#
How do we evaluate our presidents and prime ministers?
#
Ideally, we should do so on the basis of their governance.
#
But governance is complicated, the economy is complicated, policy is complicated, the
#
state is a convoluted beast that moves in many directions at once, and this entangling
#
How much of what happened is down to the decisions of the person at the top.
#
How many of those decisions were good or bad, regardless of the consequences?
#
What are the counterfactuals?
#
What are the counter narratives?
#
In most cases, we can't tell.
#
So we instead judge our leaders based on our prior perceptions of them, the image we already
#
We rationalize or condemn everything they do, regardless of what they actually do.
#
Often, we judge them based on the ideological or political tribe we have already chosen.
#
Sometimes, though a leader is either so bad or so good that even those blinkers are irrelevant,
#
I feel like that when I think of a man called P. V. Narsimha Rao.
#
Born 101 years ago, on June 28, 1921, Narsimha Rao happened to be the compromise candidate
#
when he became the prime minister of India in June 1991.
#
India was in the middle of an existential economic crisis, bold action was needed to
#
We needed to go against every political current that had brought India to where it was.
#
Narsimha Rao was a man of great learning, but India needed a man of great action.
#
He realized the gravity of the situation and used his political skills to bring about the
#
famous reforms that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
#
What he did for humanity is incalculable.
#
And yet, his achievements are today minimized and even mocked by his own party.
#
There's a haunting image of dogs nipping at his half-burned body on his funeral pyre after
#
And that's a perfect metaphor for what this country has done to one of its tallest leaders.
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If it was not for PV Narsimha Rao, I may not have been recording this today.
#
And if you're Indian, you may not have been listening to it.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Vinay Sitapati, a political scientist who's been on the show before to
#
discuss the history of the BJP before Modi.
#
That's one of the most popular episodes of the show and I'll link it from the show notes.
#
When Vinay got in touch recently and said he was visiting Mumbai, why don't we meet
#
for coffee, I instantly took the chance to invite him back to my home studio to discuss
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his outstanding first book, Half Lion, a PV Narsimha Rao transformed India.
#
Vinay came over for a meal and a recording and we had this conversation.
#
Vinay's book began with the question of how central Narsimha Rao was to the 1991 reforms.
#
Would they have happened anyway?
#
His narrative reveals that without the man who put together the remarkable team that
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carried out the reforms, they may not have happened.
#
His book also paints a fantastic picture of Narsimha Rao, the man.
#
Here was a boy from humble background whose hunger for learning was second to none.
#
He was a self-taught polymath who knew 13 languages, 10 of them spoken by humans and
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3 computer languages that he taught himself when he discovered computers in his 60s.
#
He was erudite, pragmatic and when action was required, a man of action.
#
Vinay's book brings out these aspects of his character and is also unflinching in looking
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at the things he got wrong.
#
Vinay and I spoke about many other issues and the first half is a freewheeling chat
#
on politics, history, political science, why we want the things we want and a road between
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Bandra Station and Bandra Reclamation that contains all of India within it.
#
Before we get to the conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Do you want to read more?
#
I have put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
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There is a world of knowledge available through the internet.
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But the problem we all face is, how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com
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which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping Rs. 2500, 2500 if you use the discount code
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
#
Vinay, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you very much, Amit.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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Yeah, and it's especially a pleasure for me because our last episode was actually recorded
#
remotely and it's just much better to kind of be sitting here in front of each other,
#
Yeah, this could not be less remote.
#
This could not be less remote.
#
The listeners, he is not on my lap.
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But the episode we did together, by the way, if I remember correctly, is the fifth most
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downloaded episode of The Scene in the Unseen.
#
So I think it struck a chord with a lot of people.
#
Let's hope this gets a little higher than that.
#
Let's hope this gets a little higher than that.
#
And I want to start off by sort of referring to, and I found my episode with you and indeed
#
your book on the BJP really eye-opening for me.
#
And I want to start off by asking you about something that we spoke about.
#
And then subsequently, you know, there's been a counter-narrative to that.
#
Yeah, when Dhirendra Jha's book Gandhi's Assassins came out recently, there was a prominent
#
blurb by Christophe Jaffrelot saying that, oh, to the effect of, I don't remember the
#
exact words, but to the effect of this proves that the RSS was involved in Gandhi's murder.
#
And when we spoke, you pointed out how, yeah, Godse was in the RSS in the 1930s.
#
But then by the early 1940s, he had, I mean, he didn't formally resign, but he had nothing
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And most importantly, in his magazine, Agrani, for years before he assassinated Gandhiji,
#
he railed against two targets, which were RSS and Gandhiji, which kind of proves that
#
he would have had nothing to, you know, he was completely out of the RSS orbit.
#
And this book using mostly circumstantial evidence seems to imply that, no, he was an
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active part of the RSS, which I didn't see any direct evidence for, it was circumstantial
#
and also that the RSS is involved in the murder.
#
So firstly, you know, what would your response to that be?
#
And secondly, the broader question is, is that, you know, I abhor the RSS and obviously
#
And I don't think that one needs to associate them necessarily and force fit them together
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So it's almost as if that this narrative is important for people to prove as they've
#
been kind of talking about for the last, you know, since Gandhiji died.
#
So what's your take on this?
#
Well, let's stick to the facts for a minute before, you know, the larger narrative, right?
#
It's a clear fact that Godse was a Hindu nationalist in that he believed in Hindutva.
#
He was a fan of Savarkar.
#
The criticisms that he had of Gandhi are the exact criticisms the RSS had of Gandhi.
#
There's no disagreement on that.
#
Even the RSS would say that, look, we may respect Gandhi, but these are the criticisms
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we had of him, etc, etc, appeasing Muslims, appeasing Muslim League, you know, appeasing
#
Pakistan after creation of Pakistan, etc, etc.
#
So both Godse and the RSS had the same views on Gandhi.
#
The question and the question for criminal liability is, was the RSS involved in the
#
murder of Mahatma Gandhi?
#
There is no evidence for that, right?
#
There's a little more circumstantial evidence that says, look, what's the role of Savarkar?
#
But in the and this is not a question that has not been asked.
#
This is a question that has been asked heavily for the last 75 years.
#
Immediately after Gandhi's murder, RSS was banned.
#
The police, which was run by Patel, was not sympathetic to the RSS at all.
#
And a year later, they found no evidence against the RSS, which is why they removed the ban
#
Why would they remove the ban if the RSS was involved, right?
#
The RSS was not charge-sheeted, people were arrested, but nobody in the RSS was convicted
#
And for decades later, this question has been asked again and again and again, right?
#
And as you point out, the new book is, you know, is circumstantial evidence and you have
#
to then ask the question, why are we interested in that today?
#
Because somehow you want to tarnish the BJP today with something that happened 75 years
#
ago and on which so much research has already been done, right?
#
And as you said, why can't you just criticize the BJP saying that, you know, and I do that
#
in my book saying that, you know, its treatment of Muslims is unconscionable, etc., etc.
#
So why do you have to invent these other things, right?
#
The other thing that has constantly been, I would say, invented on the BJP is that it's
#
fundamentally a Brahminical upper caste organization.
#
And if it has that in the beginning, it's certainly not the case under Modi.
#
And you know, Amit, I keep wondering, why can't you just say the problem with the BJP
#
is that it's majoritarian, that, you know, 200 million Indian citizens, it seeks to exclude
#
That's bad enough, right?
#
Why do you have to, you know, and the problem with doing this and especially things like
#
the relationship between RSS and Gandhi's murder, which, by the way, was a Congress
#
political platform for decades after, which is, you know, vote must they though Gandhi
#
ke hatyaron ko that that used to be the voting rallying cry, but there's just no evidence
#
And I feel in some senses, you know, critics of the BJP do themselves disservice with these
#
kind of allegations that have been exhaustively studied and exhaustively disproved over seven
#
And, and the other job, by the way, is a wonderful writer.
#
So it's not about him as well.
#
I love this previous two books, which I recommend you read called The Dark Knight and Assetic
#
The Dark Knight, in fact, has a history of how the whole Babri Malchit controversy started.
#
Akar Patel first told me about that book.
#
So a wonderful journalist, not a knock on him.
#
And this book also has some excellent journalism slash history and, you know, all of that.
#
But it also seems that there is, you know, a need to kind of push a narrative about a
#
party where absolutely everything is black.
#
And if this has become a dominant narrative that the RSS killed Gandhi, then they've got
#
to find a way to kind of talk about it, where I found, you know, my conversation with you
#
enlightening on this, that, you know, Godse railed against them for years in his magazine
#
And yes, you can't necessarily absolve Savarkar in the same way.
#
But that's again a whole different story.
#
And as far as caste is concerned, you know, the fact is that both in 2014 and 2019, more
#
Dalits voted for the BJP than they did for any other party.
#
And it's the same with OBCs and tribals too.
#
Casteism is pernicious and is unfortunately still a part of Hindu society.
#
And you know, and that's a terrible thing.
#
And hopefully one day we get past it, though we are nowhere close to doing so.
#
But that doesn't mean that Hindutva per se is necessarily casteist.
#
What Hindutva is, especially as we see it today, is anti-Muslim.
#
And you know, and that is a big problem.
#
And that's reason enough, I think, in my mind to sort of oppose it.
#
You know, you've mentioned to me that you've never voted for the BJP and why and so on
#
And we've just kind of spoken about the anti-Muslimness and all of that.
#
But is it the case that after you came out with these two books on Narsimha Rao, which
#
we'll discuss in some detail and which I really love reading, and your book on the BJP for
#
example, that people, especially within academia, within the world of history, began to look
#
at you differently, as if in some way you are an apologist of some sort, just because
#
of the subject that you chose.
#
I mean, a long time back, I remember I did an episode with Prashan Jha, who wrote the
#
book How the BJP Won, which is about 2014.
#
And there is nothing, nothing in that book which indicates study supports the BJP.
#
It's just data analysis and really sharp analysis and all of that.
#
But I mentioned that book to a friend and said, you really must read this if you want
#
to understand why they won in 2014, and he's like, no, no, he must be a BJP guy or whatever.
#
Have you had to go through that?
#
That's a very interesting question, you know, because for my first book, which is what we're
#
going to discuss today in detail, the biography on Narsimha Rao, the hot button political
#
question was economic liberalisation, right?
#
And of course, I asked the question, who did it?
#
Who was the author of liberalisation?
#
And I argue that, look, it was a political, not a technocratic process.
#
And therefore, the primary responsibility lies with the politician in question, which
#
But an underlying assumption was that liberalisation was a good thing, right?
#
That it worked, that it has brought about growth, that it has lifted enormous amounts
#
of Indians out of poverty, that it has increased government revenue to the extent that it can
#
fund welfare schemes like NREGA, Sarva Shiksha, Abhiyano, even the food security package
#
that India has in a way in which prior to 1991, Indian government simply didn't have
#
And while it has increased inequality, which is a problem, Indian inequality by at least
#
by Gini coefficient standards is not alarmingly high, it's a problem.
#
But poverty reduction, high GDP growth are spectacular, right?
#
Now when I wrote that, I was worried that I would get pushback from lots of people who
#
felt that liberalisation was a bad thing, right?
#
And I was not tarred saying that, oh, you are a neoliberal, right?
#
And I think, Amit, it's because in India, that battle has been won, you know, that in
#
a deep way, whether it's Mayawati or Samajwadi party or DMK, the broad agreement is that,
#
you know, the state has to retreat from the market broadly, right?
#
And instead, the state has to play an active role when it comes to welfare schemes.
#
And the two are connected because when the state retreats from the market and allows
#
for private enterprise, state taxation goes up and it's able to use that increased revenue
#
for welfare schemes, which then allows them to win votes, right?
#
This is a broad social democratic contract that has now become common sense in India.
#
And it has become common sense and look, if you want welfare schemes of the NREGA scale,
#
you know, you better get high GDP growth.
#
And if you want high GDP growth, the state better retreat from the market, right, roughly.
#
So that has not happened, right?
#
For the second book, on the other hand, Amit, I have got pushback saying that, you know,
#
are you an apologist for the BJP, right?
#
And I find that a ridiculous argument that just because I'm saying that they're not fascist,
#
they are, you know, driven by elections, they are focused on winning elections.
#
And I'm arguing that if you want to beat them, beat them on the electoral battlefield, right?
#
And I was thinking about Amit that, you know, I mean, I'm not invested in Hindu nationalism
#
I'm not going to spend my entire career writing books on Hindu nationalism.
#
But something that I did notice is that there's very little academic, genuine academic debate
#
on Hindu nationalism, you know, I mean, I did my PhD in Princeton.
#
I just finished doing teaching a semester at Princeton.
#
So I'm quite familiar with global academia when it comes to India.
#
And also, of course, Indian academia when it comes to India, I teach at Ashoka University
#
and you know, if you wanted a genuine debate on the BJP, genuinely, you'd be hard pressed
#
to find an ideologically diverse panel, academic panel, right?
#
That's a problem because academia works best when you have peer pushback and peer review,
#
When you have groupthink in academia, it's deadly because there's no other way in which
#
academic truths are validated.
#
It's not validated by the external world, by the number of books you sell, by a third
#
It's, you know, especially social science, humanities is inherently subjective.
#
So what you hope keeps academic honest is peer review.
#
And that just doesn't exist for Hindu nationalism, right?
#
When the debates on Hindu nationalism are minor, you know, is it fascist or is it on
#
the way to fascism, right?
#
And I worry and I and you know, this book was in some sense an attempt to counter that
#
saying that, look, you know, it's dangerous when academics and intellectuals tend to have
#
just one narrative, right?
#
And if you notice, the right wing keeps pushing back against academia saying this.
#
And I think that it has more than a kernel of truth.
#
Of course, to what extent the right wing uses this is very different, you know, and they
#
use it often to stifle debate rather than to say let's have better debate, right?
#
But they are onto a kernel of something saying that, you know, you don't have ideological
#
heterogeneity on a very, very hot button question in India.
#
On the other hand, on economics, you do and I'm happy about that.
#
You know, if you wanted to have a panel on is liberalization good or bad, even though
#
there is broad political consensus that it's a good thing, you would have intellectual
#
And even though I literally load a book saying that liberalization is a good thing, I'm happy
#
that there are academics who are constantly pointing to flaws in the way India did liberalization
#
in 1991 and that makes for a healthy academic atmosphere.
#
Yeah, I mean, I'm one of them who criticizes the 91 reforms because I feel we didn't reform
#
enough, which is, I think, one point of view, which would have been absent at the time because
#
I think the academic world would have been against them at the time.
#
But I guess gradually it turned, I mean, you get mugged by reality.
#
And I had a great episode in the 91 reforms with Shruti Raj Gopalan and Ajay Shah, which
#
I linked from the show notes.
#
And what you mentioned about poverty going down and inequality going up is a point I
#
keep making, I mean, on the show and in columns that people confuse the two.
#
People often rage against inequality when actually is poverty that they mean.
#
You know, a common question that I like to ask people on the subject is in which of these
#
two countries would you rather be poor, Bangladesh or the USA?
#
And obviously everybody would rather be poor in the USA, but the truth is the USA has far
#
more inequality than Bangladesh.
#
And now that Bangladesh is having healthier economic growth than before, hopefully that's
#
changing and it would be changing in the direction of poverty going down and inequality going
#
up because everybody is getting richer, but the rich are getting richer at a faster rate
#
But what is important here is what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls a doctrine of sufficiency,
#
that do you have enough to live an autonomous life with a certain amount of dignity?
#
And if you have that, that's what matters.
#
And therefore, when you are a nation that is as poor as India is, your first priority
#
is always to kind of get rid of poverty.
#
So before we kind of get to your book on Narasimha Rao, which is so illuminating and fascinating
#
and so resonant even in modern times, I'd like to know a little bit more about you.
#
Now typically I do spend an hour and an hour and a half with my guests talking about the
#
So I had assumed that I must have done that with you the last time we spoke.
#
But even though that was I think three hours, 40 minutes, we didn't spend that much time.
#
You did speak a lot on writing, your writing process, which I loved and many of my writing
#
I keep quoting you what you said about perfection being the enemy of production, which sinks
#
in with what I believe about writing as well, that your priority should be to get it done
#
and not to get it right.
#
And often just getting it done again and again is the way to get it right.
#
But we didn't speak about your childhood.
#
And I just found out today that you are a Bombay boy and you were kind of born and brought
#
up here and all of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
What was, how did you grow up?
#
What were your childhood years like?
#
So I grew up in Bombay.
#
My dad worked for Exim Bank, which is a PSU, public sector enterprise.
#
And it was a dislocating period for us if I look back at it, because when you're in
#
a public sector unit, and this is pre 1991, pre Narsimha Rao, you have a car, you have
#
a driver, you live in an apartment, there's a certain sense of stability.
#
And then he tried to make it on his own and big bad world of the private sector.
#
And I saw that change of 91 taking place in my family.
#
It was opportunity, but it was much more winner takes all.
#
There was an element of insecurity.
#
There was an element of risk.
#
So I grew up with that.
#
So in that sense, 91 shaped me.
#
I spent much of my childhood in Bandra, right next to Leelavati Hospital.
#
I don't know how many of your listeners know that.
#
But it was quite a fascinating part of Bandra and Bombay that I grew up in.
#
I still remember that I used to take this road from Bandra station all the way back
#
home to Bandra reclamation.
#
And that one road told me much more about India than I learned at Princeton or anywhere
#
You begin that road in Bandra station, which is a cosmopolitan place, people of all castes
#
and communities and classes come there.
#
And then you walk a little more and you cross Lucky restaurant and as you enter, it's a
#
So they are Indian Muslims, many of them are Sunni.
#
And you'll see butcher shops there.
#
These are lower middle class Muslims.
#
You'll see many electronic stores, etc.
#
You just walk for a minute on the same road and you'll see a Jain temple.
#
And I used to turn back and I used to see meat shops and I used to look in front and
#
I used to see this Jain temple.
#
And then I used to see Jains basically crossing to go to the temple and they won't look left
#
or right because otherwise they'd see meat.
#
And in 1991, during the riots, the 1992 Babri Masjid riots, that road was not badly hit
#
It tells you that India has an ancient tradition of tolerance and coexistence.
#
Anyway, you walk a little more on that road, you cross the Jain temple and it's a Marathi
#
There's a Marathi school there.
#
A little more and you enter into the Bandra Bazar, which is heavily Catholic.
#
And these are middle class Catholics, but they have permanent structures, permanent
#
And the thing that used to strike me is that unlike any other community, Hindu, Muslim,
#
whatever caste, whatever region, the Catholic areas, the public space was clean.
#
And so it wasn't just that the house was clean and the kachra would fall on the street.
#
The street itself was clean.
#
And it has always stayed with me that sometimes there are certain religious or intellectual
#
traditions that make a public sphere more possible than others.
#
That how you treat strangers, whether you're able to keep not just your house clean, but
#
the road in front of you clean, is not just randomly distributed.
#
And anyway, the Catholic area would end and then there would be a Bangladeshi slum, which
#
And then there would be a set of middle class Maharashtrian buildings where we lived and
#
And many of the labor for those middle class Maharashtrian buildings would come from the
#
Bangladeshis who lived in those slums.
#
And it still struck me that the, again, this is just anecdotal, I haven't done survey data,
#
but most of the people who lived in those buildings would be sympathetic to the Shiv
#
And they lived cheek by jowl with the other, Bangladeshi Muslims who Bal Thackeray would
#
But there was coexistence.
#
I mean, I must have walked thousands of times on that street up and down to Bandra station
#
and reclamation and back.
#
And at the time, I didn't like it.
#
I was like, I wish I could take an auto or a car to go to the station.
#
But on hindsight, I think that journey taught me more than a lot of books I've read.
#
I mean, you should write an essay about that walk, perhaps.
#
I mean, there's so much in it.
#
Because, you know, I once in an episode with JP Narayan, episode 149, which I'll link from
#
the show notes, was on one of my usual rants about, hey, India is so illiberal and look
#
at communalism, look at caste, look at gender.
#
And he said that if you look at it another way, if you look at the lived realities of
#
world, there's also a deep liberalism here, because it is also so assimilative.
#
You look at our food, you look at our clothes, you look at the street that you just described,
#
In its lived reality, it can also be incredibly assimilative and it would seem that the majority
#
of people in the concrete live their lives that way.
#
Because one of the things that I felt while, you know, reading Akshay Mukul's book, which
#
also we discussed when we last spoke, and I know you have some disagreements with it,
#
is that there was always this intolerant illiberal strain, this bigoted strain, so to say, running
#
through Indian society.
#
It was not a political creation.
#
And the politics that we see today is the supply side of the political marketplace responding
#
to a demand that was already there.
#
Like I had an episode with Vir Sanghvi about his memoir, and in that he speaks about how
#
Rajiv Gandhi's big win in 1984 was partly the Hindu vote turnout, because, you know,
#
the anti Sikh stuff and all of that.
#
And that was what made the BJP in a sense shift direction from, you know, their sort
#
of the socialism that they claim to propound in 1980, Gandhian socialism, back to integral
#
humanism, back to back to integral humanism and quoting this in the world.
#
So it was supply responding to demand and then a race to the bottom from there.
#
So what's your take from your road which goes from station to reclamation and where all
#
Well, firstly, you know, the data backs up my analysis of that road.
#
So if I would urge your readers to read the 2022 Pure Survey on Religions, which shows
#
you that most Indians live segregated lives in that, you know, their best friends, their
#
neighbors tend to be people who are from their religious group.
#
But it's also a deeply tolerant life.
#
So in India, segregation and tolerance go hand in hand and we will live among ourselves,
#
we will marry amongst ourselves, but you too will achieve liberation through your sect
#
or your religion and you have as much right to live here as I do.
#
So in India, you know, it's really communities living cheek by jowl.
#
They're not individuals living.
#
It's not Western style cosmopolitanism.
#
It is groups living, but groups living side by side and having some interactions like
#
economic interactions, but not others, for example, eating food together or marrying
#
And the reason I'm saying this is that, you know, if you see this segregation as bigotry,
#
you'll say the bigotry goes hand in hand in tolerance, right.
#
That has always been the nature of India that, you know, that it's not that this has always
#
There's been riots, you know, for a very long time, there's been Hindu-Muslim conflict
#
wasn't invented by the British, right.
#
As Marxist historians like to say, it's an age old issue.
#
But that has gone hand in hand with Hindus and Muslims living together, right.
#
And in the book, we'll talk about it, but in Narsimha Rao book, around 1993, Narsimha
#
Rao's prime minister and then he, Samuel Huntingdon has written this article called
#
Clash of Civilizations, which then became a book, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
#
of the World Order in Foreign Affairs.
#
And Narsimha Rao has friends in the US who send him the latest academic articles and
#
And in his archives, I found and if you see in my book, I have a photo of Narsimha Rao's
#
version of Clash of Civilizations with his notes.
#
And the notes are very telling and these notes that Narsimha Rao writes on Clash of Civilization
#
was written just a few months after the end of Babri Masjid, right, December 6, 1992,
#
just a few months after that.
#
And also keep in mind that Narsimha Rao grew up in a part of India that had a very strong
#
It was Nizam's Hyderabad state.
#
Many of his childhood friends were Muslims, right.
#
And he writes there in the margin that if Samuel Huntington is trying to explain why
#
Islam is in conflict with other religions, why does he not explain the moments in which
#
Islam is not in conflict?
#
In other words, you have a theory there.
#
Sam Huntington provides a theory for why there is a clash of civilizations between from time
#
immemorable between Islam and its neighbors, right.
#
And he provides a theory for that based on the nature of Islam.
#
But then you should also have a theory for when Islam coexists with its neighbors, as
#
Narsimha Rao says happened through his childhood, right.
#
And then you should equally say what is it about Islam that allows you to live in coexistence
#
And that definitely, you know, when I was reading that, I was remembering my own childhood
#
and walking up and down this road for, you know, for so long and this element of coexistence.
#
But, you know, I mean, that experience of walking down that road taught me very early
#
to be suspicious of a cosmopolitan individual rights centric narrative of India.
#
It just doesn't exist, right.
#
And you know, given that I have some sense of where your economics is headed, I think
#
some of India's economic tragedies can also be put down to the fact that we don't treat
#
individuals with any dignity in this country.
#
Yeah, that's a fantastic insight.
#
And I'll think aloud and I'll just kind of ask you a question, because it strikes me
#
that when you live like this, segregated, but tolerant, right, where you have groups
#
living side by side and not a cosmopolitan individualistic kind of.
#
And sorry to interrupt you, you know, since, you know, we both have our bones in Bombay,
#
you know, if you live in Bombay, what everybody ends up talking about is real estate.
#
And look at the politics of buildings in Bombay, Jan only buildings, no vegetarians allowed.
#
So we are reproducing in the most visually cosmopolitan thing you can have, which is
#
We are reproducing old communities living together, you know, no garlic in this building,
#
no onion in that building.
#
This is only a, this is not just a Muslim building.
#
This is a Bora building only.
#
This particular hospital has been built by Boris only.
#
We are reproducing exactly that.
#
You have a ton of individual choices, which individuals have the right to make leading
#
to what is a bad collective outcome, a bad social outcome.
#
So my musing is this, and I'm strictly thinking aloud based on what you just said, that consider
#
two scenarios and one scenario is that you live as we do, where you have people living
#
in groups segregated, but tolerant and they're living in peace, like in that lane you mentioned.
#
And as in India for, for, you know, most of our history in most places.
#
And in the other scenario, you have a cosmopolitan atomized existence, individuals living in
#
flats and apartments and all of that.
#
My sense is that the first situation where the way you think in terms of groups is likely
#
to break down at some point or the other, simply because what you are really doing by
#
living in groups is saying that this is my in group and those are the other.
#
And at one point you say, I will be tolerant to the other, but wherever you are hit by
#
say extreme scarcity or all kinds, you know, they can be other triggers, you can hit the
#
Whereas if you're living in individual atomized existence, that kind of hatred against a particular
#
group of people is less likely.
#
So in the second scenario where you're cosmopolitan and individual rights matter, you'll have
#
serial killers, perhaps those are the outliers.
#
But in the first scenario, you could have a genocide at some point or the other.
#
In fact, given a large enough sample size, it's inevitable.
#
Well, let me push back against that, you know, and I'm happy you said this because I was,
#
you know, with you, Amit, I'm worried, will we ever have even four hours of each chat
#
will we have a disagreement.
#
So I'm happy that you said this, because I would push back to say that to defend India's
#
segregation, but tolerance, right, to defend it, firstly, it's all we have, right.
#
So as a reality, you know, if you are thinking about changing India, you got to work with
#
So we don't, we're not living in Switzerland.
#
I meant in terms of a thought experiment, I completely agree that me certainly, I don't
#
know about you, I'm a complete misfit in this society, because I think in terms of individuals,
#
I refuse to put labels on someone and say, oh, you know, that person is this caste or
#
this religion or whatever.
#
And I reject all those labels when applied to me as well.
#
You know, so even if I'm born a Hindu, I'm an atheist, you know, I'm not going to accept
#
any labels, even a little label of atheist, you know, you, you know, I am who I am.
#
And so, but I completely recognize that in our society, our society is always is pretty
#
much destined for the foreseeable future to be grew.
#
I think the best we can hope for Amit is that in the short term, we make a distinction between
#
the public and the private lives of Indians.
#
And we say, look, in a private life, you marry who you want.
#
If that means you marry somebody from your caste or your religion, that's your choice.
#
If you want to have lunch or dinner with people only, you know, commensuality, right, that's
#
the origin of jati, whatever, not origin, a key feature of jati, you eat inter dining,
#
you don't want to do inter dining, you want to eat only your kind of food.
#
Your particularities, you have every right.
#
But there is this thing called public sphere, it means voting, it means employment, right,
#
it means behavior of strangers in the street, right.
#
In those things, you have to behave like an individual, right.
#
So the best I think we can push for, right, is to say that there is this private life
#
And if you want to be comfortable living a group life, go ahead.
#
But in so far as we have these public spheres and public lives, please don't think about
#
your caste, your religion, because you're all in it together.
#
Because just the nature of the group is all 1.4 billion Indians, right.
#
I would say that's a more achievable equilibrium than a Swiss society where everybody thinks
#
as individuals in India, which, you know, I just don't see, at least in our lifetimes,
#
that realistically happening, right.
#
And one thing we've seen with the old modernization theory was that with industrialization, right,
#
with the move from farm to factory, groups would kind of atomize and you'd move from
#
rural group-based societies to individual urban societies.
#
You just haven't seen that, right.
#
And in that sense, Indian modernization looks more and more like Japanese modernization,
#
where you're able to both keep old traditions as well as reinvent new traditions of groups
#
rather than move towards what the United States or Europe looks like, though even there, as
#
we see now, group dynamics are playing a very big role.
#
Yeah, and, you know, I'm glad you mentioned the word atomization, because people often
#
use that to beat up on a straw man version of libertarianism, where they say, oh, you
#
see the world as atomized individuals, all our connections will be lost and blah, blah,
#
And my response to that is no, you know, the world that I see is based on a respect of
#
consent and voluntary action, you know.
#
I see myself as an individual, but I'm a part of different communities of choice.
#
I keep trying to reach out, form different kinds of bonds.
#
So that whole term atomization at some level goes to that straw man argument, which people
#
But that was a delightful sort of diversion you took into that street from Bandra Station
#
I'll take you down that.
#
I'll take, I mean, let's walk and you'll see what I mean.
#
I mean, if this was on YouTube, the next shot would be, we are in that lane.
#
So tell me more about your childhood.
#
So you know, where are you going to school?
#
What's your vision of yourself at this point?
#
Give me a sense of the texture of your days.
#
So, you know, I used to go to school place till my 10th standard, a school called Aryavidya
#
That's where I spent seven to eight years of my life.
#
And you know, the joke, when my Narsimha Rao book came back, the joke I used to say was,
#
look, I went to a school where everybody knew Mahesh Bhatt's third or second wife.
#
Nobody had heard of Narsimha Rao.
#
And I remember saying this at, you know, one particular event.
#
And the person who spoke after me was Vikram Bhatt, you know, who is, again, if my memory
#
serves, Mahesh Bhatt's younger brother.
#
And he, you know, he began by saying, you know what, I have to be honest with you.
#
I didn't know who Narsimha Rao was, but I sure knew Mahesh Bhatt's second wife, you know.
#
So that was the school I went to, right?
#
It was a school in, you know, where it was an Arya Samaj school, so we had a disproportionate
#
number of Hindus, mainly Sindhis and Punjabis, you know, ex-refugees or from ex-refugee
#
families who kind of made it, you know, in Khar, Bandra area, Santa Cruz, those areas.
#
And we had a high proportion of Parsis because, you know, Arya Samaj worships fire and, you
#
know, Parsis said, okay, we also are happy worshiping fire, so we had a disproportionate
#
number of Parsis, right?
#
And it was an interesting school because, you know, my parents came from a professional
#
My mother taught at Bombay University, she taught sociology.
#
And my dad was an IIT engineer and he had his own consultancy, he had gone private.
#
But you know, most of my students came from business backgrounds, right?
#
Most of my fellow students.
#
So for example, around Bandra station, again, those of you who are familiar with Bandra,
#
you have a series of jewellery shops, you know, where Hill Road meets Bandra station.
#
Lots of my classmates, you know, were scions of those jewellery shops, you know.
#
So it's radically different world from those who come from a professional background, you
#
And it gave me a very, an instinct that, look, I like to read books, but I'm very familiar
#
with the fact that other people don't read books, you know.
#
And I like that diversity, you know, that I don't want to only seek out people like
#
me who, you know, who like books and who, you know, who quote and, you know, like whatever,
#
you know, the life of the mind.
#
Many people are not like that and all power to them, right?
#
And you know, what does it look like to grow up to inherit your father's jewellery business,
#
What does it look like to grow up to inherit your father's Skoda business, Skoda car dealership
#
So I had a pretty strong instinct for that, you know.
#
And in that sense, I'm pretty happy I didn't go to Delhi and, you know, a certain world
#
in Delhi where, you know, I'd only be hanging out with people like me.
#
I think this has given me a good instinct for people who are different.
#
Of course, you know, the class background was not heterogeneous, you know, people were
#
broadly wealthy and certainly most people were wealthier than my parents were.
#
But it, you know, it was certainly an interesting car, Bandra, you know, background, you know.
#
For example, the school, we used to go swimming as a school every week to car gym, right?
#
And I used to joke that car gym is the only place in the world where in the bar, Sindhi
#
is the lingua franca, right?
#
You know, Sindhi is the language that is spoken.
#
So it's a very different kind of deal.
#
And then after my 11th and 12th, I think my parents thought I was getting out of hand
#
and I went to Rishi Valley school, which is a Jindu Krishnamurthy school.
#
I mean, the stereotype of the school is, you know, you sit in on classes under a tree.
#
And I think that that stereotype says a lot about the school, two of the happiest years
#
I'm very happy that I didn't go there throughout, because if I had gone there throughout, I
#
wouldn't know how to cross a road with traffic, you know, because it's a rural school.
#
You live, you know, in a pretty sort of, you know, inside baseball community.
#
And then I went to National Law School, Bangalore for five years.
#
And after that, you know, I found a lot of my students, a lot of my fellow students in
#
National Law School, Bangalore were going to these fancy American universities for what
#
we call them LLM or a Masters in Law and places like Harvard, Yale, which would be out of
#
reach if I was even going to IIT.
#
And I just I applied because I thought it would be a good sixth year.
#
So I went to Harvard Law School, I spent one year and I think at that time, I had an epiphany,
#
a myth, which is that if after going to Harvard Law School, I can't do what I love, then who
#
can do what they love, right?
#
And suddenly all that pressure, everything mounted, right?
#
If you know, after Harvard Law School, if I do something conventionally foolish, people
#
think I'm eccentric, not crazy.
#
And there's a world of a difference between both those words, right?
#
Eccentric people are, you know, people with options who choose to do funny things, crazy
#
people are just crazy, right?
#
Because I asked myself a simple question saying, what do I like doing on weekends, right?
#
And I liked, you know, I used to follow Indian politics, I had written a couple of pieces
#
for Times of India and Hindu and just crafting, writing and crafting the narrative on politics
#
is something that I found fun.
#
And I said, look, this is what I clearly like doing when nobody's forcing me to do anything
#
Let's see if I can make a career out of that.
#
And at that stage, I was quite keen to do a PhD in political science, I thought I would
#
But I decided to take a bit of a break because I didn't want to go degree from degree.
#
So I came back to India and work for some years with Indian Express.
#
Again, fascinating time in Delhi, I was on the editorial pages.
#
So I was a sub editor, doing, you know, cleaning copy, but I was also writing edits and I will
#
occasionally do reporting pieces.
#
And that's when my I would say my love for journalists, right?
#
And you know, people who really are in the trenches, especially reporters, because the
#
thing with reporters is that, you know, you may spend a full day, right?
#
Seeing a story that only takes up 100 words, right?
#
But other than the 100 words, that entire experience you've had is within you.
#
And so when I used to meet older journalists, the euphemism we use as senior journalists,
#
I would find that them to be rich with anecdotes, rich with experiences.
#
I was also very lucky to meet Shekhar Gupta at that time, who has, you know, definitely
#
become a bit of a mentor.
#
He may not know it, but you know, at least from my end, because I mean, many of your
#
readers may see his cut, your viewers may see his cut, the clutter.
#
That's how he was to us, that he would just walk to the journalists and then he would
#
narrate incident after incident.
#
And that's when I learned the power of being able to talk about politics through a story,
#
And an emphasis on contemporary history.
#
So I think I owe him a lot.
#
I also, you know, was very grateful to get to know Raj Kamal Jha, who's also a very well
#
But he brought a certain aesthetic and discipline to writing that I've learned a lot from.
#
And you know, again, maybe I'm just ranting here, Amit, but you know, my time in Delhi
#
is a bit of Alice in Wonderland, right?
#
And I completely agree with the criticism of Lutyens Delhi that they're a bunch of privileged,
#
you know, ex-ISO officers' kids, right?
#
It's a correct, I mean, like all stereotypes, of course, there are many people not like
#
that, but that stereotype, the Arnab stereotype has a kernel of truth to it, right?
#
And amidst that, people like Shekhar Gupta and Raj Kamal Jha, who are genuinely talented,
#
It's very rare to find.
#
And when I found them, I was like, I used to stick to them, right?
#
And that's the one thing I learned that it's important to pick your mentors right.
#
And Raj, just the aesthetics of writing, Raj told me never use the word I when you write
#
because it's very powerful.
#
So use it sparingly only when that I is going, the word I is going to make a difference.
#
I followed that in both my books, No I, right?
#
It's third person because you know what, I'm a boring person here because you're asking
#
me I'm telling you about the street, et cetera, et cetera, but quite honestly, I came here
#
prepared to talk about Narasimha Rao, not myself, because frankly, the subject is much
#
more important than you are.
#
And yeah, and after that, I spent six years in Princeton doing a PhD in political science.
#
I learned how to write a book, a book length project, I learned how to research.
#
But I was always very sure I wanted to come back to India.
#
And I would have come back to frankly Indian Express and journalism, at least that's what
#
But luckily, you know, this Ashoka University was opening up.
#
And now that I'm there, I don't want to be anywhere else.
#
I mean, I get five months a year off to do my own research.
#
It's an unbeatable proposition.
#
So you know, many strands I want to follow, but before all of them, you know, you mentioned
#
being in that school surrounded by kids or business people and filmy people who know
#
the Bhats more than Narasimha Rao.
#
One of the Bhats was close to my age group.
#
He was my physical trainer at a gym I went to.
#
He was also David Headley's physical trainer.
#
That's how they got to know each other.
#
I never knew David Headley, but yeah, I think circa 2001, 2002, I used to go to the gym
#
in Marine Drive where Rahul was my trainer.
#
So I just finished reading this fascinating book that I'd recommend to all my listeners
#
called Wanting by Luke Burgess.
#
Abhijit Bhaduri had recommended it to me in the episode we did together and I picked it
#
And it's a superb book.
#
And the central thesis of the book is that most of what we want is not some inner desire
#
It is mimetic in a sense.
#
We look at what the people around us want and in a sense we adopt their desires to become
#
Burgess's sort of realization was based on like this line of thinking about wanting and
#
desire came from a philosopher called Rene Girard.
#
And Rene Girard, I think a few decades ago was asked to teach a class on literature.
#
And he wasn't a literature guy, but he agreed to teach the class because he needed the money.
#
And then as he read all these books, he found in them a thread that had not that you know
#
other people who taught literature hadn't spoken about, which was basically that in
#
all these novels and books and all that he read, all the characters seem to want something
#
not intrinsically, but because some someone around them wanted it or they were expected
#
to want it and so on and so forth.
#
And that's where the great tragedies took place.
#
And the concept I was left with from Burgess's book was one about reflecting why we want
#
what we want and two about the distinction between thick desires and thin desires, right?
#
And thin desires being sort of relatively superficial desires, which may be really intense,
#
but which are, which you've still picked up from somewhere else and they're not intrinsic
#
to you that, oh, I want a Mercedes C-Class or I want this or I want that.
#
I want to go on a holiday there and so on and so forth.
#
And you think you want that, but you probably want that because of a bunch of other factors.
#
And intrinsically, you don't really want that and thick desires on the other hand would
#
be what you intrinsically want.
#
That's who you really are.
#
And I found this a very good frame to just examine my own life and my own choices and
#
think about the things that I wanted and why did I want that?
#
Like I was reading this book sort of on vacation.
#
This is a bit of a digression, but there is a sport called match poker, not quite like
#
poker, but something like it.
#
And I won the national championship there with my team a couple of times.
#
I was part of team India.
#
We went and we won the Asian championship.
#
And then recently last month we went to the world championship where all the teams that
#
we had trashed in the Asian championship finished ahead of us.
#
It was pretty devastating for various reasons, like regular team members had visas rejected
#
and all kinds of shit happened.
#
And I was, while reading this book, thinking about, okay, why was I so upset?
#
And that, you know, the reason, like the first reason I got drawn to that particular form
#
of poker as it were is because it was so different from poker that you had to work it out from
#
first principles and there was an intellectual challenge.
#
So the intellectual challenge drew me in.
#
But most of the devastation that I felt was because I wanted the glory of winning a world
#
championship with team India, even though I've already won an Asian championship with
#
And why did I want that?
#
Is it something so intrinsic?
#
You know, it's part of most of our desire for validation is completely unnecessary and
#
Most of them are thin, not thick, and this was a thin desire.
#
And I have thicker desires.
#
And it strikes me that you avoided a trap here because when you went to that school,
#
it is quite possible that you could have, you know, picked up desires or things that
#
you wanted to do, which were thin desires from the people around you, from the milieu
#
And, you know, even when you did law, perhaps you go down certain paths because they are
#
Howard Law School, like who would turn that down?
#
But luckily, you said you had that epiphany.
#
And I'm presuming that what happened next, that process of seeking truth by doing the
#
reporter's job, by engaging with the world and everything that you've been doing, that's
#
So if you sort of reflect on this journey of yours, you know, does any of this make
#
Were there thin desires before you found it makes a lot of sense?
#
Of course, they were thin.
#
It makes a lot of sense.
#
That is very clarifying, Amit.
#
So definitely there are thin desires.
#
Of course, the problem with thin desires is you realize them too late, right?
#
You think they are thick desires, right?
#
You think that there's something intrinsic and later you say, no, this is not what I
#
really wanted or I was influenced.
#
So I definitely see that.
#
But I think that at Harvard Law School was an epiphany in that it told me that I didn't
#
have to play the thin desire game, you know, that I should ask myself what's the thick
#
What's the thick desire is what you do on weekends, you know, and is there a way to
#
I mean, look, I'm not crazy.
#
I mean, you know, I have to make my own way in the world and I have to, you know, pay
#
So, you know, what can I do which links my thick desire, what I like to do on Saturday
#
Sunday into, you know, being able to provide, you know, a good livelihood for myself and
#
So I think that gave me the epiphany.
#
Until then, I definitely, back of the mind, I have this thing that, you know, I have to,
#
you know, I have to succeed in the way society defines success.
#
And after studying in National Law School, Bangalore and Harvard Law School, that way
#
was actually pretty simple, which was to get a corporate law job and work on Wall Street.
#
There was actually very, and I did interview for some of them, but I had a second epiphany
#
while at Harvard Law School.
#
I took this course called, it was either introduction to corporate law or 101 corporate law by this
#
professor called Guhan Subramaniam, who was a joint appointment between Harvard Business
#
School and Harvard Law School and he was superb.
#
He was absolutely brilliant and I worked my ass off and I still got, I think, a B or a
#
And I think that was another epiphany because it told me that corporate law was not meant
#
for me, that, you know, if I have the best teacher in the world and I work really hard,
#
I'm still not good at it.
#
So why should I waste a career doing that?
#
You know, I think that, and by the way, I, you know, a lot of my students who I teach
#
and who I give a B or a B minus, I tell this story too, saying that, look, it's a signal.
#
It means that if you didn't work hard, it's a signal to work hard.
#
If you worked hard, it means that perhaps this kind of course is not meant for you.
#
And that's a good thing because there are a million courses out there, the million things
#
So actually knowing what you're not good at is a good thing.
#
So yeah, so I think that, but thanks for clarifying that, Amit, you put it better than I could.
#
Luke Burgess put it better than either of us could, I guess.
#
No, and I was thinking of the same thing when I read your book on Narasimha Rao and we'll
#
talk about the book in detail later, but this strand about what do you want and why do you
#
want it also struck me because in many ways it seems to me that Narasimha Rao was a puppet
#
of circumstance, you know, getting married at the age of 10 and, you know, you've written
#
here quote, Rao would later describe his arranged marriage as an act beyond his control as so
#
much of his later life would be.
#
He was, quote within quotes, disappointed, but not shocked.
#
His inner self remained unaffected, stop quote.
#
And later you talk about how he became an, how, you know, there was a pull to academics
#
and he had once said that had he not been a politician, he would have been an academic
#
in Oxford or Cambridge.
#
At another point you write about choosing politics where you write, quote, his choice
#
of a career in politics was not an affirmation, merely the preclusion of other alternatives.
#
In other words, he was a hopeless mid fit, but a mundane existence would have driven
#
him mad, stop quote, which is again resonant.
#
And I, so you look at Rao's life and he's a product of circumstance and serendipity
#
in so many ways rising in power as a compromise candidate because he hadn't chosen a tribe.
#
For example, you know, whether it's his becoming chief minister or later prime minister and
#
But at a deeper level on the subject of wanting, it kind of made me think that there is an
#
inner mystery there and perhaps what he wanted was the life of scholarship of reading and
#
And of course he did write that semi-autobiographical novel and, you know, he was trying to write
#
it in the seventies, but politics called him back when, you know, Indira Gandhi got him
#
to Delhi as the general secretary and, you know, and one thing that is fairly obvious
#
and almost a banal observation is we are of course all creatures of circumstance, you
#
know, whether it's a circumstance of the genes we happen to have or the things that happened
#
But in terms of wanting, is our wanting what we want also perhaps a matter of circumstance?
#
Like the other thing that you point out with Narasimha Rao was that he did want political
#
power, that he did in a way pull strings and maneuver and try to, you know, lie and bribe,
#
all of that, you know, to become prime minister when he did, to become president in 82 when,
#
you know, Zayal Singh was chosen instead and again later when Venkatraman was chosen instead.
#
So he did want that power even though he was in a sense an accidental politician.
#
So just, I think one way of looking at lives and reading lives is also as a web of desires
#
and trying to figure out where they come from and what they do to you.
#
And I'm just thinking aloud.
#
This is a bit of a ramble, but what are your thoughts?
#
No, I think that's, you know, that's quite illuminating.
#
I hope, by the way, you didn't structure just to say that my musings are equivalent
#
to Narasimha Rao's musings as he grows up, you know, because I certainly haven't thought
#
The way I thought of Narasimha Rao is as follows, you know, I mean, an uncle of mine who has
#
had a huge influence on my life has always tells me this, which is that God gives you
#
a certain set of cards, right?
#
Some of them are aces, some of them are not.
#
The question is how well you play those cards and as a poker player that, you know, must
#
resonate with you, right?
#
I think Narasimha Rao had a very early epiphany that he can't control the cards dealt to him,
#
He's married at the age of 10, he's married at the age of 10, right?
#
You know, his family around him is semi literate, the family around him is semi literate, right?
#
What he can control is what he can do with those cards, right?
#
So yes, the family around him is semi literate, but he's a precocious student, he loves learning.
#
So his father sees that and sends him to a school in a different village, even if it
#
means that Narasimha Rao is cut off from the rest of his family, right?
#
And by the way, this is a learning that is hugely helpful to him when he becomes Prime
#
You know, look at the cards that are dealt to him, right?
#
One is India is facing the biggest economic crisis, you know, it has ever faced arguably,
#
The Berlin Wall has collapsed, so India's best friend in the global stage, Soviet Union
#
is kind of withdrawing, right?
#
India has secession issues in Assam, Kashmir and Punjab.
#
In fact, I think in Kashmir and Punjab, if my memory serves, elections couldn't even
#
be held when Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister, right?
#
And his Congress predecessor has been murdered by the LTT, that's Rajiv Gandhi.
#
These are the cards that he's been dealt with, right?
#
And look at the other set of cards dealt with him, right?
#
He is not popular in his own party.
#
His party is not a majority in parliament, right?
#
He lacks individual charisma, God has not given him charisma and he has to in some sense
#
report to Sonia Gandhi.
#
These are the cards dealt to him, right?
#
The question is how do you play it?
#
And the argument of the book is he played it better than anyone could have played it
#
in those five years, right?
#
So I think that realization he has from a very early age that there are tons and tons
#
of things outside his control and he's not, you know, he's not going to die on that hill.
#
He's not going to complain, God, why did you do this to me?
#
He's not going to do that.
#
Given the situation, he's going to make the best of the cards that have been given to
#
And I think that's an early childhood realization that Narasimha Rao inherits.
#
And I would argue that that's his core skill set to know when to lose, to know when to
#
win and to know when to cheat, you know.
#
And there's also sort of a poignancy to the metaphor you made with poker and the cards
#
you're dealt because, you know, in poker, what happens is that you know that even though
#
it's a game of skill, luck plays a huge part.
#
The quantum of luck is much more than in other sports.
#
You know, I play a hundred points of tennis with Nadal, I will lose all hundred.
#
But if, you know, you take the best poker player in the world and he plays a newcomer
#
who just knows the rules, it's going to be more like 52-48.
#
So what you need to for skill to express itself is volume.
#
So you don't play one hand.
#
You play hundreds and thousands and really a decent sample size in poker would perhaps
#
be 100,000 or more than that.
#
I didn't think of that.
#
And in life, you don't have that.
#
You don't have a sample size in life.
#
You can't put in volume as a phrase goes.
#
You do with it what you can.
#
And it's interesting through the course of the book to see how that worked out, how that
#
worked out with his marriage where they did stay together in a way for 40 years, have
#
kids and all of that, but also had independent lives outside of that or rather he did.
#
He couldn't so much because just the privilege of being male, I guess.
#
And then even later, I completely agree with what he achieved during his five years.
#
Like you mentioned in the book that quote, in terms of the quantum of transformation
#
brought about, Rao ranks with other 20th century revolutionary figures such as Nehru, Deng
#
Xiaoping, FDR, Reagan, Thatcher, and Charles de Gaulle.
#
But the difference you point out is that none of them faced all of these obstacles which
#
you just outlined and he alone faced them and he made the most of the cards.
#
And another way of looking at that is that, you know, when he was home minister, when
#
the Sikh riots happened, you outline it in your book in detail that it's fashionable
#
now to blame him and say he was a home minister, the riots happened.
#
But as you say, what really happened was that he was given a message at a point in time
#
that now all reports of this and the control of the police will be with the PM or with
#
the prime minister's office.
#
And those are the cards he's dealt.
#
But by the way, I do say that I think he played it badly, right, in the sense I call it his
#
Because those were, so he was held a bad set of cards.
#
He was given a direct order by the PMO to stand down.
#
And that even though he was home minister and in Delhi, the Delhi police report to the
#
home minister, he was told on the day that Indira Gandhi died that there would be riots
#
the next day and the police will report directly to the PMO.
#
So he was held a bad, he was dealt a bad set of cards.
#
If he had protested, he would have had to resign and his career would have been over
#
But he could have done that, right?
#
He chose to protect his career over preventing genocide of innocent Sikhs, right?
#
And I would judge him harshly.
#
But yes, he was dealt a bad set of cards there, no doubt about it.
#
I agree with you in terms of it being his vilest hours and one has to judge him harshly.
#
But what he did there was consistent with what you point out he did in all the other
#
situations where rather than argue against the cards dealt to him, he just accepted it
#
and ensured his own survival within the system.
#
In that sense, he was being as rational at that moment as he was after 91, where he did
#
everything he did where he was completely masterful.
#
So it's an example of how people contain multitudes.
#
It is so easy to praise Narsimha Rao as India's best prime minister.
#
And as you point out in your book, Arun Jaitley does.
#
Arun Jaitley says India's best Congress prime minister.
#
Oh, that's what he said.
#
He asked to say that, right?
#
And at the same time, condemn him for his inaction in 84, for example.
#
In the same way, you know, I think Vajpayee was a damn good prime minister.
#
And there are other things that you can condemn him for as well.
#
So people contain multitudes and Nehru as well, did too.
#
There are things you can condemn him for and there are things you have to praise him for.
#
But we'll come back to Narsimha Rao later, but in that personal journey, there were other
#
strands I wanted to pick up on.
#
And one was you spoke about gaining a particular aesthetic and an approach from Rajkamal Jha,
#
who by the way, also contains multitudes because I absolutely hated his first book, The Blue
#
I thought it was purple, ornate prose and, you know, maybe the mimetic desire to write
#
like Arundhati Roy, who was, you know, who wrote similar ornate purple prose, except
#
that he seemed almost a parody, but obviously a great journalist and editor from everything
#
So tell me a little bit about the influence he had on you.
#
Like the bit about the eye I completely get in journalism, there has to be no eye.
#
I focus a lot on getting my guests to use the eye because that personal journey is really
#
for me what brings the show alive and what makes each of my guests more than an expert
#
on a subject, but an actual human being on a journey.
#
So I aim for the personal, but in the journalistic context, you know, I can, you know, I totally
#
agree with Raj there, but tell me a little bit about, you know, figuring out in terms
#
of aesthetic, in terms of approach, in terms of ethic, how he influenced you and how you
#
Well, firstly, definitely the eye, right, and the eye is also deeper in the sense that
#
what he constantly instilled in me was that the subject is greater than the observer,
#
you know, and he's in doing so, he's rebelling against a recent fashion, which says that
#
because the observer cannot be detached from the observed, let's talk about the observer
#
And look, academia is full of this stuff, right, because you need to be sort of self-reflective
#
It just becomes like a, you know, sort of an ego massage that actually you should be
#
writing about tribals in Jharkhand, but, you know, you're talking about your caste privilege,
#
class privilege, gender privilege, but actually that, you know, there's a way in which that
#
becomes talking about yourself.
#
I don't want to know about you, I want to know about the tribals in Jharkhand, right.
#
So he, so I think he really pushed me into, you know, take, realize that the subject,
#
that what you're seeing, what you're reporting is much more important than you are.
#
Of course, you have bias and be a little aware of it, but don't be so aware of it that that
#
becomes the center of the story rather than what you are seeing.
#
You know, I think the second thing that Raj has instilled in me, you know, look, you know,
#
he wouldn't consciously call himself a mentor, but, you know, I would say that it's a one
#
I've learned a lot from him is that the art of telling a story, you know, that what it
#
means to tell a story, what it means to talk about the interiority of people, right.
#
To give you one example in the BJP book, which is what we talked about in the last episode,
#
the book, you know, consciously ends with Modi's ascension on the national stage.
#
And it's about, you know, Vajpayee and Advani's life.
#
And through them, we get to know Hindu nationalism before Modi.
#
But Raj, you know, when I was talking to him while researching the book, I had a very interesting
#
He said, look, everybody reading the book will be reading the book backwards in the
#
sense they will be reading the book knowing that Modi is in power today, that Hindu nationalism
#
is hegemonic today, and knowing this, they are looking at the past.
#
So you can't like go ahead and write the story of the past pretending that there's no Modi,
#
So it has to lead up to Modi.
#
It shouldn't be about Modi, it has to lead up to Modi, but it should be well aware and
#
sensitive to the fact that the story only makes sense for people reading today, given
#
that they're obsessed about Modi, they're obsessed about Hindu nationalism, right.
#
And he gave me this example of this book that he had liked a lot, which is by Lawrence Wright.
#
I think it's called The Looming Tower.
#
The Looming Superbook, yeah.
#
So I'm sorry, I haven't read the book, but I'll paraphrase what he told me.
#
And he told me that, look, it's the story of Al-Qaeda until 9-11, right?
#
So that isn't that right?
#
But everybody reading it is reading the story of Al-Qaeda given 9-11.
#
So how do you, you know, and it's a bit of a balancing act because, you know, everything
#
that Osama does, you know, in the 1990s shouldn't be, you know, saying that, ah, this is what
#
And therefore, this helps 9-11 make sense because that's a bit too reductionist.
#
On the other hand, that's what the reader cares about.
#
So how do you make that balancing act, right?
#
And his answer to that, by the way, Raj's answer, and I really appreciate that, is often
#
more aesthetic than it is analytical.
#
So it's a treatment of a story rather than the facts or the narration of the story, right?
#
I've learned a lot from him about that.
#
The third thing I've learned, which is, I think the most important thing is that, you
#
know, I mean, Indian Express under him, he's now the editor-in-chief, makes a conscious
#
effort to not be left-wing or right-wing, right?
#
Because it feels that the complex story is actually in the middle.
#
So it's, you know, it's very critical of Modi.
#
Indian Express houses Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who's, I would say, arguably the most famous
#
And it has gotten him into enormous trouble, not least in my own university, which is shameful.
#
But it's certainly not right-wing.
#
It's not a left-wing paper either.
#
It gives plenty of space to Ram Madhav.
#
You know, it's quite critical of cancel culture, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And even when it comes to Modi, it's critical of Modi.
#
It also says that there's tons of things that Modi does right, like the welfare schemes,
#
And it, you know, and I think that has to do in part with Raj's aesthetic of focusing
#
on the middle and on the complexities in the middle, right?
#
And I've certainly for both my books have taken some of that aesthetic, which is that,
#
look, it's a really boring question to say, I want to write a book which says that Modi
#
is the son of God, right?
#
Or I want to write a book saying Modi is the son of Hitler.
#
I mean, those are terrible books to read, right?
#
The complexity of the story is somewhere in between and being able to tell that story,
#
And being able to draw people from the left and the right to engage with you, regardless
#
of their ideological beliefs by saying that, look, I have my own sensibility, right?
#
But the facts that I'm telling you and the story that I'm telling you is honestly done
#
and adds value to you even if you don't agree with my ideological position.
#
And I think, you know, looking back, some of that comes from both what Raj is doing
#
with Indian Express and frankly what Shekhar Gupta is doing with the print, right?
#
Which is it infuriates people on the left, it infuriates people on the right, but it
#
tries its best to do what you said, which is to resist categorization.
#
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.
#
And in fact, like one of the small tips I give my writing students in one of my webinars
#
is about how when you're writing an op-ed or an opinion piece, you want to engage with
#
the opposite argument and not a straw man, but the best version of the opposite argument.
#
And what it does, and there's a tactical reason for this, what it does is that today what
#
has happened on social media is you have vocal minorities consisting of tribes.
#
And within these tribes, you have people raising their stature by attacking the people in other
#
tribes, by attacking people in their own tribes who are not being pure enough and never addressing
#
And these are extremely vocal.
#
So it seems like everybody is like this, but these are minorities.
#
And the vast silent majority of people realize that everything is complicated and they are
#
confused and they want to figure shit out.
#
So if you go there with the attitude that everything is complicated, here's what I think
#
and here's why, and here's why I think the other point of view is wrong.
#
And you take that intellectually honest approach, you get a lot more credibility and you have
#
a lot, you have a much better chance of convincing readers because they haven't immediately pegged
#
I mean, it's so easy to tell who's preaching to the choir and who's not in a sense.
#
I want to sort of go back.
#
Sorry to add to that, I want to add to that that it's not just that readers are getting
#
irritated when people are partisan, readers get and viewers and in your case listeners
#
get irritated with moral preachiness, which is that somebody beginning with the moral
#
high ground and telling you, you have to agree with me, otherwise you're a bad person.
#
And it irritates the shit out of readers and viewers and listeners.
#
But they just feel so bullied that they can't even say it.
#
And I think that you confront a viewer or a listener or a reader with saying, look,
#
this is a point of view, these are the facts.
#
But hey, no pressure, man, make up your own mind, look at it your own way and come to
#
And you know what, you presume I'm a good person, I presume you're a good person.
#
And I find that a much more refreshing attitude and frankly, a much more honest attitude.
#
And a much more healthy attitude.
#
And so sort of going back to the second of the three learnings that you said you had
#
from Raj Kamal Jain, one of them was that people who read your book, which is about
#
the BJP before Modi will read it knowing the ending.
#
And therefore, in some way, the narrative has to play to that play to the ending.
#
And I'm not sure and again, I'm just thinking aloud and no doubt you've thought this through
#
I'm not sure that that's always the best approach to take in the sense that if you think about
#
the world in probabilistic ways, there can be many outcomes today from where we are,
#
it seems that Modi was inevitable.
#
But in 1980 or in 1988 or in 1992, when Modi wasn't necessarily inevitable at any of those
#
points in time, like if you think of the world in probabilistic way, like how I explain it
#
is that imagine you're flipping a coin and there's a 50% probability.
#
And as you flip it, there are two parallel universes which form and in one universe its
#
heads in the other universe's tails, and so on down the line for infinite parallel universes
#
of which we occupy only one.
#
And with the benefit of hindsight, we behave that whatever happened was inevitable.
#
But actually, it wasn't, you know, and I wonder if thinking of what has happened as inevitable
#
can lead you to the trap of sort of then framing history in a way that it leads to this and
#
Like, for example, Keshava Guhas made the point earlier and that, you know, if Pramod
#
Mahajan hadn't died, for example, you know, within the BJP, or if within the Congress
#
people like Madhav Rajshindia and Jitendra Prasad and Rajesh Bailet hadn't died, maybe
#
politics would be completely different today.
#
Maybe Mahajan would be PM and maybe there'd be a real opposition in the Congress instead
#
So all of those possibilities are open.
#
But if you, you know, keep the reader in mind that the reader knows the end, I mean, isn't
#
No, I, firstly, I completely agree with you, right, which is that it's deeply wrong to
#
think about the present as inevitable, right?
#
In fact, both my books on Narsimha Rao and on the BJP, the central point of both books
#
is that these were contingent affairs, that these were demand side, they were the journey
#
shaped the destination that we have to know the hundred years of the BJP to get to today,
#
So each of those years shaped, you know, the way we came to today, right?
#
And it wasn't inevitable.
#
I focus a lot, you know, critics say a bit too much on personalities, right?
#
But to me, personalities are important because they are full of, like what you, the example
#
you just gave by Keshav Guha on, you know, Pramod Mahajan dying or Madhav Rao's India
#
dying, what effect it has on the Congress.
#
So I completely hear you on that.
#
I think what Raj meant and what I took from him was not that the reader should first be
#
told that the present today, this is the only journey that could have happened.
#
It is that that's there in the back of their mind while they are reading your book.
#
So you have to address it, right?
#
Again, I haven't read Looming Tower, but my impression is that Lawrence Wright is not
#
arguing that it was inevitable that the towers would fall.
#
It is that the reader reading me about the various contingent events that leading up
#
to the fall of the Twin Towers is having both the towers in the back of her mind or back
#
And I have to be respectful of that.
#
I can't pretend that that didn't happen because that's what the readers and the viewers, the
#
That's what I've taken, you know, I've kept in mind.
#
Like for the Nasim Marrao book, you know, a very important fact that, you know, I didn't
#
want to hide away from was that Nasim Marrao has been shamefully treated today, right?
#
That's the reality of today that he's been erased.
#
And I wanted you to, you know, I wanted to keep the reader, the one thing in the mind
#
of the reader that when I, you know, the reader is probably asking, hey, why do you want to
#
write 300 pages on this guy, right?
#
Nobody's going to say that on Vajpayee Advani.
#
But plenty of people would have said that about Nasim Marrao and I have to be sensitive
#
I think that's what I took from that.
#
That, you know, the reader is looking at the present and then reading your book, right?
#
So be respectful for that, but don't pander to the prejudice that the present is an inevitable
#
consequence of the past.
#
And you know, if you're listening to this in India, then I think you, you know, no matter
#
who you are or where you are, you owe a debt to Nasim Marrao in some way.
#
I mean, what he did in those five years is just apart from the bare facts of lifting
#
hundreds of millions of people.
#
I mean, if you have a mobile phone, thank Nasim Marrao, like forget like any complicated
#
You know, if you drive on a road with a public-private partnership, a lot of high quality toll roads
#
But sorry, go on and on and on.
#
And for many people, if you have food on the plate because you got hundreds of millions
#
of people literally, it sounds like just a number, right?
#
But hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
#
I mean, it's just such a profound consequence and it's not necessarily the case that it
#
would have happened anyway.
#
So, you know, as your book also kind of makes clear.
#
Which is why I'm totally with you.
#
That I don't want to give the impression that there's a straight line between the past and
#
It could have gone in various different directions, as you pointed out in your book.
#
And I hadn't realized this, but I was so alarmed when I read that little bit about how Pranam
#
Mukherjee was trying to angle for the finance minister position when Manmohan became the
#
It would have been a catastrophe.
#
It would have been a catastrophe.
#
You know, because he was a catastrophe eventually when he got to the post in 2009.
#
No, no, see, there is a straight line before his finance ministership in the 80s.
#
Where he encouraged, you know, reliance style, crony capitalism and his finance ministership,
#
you know, in the waning years of the UPA, where once again, you know, it was old style
#
I mean, your listeners would remember what he did to Vodafone, for example, it's absolute
#
But by the way, that's not the only catastrophe.
#
Imagine if Pranam Mukherjee was a long shot, right?
#
Even as finance minister, he was a long shot because, you know, he had been sort of expelled
#
or he had left the Congress under Rajiv and had come back and was being rehabilitated
#
Tiwari, remember him, right?
#
Had been prime minister.
#
I mean, you know, that frankly that, you know, he was the most likely candidate, right?
#
Or Sharad Pawar, right?
#
It would have been crony capitalism.
#
These are, you know, and it was within a whisker of happening.
#
That's just such a fascinating period of time.
#
Let's go back to your getting to history, for example, I'm curious about that shift
#
now from journalism to history, because part of that epiphany that you had in Harvard Law
#
School was you like reporting, you like that kind of life, you like writing about stuff
#
Where does the shift to actually writing history happen from there?
#
And what does it mean that you have taken this unconventional route to writing history
#
in the sense that, you know, whenever I talk to academic historians, I get this little
#
sense of resentment against the likes of even Ram Guha and Manu Pillai, who are not traditional
#
They kind of come from outside.
#
By the way, most or many academic historians resent Ram Guha and 99 percent of that is just
#
He sells more than them, and when they tell ordinary people, you know, people who are
#
not academics, I'm a historian on India or South Asia, they say, oh, like Ram Guha and
#
they burn when they burn when they heard that sentence.
#
And not only does he sell more than them, he also writes better than them.
#
So frankly, it's just, you know, plain causality happening there.
#
I have one gripe with Ram and I've told him this many times, which is that, you know,
#
his books are rich in primary sources, which is the most important thing, but they lack
#
respect for secondary sources.
#
Look on Gandhi, lots of people have written about, right?
#
And what Ram has done is dived into the archives focused on primary material.
#
But I just wish he could have also told us what others have written about about Gandhi,
#
because look, there's a long tradition of that.
#
That's also one reason why academic historians are hurt, because they're like, look, this
#
guy is writing on stuff that we have written about too.
#
And of course, he has original material, original research, they're fantastic.
#
But why doesn't he acknowledge us?
#
And I think that, you know, that is a legitimate criticism.
#
Look, I'm a big Ram Guha fan.
#
But I would say that, you know, if he, you know, he should inform the reader a little
#
more on others who have written about the similar subject.
#
And I'm also a big Ram Guha fan.
#
I got attacked on Twitter recently because I defended him against someone who called
#
him a Sanghi uncle, quote unquote, a Sanghi uncle, Ram Guha of all people.
#
And then Ram saw the Twitter fracas and he wrote to me and he said that, no, no, listen,
#
Just just stay out of this.
#
So it can get a little ugly.
#
But just sort of speaking about those secondary sources and just a question that occurs to
#
me that at one level, of course, that you don't just want to go to the primary sources
#
and see Gandhi's letters and Gandhi's writings and what others wrote on him at the time,
#
but also how other historians have interpreted that and looked at that.
#
But you know, there's a term George Soros coined in his book, The Alchemy of Finance
#
And his point was that the way people think of the world changes the world.
#
So if you think the reality is X and reality is actually Y, reality will actually start
#
moving from Y to X if enough people think that is the case.
#
Does this have an effect on historical figures whose careers play out over a long period
#
of time that they pay attention to what others are writing about them or that what others
#
are writing about them can shape a public mood and then change the way they behave?
#
And therefore, for that reason, also, you need to take account of this.
#
That's a good question, actually, look, you know, my first book, Nassimara are dead.
#
So he's not going to listen to me, right?
#
But during his lifetime, because if you're looking at secondary sources, you might also
#
be looking at what a newspaper said about him in 1967, which can change the way he reacts.
#
Look, it's a good question, right?
#
I'm not going to give you a flippant reply, which is that, you know, do writers about
#
history help shape history through this causal pathway, namely that leaders and people of
#
influence are being influenced by that history?
#
It's a good question, you know, but just one pushback a little bit.
#
I don't I'm not a historian.
#
So I call myself a political scientist.
#
My PhD is in political science.
#
I'm an associate professor of political science at Ashoka, where I have some similarity with
#
historians is that I use archives, but I use interviews.
#
Historians don't use interviews, right?
#
So that's what I have in similarity with reporters.
#
So to me, the two primary sources that I use are newspaper archives, documents, you know,
#
private papers, etc., and as well as interviews, and frankly, the interviews are what I love
#
But the big difference I have with historians is that I'm interested in causation.
#
Historians don't like to think of, you know, the world in that way.
#
So for example, when it comes to the rise of the BJP, I'm interested in what helped
#
When it comes to Nasim Marao, I'm interested in making the causal argument that Nasim Marao
#
caused liberalization, right, or certainly caused the success of liberalization.
#
So I'm making a causal claim.
#
And thirdly, unlike historians, most of the secondary sources I refer to tend to be political
#
So certainly, so I would call myself a political scientist who uses historical methods as well
#
as journalistic methods, right?
#
But again, maybe it's the Harvard Law School Syndrome, Amit.
#
I don't feel insecure as having to prove that I'm one amongst them.
#
I mean, whatever, man, I'm like a tenured professor in a university, right?
#
I teach students, you know, I just spent a semester teaching at Princeton.
#
So I don't have that insecurity at that level.
#
And B, and at a deeper level, Amit, having spent lots of time with academics, I don't
#
think academics are any smarter than non-academics, right?
#
It's like saying are doctors smarter than non-doctors?
#
No, it's just that doctors have gone through a certain training and know some methods that
#
non-doctors don't know, but their IQ may not be better than the patient, right?
#
And so similarly, I am under no illusion that academics are, you know, the smartest people
#
They just have done a PhD, most of them, and they have, you know, some kind of methodological
#
training that gives them certain advantages and doesn't give them many other advantages.
#
So this idea of having to write for academics, I don't think that they're the smartest people
#
I mean, I'm not disrespecting academics, but I think that they're just, you know, as smart
#
as bankers or as smart as journalists on average, there's no particular difference, right?
#
I mean, Sturgeon's law would apply here as well, which is, you know, 95% of everything
#
And everything is what?
#
Crud is a term he uses, but it's a synonym of crap.
#
So, you know, like one difference we'll often make is that we listen to some music today
#
and then we'll say, areh 60s mein itna achcha tha, Beatles were there, Rolling Stones was
#
there, but that's a selection bias, you're looking at the survivors, you know, the survivorship
#
But 95% of music was crap then and it's crap now, and if you have to compare the outliers
#
to the outliers, this can often give a romantic tinge to the way that you sort of look at
#
But staying with academics for a while, like in another context, the context of economics,
#
Ajay Shah had once, you know, lamented on the show that so many talented economists prefer
#
to play that whole academic game, the circle jerk, as it were, and circle jerk is a word
#
I'm using, Ajay is too polite to use such terms, but that whole academic circle jerk
#
where they're writing for fellow academics and they're getting plotted there and so on
#
It's a reflexive game and they're not really growing.
#
And the incentives of that seem terrible to me because, you know, then you're sort of
#
driven into directions to follow certain kinds of fashionable dogmas of the moment and so
#
And Ajay's deeper point, which I think would resonate with you as well, given your book
#
to Narsimha Rao, is that there are very few of these economists therefore who are choosing
#
to stay back and engage with the real world.
#
And one of the points and one of the themes he speaks about to give context to this is
#
how there was actually a community of economists in the government at one point in time, economists
#
and wonks and bureaucrats who believed in reform, who right from the 80s were doing
#
the groundwork for reform.
#
So that when that moment came, you know, even before Narsimha Rao asked Manmohan Singh to
#
be finance minister, Naresh Chandra, his cabinet secretary, had given him a paper outlining
#
all the reforms that should happen because that community of wonks and bureaucrats had
#
And he says that that's dying out there, that it was vibrant through the 90s, it was vibrant
#
He doesn't see that anymore in the younger generation who are playing the academic circle
#
No, I think there are two reasons for that.
#
There are two reasons for that.
#
The first reason is that, you know, the government is less receptive, right?
#
In the 1980s, you had people like LK Jha, Abed Hussain, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh
#
Alualia, you know, Rakesh Mohan, you know, these are all fine intellects, right?
#
Rakesh Mohan did his PhD in Princeton, Manmohan Singh, you know, you know, was at Oxford and
#
Cambridge, Montek Singh Alualia, you know, was in the World Bank and, you know, people
#
like LK Jha, Abed Hussain were first rate intellects, right?
#
And they were not just persuaded about the importance of liberalization, they knew how
#
to work the system and these two are not the same thing, right?
#
So that as you mentioned, when you had a determined prime minister or a talented prime minister
#
like Narsimha Rao, you have a note available to him saying do X, right?
#
And higher Y, which is higher Manmohan Singh, right?
#
I worry that this government and now I'm straying away from my research into, you know, speculation
#
on the present, I worry that this government under Narendra Modi has contempt for, you
#
know, economists as intellectuals and that's a problem, right?
#
Because in a country like India, a developing country, we don't have left-wing intellectuals,
#
right-wing intellectuals, left-wing economists of high quality, we have what we have and
#
we have to use those few resources for national development.
#
You can't just say that everyone with a foreign degree and, you know, who speaks English should
#
The RSS is not producing world-quality economists.
#
So you should go to war with the army you have and so I think that one reason for what
#
you mentioned is that this government is less receptive, they're less receptive for people
#
of the quality of Arvind Subramaniam, they're less receptive of people like Raghuram Rajan
#
and that's a problem, right?
#
But the second thing you said, which is that part of the reason is that academia itself
#
is being so professionalized, that you're not finding A, people who work on real issues
#
and B, people who are willing to engage with policy and government.
#
I think unfortunately that's true too.
#
I can't speak so much on economics only through friends who are, you know, who are economists.
#
It's certainly true of political science, right?
#
It's certainly true of the humanities, I can see that.
#
And that is, it is a larger tragedy.
#
There's a third thing and I think I should have mentioned this earlier when I was talking
#
about my life history, which is that when I finished my PhD in Princeton, I was determined
#
to come back to India, no matter what, I didn't want to look for a job in the US.
#
And part of that was, I mean, it was a deep-seated feeling that the creation of knowledge has
#
jurisdictional issues, right?
#
Or to put it differently, if you're an economist whose aim is to get tenure in a US university,
#
you won't focus or it's much harder for you to focus on issues of economics in India.
#
It's just much harder for you.
#
You look at, you know, what is happening in American economics, you'll try to find the
#
analogy in India, right?
#
For example, in political science, so many of my friends in the US are obsessed with,
#
you know, Trump is the fascist, you know, Modi is India's Trump, right?
#
Which is absolute rubbish.
#
I think that's a third problem, which is we are seeing a brain drain of high quality scholars
#
to the West and the incentives to produce in the West are very different from the incentives
#
And then I would say the main reason I came back to India was that I felt I would be stifled
#
I would have to produce things that help me get tenure there, even if it meant lying about
#
India or exaggerating about India or more likely focusing on topics that are not hot
#
And that's not something I wanted to do.
#
And I think that's a third problem that, you know, explains what you're just saying, which
#
is that we're seeing a brain drain.
#
Now we have institutions like Ashoka, Kriya and, you know, hopefully state and central
#
universities also revive some of them like IISC are excellent, right?
#
And you know, when I met senior BJP leaders for this book, for the BJP book, my second
#
book they were constantly complaining saying, aap Ashoka se ho, maya JNU hai, it's an anti-national
#
I'm like, do you want the anti-nationals to be in India or do you want them to be abroad?
#
You know, don't you want them to be in India because at least they're focusing on Indian
#
Don't you want to create, when you say make in India, don't you want institutions of higher
#
learning also to be made in India?
#
I think that matters hugely, you know, and, you know, in an interview elsewhere I've said
#
that self-knowledge is a sovereign asset.
#
And I would say I believe that very strongly, right?
#
I mean, Amit, if you were doing this podcast, you know, sitting in the US or the UK, right?
#
About India, but with half an American audience or half a UK audience, the questions you would
#
ask me or the questions you would ask others, the kind of people you would pick would be
#
vastly different, wouldn't it?
#
So you know, this, what you said about, you know, your argument to these BJP leaders about
#
wouldn't you rather have your anti-national people within the country reminds me of this
#
famous quote, I think it's by Lyndon Johnson, where he got someone in his government and
#
they asked him that, you know, why have you got this person in your government?
#
And he said, quote is probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside
#
And here it seems that how the BJP leaders would look at people in Ashoka would be that
#
they inside the tent pissing in, so that's how I think they'd look at it.
#
A quick anecdote before I go to my follow up question, you sort of mentioned, you know,
#
people in the US who might think that, you know, talk about Trump and Modi and this and
#
I was once told by Steve Bannon that Modi is India's Reagan.
#
So I'd won this prize called the Basia prize.
#
You're the only person to win it twice.
#
No, Tim Halford won it a second time after my second time, so I was the first person
#
The second time when I went, there was a ceremony, I gave a speech and the next day the organizer
#
of the ceremony called me and said there is a particular lady, I won't take her name,
#
but a very influential person in Republican Party circles and the daughter of a very influential
#
And he said that she wants to speak to you.
#
She really loved your speech.
#
So I said, OK, I mean, why not?
#
I'm open to meeting people.
#
And then I Googled her and all of that.
#
And I found that there are a bunch of people who are supporting Ted Cruz at the time.
#
The primaries had just kind of kicked off.
#
So the next day I go and into this fancy building and there is this lady and with her there
#
is Steve Bannon, who I hadn't heard of before.
#
I had no idea what the alt-right is or any of that.
#
So they introduce themselves and he said, I do a magazine called Breitbart and we heard
#
your speech and your speech was great.
#
And would you like to start India's version of Breitbart?
#
And that's kind of how I reacted.
#
I kind of laughed because I didn't know the term alt-right then, this is 2015, but I knew
#
that they were broadly conservative.
#
And of course, I'm not conservative.
#
You know, I would not agree with most of the views.
#
I wouldn't even call Breitbart conservative.
#
I would just say they're right wing.
#
They're nativist, protectionist.
#
Yeah, they're beyond the pale.
#
But at that time, I hadn't read Breitbart.
#
In my mind, it's something vaguely conservative and why are they talking to me?
#
At most, if you have to put a label, you could say I'm libertarian.
#
So I said, no, no, I don't think it's a fate.
#
For example, you know, I believe in immigration, you guys are against that and I believe in
#
gay rights and you guys have issues with that and so on and so forth.
#
And then we just chatted quietly and they were very nice and at one point, Steve Bannon
#
looks at me and he said, don't you think Modi is just like Reagan?
#
And again, that's exactly how I reacted and I kind of said, are you like kidding me?
#
I'm sure you know Reagan, so clearly you don't know Modi, you know, it's absolutely the opposite
#
But interesting anecdote aside, and I wrote a post on that encounter, which I will link
#
My follow up question is somebody you should do scene and the unseen with Steve Bannon.
#
Yes, I don't think I would.
#
Because you know what, because and we were discussing this before the thing that my show
#
works best when people come here without a filter, when they speak honestly from the
#
heart and the problem with people in politics is that they'll be an agenda, they'll be
#
a narrative, they'll be a particular way they want to present themselves, which is also
#
why I don't have, I don't even invite politicians on this show, except, you know, someone like
#
Shashi Tharoori wrote a book and the whole logic of a four hour podcast is premised
#
on honesty, honesty and trust that, you know, you can have that mutually respectful conversation
#
and polite to each other.
#
And it isn't someone trying to peddle a narrative, which won't work.
#
But so get back to my follow up question, the reason I mentioned academia and both of
#
us went off on, you know, talking about that is tell me a little bit about history, the
#
way history is studied and pursued in academia, because someone who is not related to academics
#
or to history, their impression of history would be that history is an inquiry into what
#
And it is a presentation of the results of that, that there are facts about the past,
#
you turn it into a story, you present it and that's history.
#
That's how normal people think of history.
#
But within academia, that's not it.
#
That's not the thing alone.
#
Within academia and academic history, there are prisms that you have to look through.
#
Ideologies that you have to superimpose on history, you have to look at it in a particular
#
Anything that falls outside that prism and is not useful to you, you have to cast it
#
And that pollutes the field and that perhaps is one more reason why a lot of good history
#
actually comes from people outside that academic line, like people like Ram Guha and Manu Pillay
#
and so many great Western historians as well, in fact, who are castigated for being popular
#
So tell me a little bit about this because many of my listeners would have heard phrases
#
like Marxist historian and so on and so forth.
#
Kind of give me a sense of what are the different schools of history, what are the approaches
#
through history and when a newcomer like you comes in, how do you make sense of all this
#
and set that path for yourself?
#
Well, you know, first up, I don't think I'm qualified to answer that question because
#
I'm a political scientist, right?
#
So history is a distinct field.
#
I don't teach courses in history.
#
I have some amateur interest in history, especially ancient India.
#
So I'm reading up quite a bit about it.
#
I mean, you know, shout out to those who haven't read Upinder Singh's work.
#
I just finished reading her Ancient India Culture of Contradictions.
#
I could not recommend it more.
#
It has an ideological point of view.
#
It's also very, very, very good, right?
#
And it tells you that, you know, that the two things may go hand in hand, that, you
#
know, a historian has a perspective, but within the perspective, you can be good or bad, right?
#
Or to give you the example of Rumila Thapar, who I broadly disagree with, not even broadly,
#
I specifically disagree with, right?
#
She's a Marxist historian.
#
Or I would say her guru, Didi Kosambi, who I would say is even more of a Marxist historian,
#
an absolutely brilliant man.
#
Both of them are very good.
#
While I can't answer the question of different ways of thinking of history because I'm not
#
a trained historian, you know, I use historical sources, but I am a political scientist.
#
I'm interested in power and politics.
#
I would only push your listeners that don't reject someone because of ideology.
#
I mean, you know, to call Rumila Thapar a Marxist historian and should not be a conversation
#
It should be a spur for you to pick up her books, read it, and if you disagree with it,
#
So to give you just one example, she's written an absolutely brilliant book on Somnath, right?
#
The many voices of Somnath, the many stories of Somnath, where her argument is that the
#
destruction of Somnath in, I think, the 11th century by Muhammad of Ghazni, she doesn't
#
dispute that it happened, right?
#
But what she disputes is that this narrative that it's a historical wound in Hindu civilization,
#
she says was not the case until the 19th century when the British made it the case, right?
#
And Hindus did not see it in quite this way.
#
And most of the sources we have, which talk about the barbarity of Muhammad of Ghazni
#
in destroying Somnath are Muslim sources and Persian sources, right, who had an incentive
#
to exaggerate, to make Muhammad of Ghazni seem like the protector of the faith rather
#
than somebody who wanted to make money and came to India to loot, right?
#
Now, I happen to disagree with the book, right, because she's going somewhere with the argument,
#
isn't just an argument, and I disagree with it.
#
But it's a very, very good book, right?
#
And it's, you know, something that you mentioned earlier, whether you agree or disagree, let's
#
see whether we can pick the best person who argues on either side.
#
And certainly, Romila is one of them, right?
#
A critique of Romila Thapar, if people are interested, there's this writer in Swarajya
#
magazine, which is a center-right magazine called Arvindan Neelkanthan, who I quite admire,
#
who's written like a detailed critique of various things Romila Thapar has done.
#
And what I liked about him, and I told him that is, you know, I think he comes from an
#
And I told him that, look, you treat her with respect, right?
#
And in the few sentences where he's a bit disrespectful, I told him, please don't write
#
that, you know, because the power of an argument is that, you know, Romila Thapar is excellent,
#
I have no need to question her bona fides, right?
#
But these are the ways in which her interpretation has made errors, right?
#
And so for those who are non academics, who are attacking historians, this is what I would,
#
I'm not, I mean, I agree with many of the criticisms.
#
As I said, I'm not in agreement with Romila Thapar's project at all, right?
#
But she's very, very good, right?
#
And to attack her, you have to treat her respectfully and be as good, right?
#
There's this American show called The Wire.
#
Some of your listeners may have heard about it.
#
And there's this man there called Omar.
#
And Omar's famous line is that, you know, if you're trying to shoot the king, you better
#
So if you're trying to go after someone like Romila Thapar or Didi Kossambi, these are
#
To make the effort to kind of rise to the occasion.
#
No, that makes a lot of sense to me.
#
And The Wire, of course, is, you know, one of the great TV series of all time.
#
I mean, The Wire and Decalogue are for me the gold standard.
#
She's the other one I haven't-
#
Which is pre-OTT Times.
#
It was made in 1989 or 1990.
#
It's a series of 10 short films for Polish television by the director Krzysztof Kieslowski.
#
And each episode is loosely inspired by one of the Ten Commandments, even though I don't
#
I should write this down after the show.
#
Oh, it's a masterpiece.
#
It is for me the pinnacle of cinema.
#
And I've spoken about it on the show before and I kind of go on and on about it.
#
So I won't kind of repeat that bit.
#
But I want to get a little specific here.
#
Like when you say you disagree with Romila Thapar's project, what is the specific disagreement?
#
For example, with that book, what would have been your specific disagreement?
#
And also, and these two might even have the same answer, that because the term goes around
#
a lot, Marxist historian, what does it really mean?
#
What is the lens they are looking at?
#
And I accept that you're not a historian and you've clarified that you're a political scientist,
#
but as someone who's read much more of this stuff than I have, certainly enough to have
#
disagreements with Romila Thapar.
#
I've read her a little bit, but I don't know enough to have disagreements.
#
So just expand a little bit on that.
#
So I'm not, neither am I a Marxist or a scholar of Marx, nor am I a historian.
#
But loosely put, I would say Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, Didi Kosambi, Didi Kosambi
#
is really the great scholar.
#
So if anyone, as I said, if you want to aim for the king, you best not miss first aim
#
And for those of you who don't want to read his work, there's an excellent talk that Pratap
#
Bhanumaita, the political theorist Pratap Bhanumaita gave on Didi Kosambi in a Didi
#
Kosambi lecture, a named lecture on him on YouTube, which sort of lays out Didi Kosambi's
#
And it gives you a good sense of what the Marxist lens as applied in India is, which
#
is slightly different from the European and American Marxists.
#
So the Indian Marxists are a little different breed.
#
One thing they all have in common is the emphasis on class and material dialecticism as applied
#
to class and class analysis, and a belief that the real struggle or the story of history
#
is class struggle, everything else is an epiphenomena.
#
So to take that to the specifics of Romila Thapar's book on Somnath, her argument is
#
that the motivation of Muhammad of Ghazni was not religious.
#
And the insult and the humiliation that the Hindus felt was not religious.
#
And it was invented much later on by the British, who had their own kind of agenda.
#
So that would be one very strong emphasis that other axes of motivation are considered
#
to use Marx's phrase as epiphenomena.
#
So I would say that's a very important element, that there are peasant struggles, that you're
#
looking at different modes of production.
#
And during these different modes of production, feudalism, capitalism, what is the underlying
#
class struggle that is going on, and that forms the basis of history.
#
So for example, a lot of Marxist historians would see the failure of the national movement
#
as not looking at class revolution and focusing on nationalism instead.
#
And scholars like Bipin Chandra, Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee, who are again historians,
#
but they are kind of, they are off the left, but they are Congress historians who are critiquing
#
Marxism or Marxist historians by saying that actually the national movement was a class
#
So that's sort of defeating the Marxists on their own terrain.
#
So I would say that, broadly put, that becomes the way of analysis.
#
It's not the only school of Indian scholarship.
#
So for example, two other scholars that I admire greatly on ancient India also happen
#
to be my colleagues in Ashoka University.
#
That is Upinder Singh, who we mentioned, and Nayanjot Lahiri, who's written really a classic
#
Another scholar who is not a Marxist, but who understood Marxist ways of writing is
#
Ayurvedan Mahadevan, who was a former IS officer who dedicated his life to decode the Indus
#
Again, he was not a Marxist.
#
So by no means is the Indian tradition on studying ancient India, and this is all I'm
#
focusing on, is a Marxist tradition, right?
#
But you have high quality scholars that come out of India who also happen to be Marxist,
#
but not all of them are.
#
And when you set about to writing first the book on Narasimha Rao and then the book on
#
the BJP, what was sort of your models for this?
#
What are you looking back at?
#
Can you say that you were writing about history, but it wasn't history per se, quote unquote,
#
and you know, it was more using historical facts to talk about political science?
#
Yeah, so I'm just answering, you know, so I'm saying I'm not a historian in a disciplinary
#
So most of your listeners who are not academics or not in a university would say that what
#
is Vinay talking about?
#
He is a historian, right?
#
Yeah, he's writing history.
#
He's writing, you know, he's writing about the past, like Narasimha Rao existed in the
#
past, he's writing about the past, right?
#
But the reason I'm pushing back is that over time, the discipline of history across the
#
world and the discipline of political science have moved in that history is considered firmly
#
in the humanities, along with anthropology, comparative literature, English, etc.
#
And political science has moved closer to social science, like economics, social science.
#
One is, of course, the use of data and numbers, right?
#
But that's not the only thing.
#
I mean, I would say in political science, a big difference is that our focus is on causality,
#
causal mechanisms, causal influence.
#
Why did something happen?
#
Historians will say, look, you can't put a finger on it.
#
There are multiple reasons for why it happened, right?
#
Whereas I am interested, that's very much my training, you know, and as I said, historians,
#
the main method they use is archives, right?
#
They don't use survey data, for example, historians don't do that.
#
They don't do interviews.
#
They don't do survey data, but I do a ton of interviews, which is some, you know, or
#
what we now fashionably call oral history.
#
But that's what journalists have been doing for a very long time, right?
#
So it's just a, I mean, again, if you're, I'm answering this, presuming that at least
#
1% of your listenership are academics to make that distinction.
#
But if you're not an academic, it's not a substantive difference.
#
It's basically a disciplinary difference, you know.
#
So when you talk about methodology, you know, and a lot of it is based on interviews.
#
Now it seems to me that it must be especially tricky to write books like what you've done.
#
I was about to say history, but I'll just say to write the two sort of biographies that
#
Now, at least the Narsimha Rao book to a certain extent, it's not exactly a biography biography,
#
but it encompasses elements of that, that one, when you're writing about events from
#
a historical perspective, but that still that, you know, many of the characters are alive
#
and kicking and interested in how the world will view them or how the world will view
#
events and all of that, there then comes a trap of how much do you rely on interviews
#
and how much do you rely on oral history from people who were participants and who will
#
want to push one side of the story.
#
Now what you've done scrupulously in both books is that wherever there are multiple
#
versions of something, you've pointed out what those multiple versions sort of are,
#
you know, but you know, how careful do you then have to be like when you're covering
#
a particular event, do you then tell yourself that if this is likely to be something that
#
is contentious, I should get a larger sample size of people to speak to from different
#
How do you, how do you handle that?
#
Academics wrestle with this question a lot.
#
This is that when it comes to interviews, this is the, all the problems that you listed,
#
but reporters do it on an everyday basis and they have found a solution, right?
#
You have good reporters, you have bad reputer, any story you do, right?
#
Any story you do, a reporter will speak to various interested participants by definition
#
because the interested participants are also the sources, right?
#
And then the question is the question you just asked, which is how do you balance the
#
fact that the source has an interest in the story and is spinning something to do, right?
#
And this is what the skill of a reporter is, which is you get the source to speak, but
#
you're very, very cognizant that the reporter comes from a, that the source comes from a
#
So one way to do it is to try to balance it, search for the other side so that at least
#
you have multiple voices there, right?
#
Two is do a preliminary fact check for the source.
#
Is the source, you know, lying, you know, is the source reliable?
#
Ultimately, look, this comes down to human judgment, right?
#
Why is Bob Woodward Bob Woodward, right?
#
Problem issues, all the people he interviews, having, you know, when he interviews Trump,
#
Trump has an interest in Trump, right?
#
Now how do you, you know, so how do you balance it out?
#
And so I found myself, Amit, in answering this question, not relying on academia, I
#
think for historical sources like archives and for secondary sources and for research
#
design, academia was excellent.
#
My PhD training helped me.
#
It didn't help me for interviews.
#
I had to go back to my Indian Express days.
#
I was actually not a great reporter.
#
I was an edit, you know, an editor, copy editor, pretending to be a reporter, but I knew tons
#
of high quality reporters.
#
How do you answer the questions that you just asked me, right?
#
And I think this is what it is that if you, if you find it's a contentious issue, get
#
multiple points of view, right?
#
You know, but you shouldn't, you know, strive for balance when there is none, you know,
#
you shouldn't say, you know, some, you know, X believed that, you know, the final solution
#
Y believed it didn't happen.
#
There are facts in the middle.
#
So do your own research, right?
#
And frankly, Amit, I found that doing my own research was hugely helpful when I interviewed
#
So, for example, when I interviewed Manmohan Singh for the Narsimha Rao book, I had done
#
enough research, you know, I read some of the things he had written, some of his reviews
#
from the 70s, etc, etc, when I was asking him questions, and I could see that he was
#
impressed and that was important for me because I was in my early 30s.
#
And here I was, you know, interviewing an ex prime minister about economics, right?
#
And about liberalisation and I have to prepare because that's when they take me seriously,
#
But preparing also means that I can call out when somebody is saying something that is
#
The third thing is what you said that when you have a very contentious issue, rely on
#
multiple people when you have like, for example, suppose, you know, what Manmohan Singh was
#
wearing at a particular point of time or what Narsimha Rao was wearing, or what was Narsimha
#
Rao's health, I'm happy only relying on his doctor because it's relatively uncontentious.
#
Now this requires human judgment, there's just no way to run away from that, right?
#
And at some level, I am asking the reader to trust me.
#
But what I'm trying to do while asking the reader to trust me is also to be as transparent
#
In most cases, tell them the sources, right?
#
Give the page number if I'm using a book or an article so that they can read it themselves,
#
And I realised, Amit, that, you know, all of this, which is the process by which you
#
get interviews, the process by which you look at documents, is all about building trust
#
with the reader, right?
#
And readers know that immediately.
#
I'm sure you, you know, you have the same experience with your podcast listeners.
#
Very quickly, they know whether you're lying to them or not, whether you're selling them
#
something or not, right?
#
And that changes who you are.
#
You know, you're very careful in asking questions to your own interviewees because you know
#
that the podcast listener is trusting you, right?
#
And I was very conscious of that burden that, you know, I was, you know, in some sense,
#
I felt I was an agent of the reader.
#
And you know, when I was interviewing Manmohan Singh or anybody or Narsimha Rao's doctor
#
or his cook, I was there on behalf of the reader, right?
#
And as I said, a lot of this I learned from reporting rather than academia.
#
So just thinking aloud, I think the one difference between what I do and what you do is that
#
a podcast, essentially a conversation like this, is a work in progress.
#
It's not finely edited.
#
A lot of the stuff is just thinking aloud and so on and so forth.
#
So my listeners, because of the intimacy of the medium, they'll know that I'm acting in
#
good faith, that I'm making the best honest effort I can.
#
Or will I always say something today that, you know, that I will agree with tomorrow
#
I mean, I've changed my mind on the show.
#
But it's the same with me, Aamit.
#
You have to come up with a finished product.
#
But yes, maybe more finished because I have the luxury of doing many edits.
#
And I hardly edit this.
#
You can't rewrite, right?
#
You can edit, but you can't rewrite.
#
But you know, the issue remains the same, which is, you know, I look back at the books
#
and I've made mistakes, you know.
#
Like each book has, you know, more than 1000, you know, I would say, I mean, I'm just flipping
#
maybe 2000 footnotes each, roughly, right?
#
Some of them are erroneous.
#
I, you know, in later editions, I've made an attempt to change.
#
Sometimes somebody, you know, something as simple as the spelling of a person, I've sometimes
#
Readers are okay with that.
#
Saying that, look, on margin, you make a product like this.
#
Some errors are inevitable as long as you're honest and you're self-correct.
#
And the error is not massive.
#
It's like a relationship.
#
No relationship is perfect.
#
You know, husband, wife are constantly fighting.
#
The relationship with the reader and the writer also presumes that the writer is, by the way,
#
I also presume the reader is imperfect, which is why I take so much effort to make the bitter
#
medicine in the book palatable to the reader by putting some honey.
#
Because I know that, you know, the reader is saying, meh Facebook mein kya ho raha hai,
#
WhatsApp mein kya ho raha hai.
#
I have to constantly bring the reader from that to focus on the book.
#
So it's a relationship like anything else.
#
Elaborate on that with a concrete example, like what is a bitter medicine?
#
So the bitter medicine is the facts of the book.
#
So to give you an example in the Naseema Rao book, I have two chapters on Naseema Rao's
#
The economic liberalization reform.
#
Now, other than Amit Verma and economists, everybody else finds this instinctively boring.
#
What is fiscal deficit?
#
What is monetary deficit?
#
Monetary policy is something that is sleep inducing.
#
I'm not blind to that, right.
#
I would have loved to be in a world in which readers love it with as much passion as I
#
Which is why I began that chapter with gold leaving South Bombay, right.
#
From the RBI headquarters and going to Sahar airport and being loaded, you know, and in
#
being doing that, India is, you know, is selling, is pawning its family silver.
#
Why do I do that visual?
#
Why do I do that visual, because that's the honey, right, which is entrapping the reader
#
to read the rest of the book, right, or the next chapter, which is the Naseema Rao's economics
#
from 92 to 96, where he, you know, where he plays the middle overs, not just as an opening
#
I begin by talking about Chanakya and Chanakya's various ways in which the king should deal
#
with enemies, right, Samadhana, Bheda, Danda, etc., etc.
#
Why do I really give the honey, right, that entraps, you know, or that makes it palatable
#
to read about, you know, Jet Airways opening or this, you know, or, you know, licenses
#
to banks, etc., etc., which I know that the reader may not like and look in doing so,
#
it's like anything else.
#
It's any other relationship.
#
Amit, you've had this conversation with me, right.
#
Now imagine a friend of yours who has no interest in your podcast, right.
#
I hope you have some like that, you know, and you want to explain this conversation
#
or this book or Nasimara to them.
#
You in your mind are want to be honest to the book, but at the same time, you know that
#
your friend's attention is limited and you want to pick out something juicy to tell the
#
friend to capture the friend's attention so that they get the core argument what you're
#
You know, for me, it's like a grandmother test or my, you know, I have a daughter test.
#
Can you tell the story to capture their attention?
#
That doesn't mean you lie.
#
That doesn't mean you needlessly simplify, but it's incumbent on you to make it interesting
#
to somebody who, you know, for whom it's not otherwise interesting.
#
Yeah, that's well said.
#
And speaking of friends who don't listen to the podcast, that's almost all of them in
#
the sense that for a long time, I did not know the kind of following this podcast have
#
because none of my friends listen to podcasts at all, leave alone mine.
#
So you know, it's only serendipitiously that in the last couple of years, it kind of hit
#
me that the show does mean a lot to many people and some of them are now my friends.
#
So, but I have retained the friends who don't listen to podcasts.
#
And just think back, if you can just tell me, I know this is the other way, but you
#
know, think of a book you recently read, right.
#
And you know, to a friend who doesn't read books, you want to tell, wow, I really had
#
I told you about Wanting by Logue Burgers a little while back.
#
In fact, I even sort of ironically made you want to read the book because of, you know,
#
mimetically, which is what the book is about.
#
Yes, but you know how you did it?
#
You did it by saying there's something called thick and thin description.
#
Look back into your life, namely my life, and what part is thick and thin.
#
And you know what the most interesting thing to anybody is that person.
#
Yeah, you got to make it relatable.
#
Yeah, that's the honey.
#
And what you say about economics being boring for most people is sadly true, which is why,
#
you know, the most famous Hayek in the world, sadly, is Salma Hayek and Frederick Hayek.
#
So what are you going to do about that?
#
But it's your job to change that.
#
At least to move the needle a little bit towards, you know, the one Hayek or the other Hayek,
#
No, no, I totally do that to the extent that there might be friends who, you know, see
#
me coming and say, oh, no, he's going to talk about Hayek again.
#
But so here's the next question.
#
I would imagine that when you start writing the book, you have a broad sense of a frame
#
You have the questions that you're asking and you may not know the exact answers.
#
And then you get into the book and then structure reveals itself and so on.
#
Now what happens here is that on the one extreme, you can have the approach that you just know
#
the conclusion you want to reach.
#
And once you've got enough facts to kind of make a case for that, you end the book, which
#
is which you've completely avoided, obviously, and there's far more rigor and depth in that.
#
The other approach, which you're closer to, but which you also kind of avoided, is that
#
you just go endlessly into rabbit holes forever.
#
Like one of my favorite biographers is Robert Caro.
#
You must have read him.
#
Of course, the Lyndon Johnson.
#
And even before the Lyndon Johnson, like in the mid 60s, I read Power Broker, is that
#
the one you're talking about?
#
So in the mid 60s, he started writing a book called The Power Broker, which he thought
#
It took him eight, nine years.
#
And it's a masterpiece.
#
It's I think it's a it's a million words and was cut down to 900,000 and I think it is
#
And it's not just a biography of Moses as a person, therefore, you know, a biography.
#
It's also a study of power and what power does to human beings and therefore a work
#
And it's also the biography of a city, the city of New York.
#
And it works at so many different levels.
#
And after that, he in the late 70s, he began this biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is
#
supposed to be five volumes, four are out.
#
At some point, hopefully the fifth will be out.
#
But like 40 years have gone by, 45 years have gone by.
#
And in fact, it took him longer to write the fourth volume than it took Lyndon Johnson
#
You know, the periods that are being described there.
#
So incredibly meticulous and just, you know, remarkable and thank God he exists.
#
But everybody can't afford to be like that.
#
So how do you like kind of find that balance that it must be so seductive?
#
Certainly it would be for me, like so often when I read a book like yours, in fact, you
#
know, I find myself going to the footnotes and then I'll just enter rabbit holes and
#
that just goes on and on when you're actually writing, you're doing the research.
#
How do you get yourself to a point where you say that this is enough?
#
I move on to the next thing.
#
So to by the way, somebody you must interview is Patrick French.
#
So Patrick French has written the best biography I've read of anyone, which is a biography
#
Naipaul called The World Is What It Is.
#
I find it the best biography and it's astonishingly deeply critical of Naipaul yet an authorized
#
It's unbelievable how he pulled it off and he gave me this advice.
#
He said, look, some version of perfection is the enemy of production, right?
#
So when should you stop research and start writing?
#
And he said, you know, you'll always have four books you should read, three people you
#
should interview, two archives you should go to before you start writing.
#
Don't wait, stop and write and leave things blank.
#
So I've learned that, which is that research and writing is not a linear process.
#
It's an iterative process.
#
So you do some research and then you start writing and you leave blanks and then you
#
go for one other step of research where your job is only to fill the blanks up, right?
#
Because otherwise you're waiting for this mythic sense of completion before you begin
#
to write and that's a mythic sense and frankly, I learned that while doing a PhD in the wrong
#
I think I wasted an entire year looking for something that was a Delta 10%.
#
So the question is the following that you keep doing research, right?
#
At some point you have to say that, look, if I spend another one year doing research,
#
it's only going to improve the book 5%.
#
That's when you should stop.
#
So when you're 80% or 90% there, you should stop and start writing and then use the research
#
phase post starting the writing to actually do a little more focused research.
#
I don't know whether that makes sense because too many people I know, especially those who
#
do PhDs or writing books are like, you know, they're spending years and years and yeah,
#
yeah, it's wrong, you know, so you should stop when you're even 70% and you should start
#
writing and leave holes and then do a second round of research on the larger question that
#
you asked on, you know, structure, how do I go about the book?
#
I am quite a structured guy, right?
#
So for both the books, they were historical.
#
There was a historical fact element, Nasimara was born a certain time, died a certain time.
#
So what I did was for both of them, I had done about a years of general soaking and
#
poking not focused research.
#
Generally should I do the book?
#
What should it be about?
#
Nasimara book, of course, start to finish took a year, but I'm saying for the second
#
Very early on in the process, I wrote a mock table of contents, right?
#
Saying that it will be a 350 page book, there'll be an introduction, there'll be a conclusion
#
and then the 30 page chapters and I think Ram told me that don't have chapters more
#
than 20 to 25 pages gets too boring, right?
#
So if you have a 250 page book, you know, you should have at least like 15 chapters,
#
you know, so keep small short chapters.
#
So very early on, I write a mock table of contents and in both books, I've realized
#
that at the end, when I look back at the original table of contents, it was actually 50% there,
#
Once I write a table of contents, right, then every book and archive I'm writing, I'm putting
#
into one of the chapters and I also divide the chapters into sub chapters.
#
So when I'm reading a book, secondary literature, which is meant for say my Nasimara book or
#
the BJP book, I'm instinctively saying, ah, this is a nice paragraph, you know what, it
#
should be in chapter six, section four.
#
So I write the CH six section four, and then I go back and I, and in my word document,
#
I say, this is what you have to do, right?
#
And of course, once you read what your table of contents is changes a little bit.
#
So you know, one of my favorite phrases, it's a unfortunate phrase is you should be prepared
#
So if you have a great idea for a book early on and you have a great theory for your book
#
early on while doing research, you know, that theory may be wrong.
#
You should be honest enough to change your view.
#
So don't be wedded to an original idea, right?
#
You may have even spent a month doing research to realize actually that's a total waste,
#
But be honest enough and make the changes.
#
So what happens is then I tinker with the chapters, I change the headings, I increase
#
the size, I move it up and down.
#
But as I said, even at the end, 60% is what I began with, right?
#
But it really helps in focused research because every time I'm doing research, I'm telling
#
myself, okay, I've talked to him.
#
You know, let's say I'm talking to Naseema Rao's cook.
#
As he's speaking, I'm saying, oh man, that was a nice sentence.
#
That is chapter six, section two.
#
Oh man, that's a nice section.
#
That was chapter one, you know, and then as he's speaking, I write down and then I immediately
#
go and move it to that particular word document where it is, which means that when I'm about
#
to write, write a 25-page chapter, I have 40 pages of notes for those chapters broken
#
up into sections and each section says where that primary material is, right?
#
So that's, you know, everybody has their way of doing it.
#
This is my way of doing it.
#
The big con of this way of doing it, which is a structured way is that I might very early
#
get committed to an idea rather than inductively making your way through an idea, right?
#
And so the one way to solve that is not to be too wedded to the original table of contents,
#
But the pro of what I'm doing is you can finish things quickly and wastage is less.
#
So to put it differently, and tell me when I'm getting boring on this, because I can
#
speak endlessly on this process, which is that when I was doing my PhD, I used to ask
#
around ki yaar tumne itna research kiya hai to other people doing PhD, how much of that
#
actually made it to your dissertation, which is the same question asking that anybody writing
#
a book, how much of the research you did made it to the actual book, actual pages, right?
#
And I found that for PhD students, it was, you know, 30 to 40%.
#
60% is you're going down rabbit holes that don't make it to the book.
#
Now some of that is inevitable in a process where you're doing original work.
#
But my argument is, can you make it from 30 to 40% to 60 to 70%?
#
You've doubled your productivity.
#
Still there will be 30% wastage and that's what it means to do original work, but it's
#
not going to be 60% wastage.
#
Was that too detailed an answer?
#
It's a fantastic answer.
#
I'm really passionate about this stuff and I want to spread the word, but you know, I'm
#
deeply aware that it may be too bitter a medicine without enough honey.
#
No, no, it's a fantastic answer and you correctly spoke about the pros and the cons and for
#
listeners who are enjoying this, let me tell you that we spoke for almost at least 45 minutes
#
about the writing process itself in our earlier episode.
#
So they should kind of go and listen to that and Joan Didion once said, I don't know what
#
I think until I write it down.
#
So the process of writing as, you know, part of a process of thinking about something of,
#
you know, improving your own understanding of the material is something that I totally
#
And what like fiction writers will often talk of an approach to structuring a novel as,
#
you know, they'll talk of the architect and the gardener.
#
So the architect is someone who's making a map where this is a house, this is a land
#
it occupies, these are all the rooms, you do all of that, and the gardener is just pottering
#
around messing around with stuff.
#
And there isn't a right or wrong, different approaches work for different people, it kind
#
of depends on who you are.
#
And I think in a sense, what you're saying is that you're more of an architect.
#
And of course, within each room, within each unit, you are still doing gardening, you're
#
still leaving that space open.
#
But I think that's okay, as long as you're aware of the flaws of being only an architect.
#
And if your approach is a gardening approach, all power to you, but be aware that there
#
are problems with because then you're gardening to your gardening everywhere, without knowing
#
where the house layout is here, you know, yeah, yeah.
#
So when you started in the Narsimha Rao book, were you aware of the answer that you eventually
#
No, no, I knew the structure of the book, I kept pushing to say, why should I care and
#
you know, the answer I and for even for the new books, I'm thinking about I'm always asking
#
this question, Amit, which is why should someone who doesn't care one ounce about politics
#
who doesn't visit Bari Sons in Delhi, who doesn't listen to seen and the unseen, what
#
should they get from this book, right?
#
So is there something larger that Narsimha Rao's life could hold?
#
But I didn't find an answer until I was midway and the answer is one sentence was Narsimha
#
Rao tells us, how do you bring about change without power?
#
How do you first gather power and influence and then wield it because he didn't have a
#
mandate, right, he had only constraints.
#
So under tremendous constraints without power, how do you then bring about change?
#
That's the central question, right, and the central answer was he did it because he knew
#
how to be a lion, a fox and a mouse, which we'll talk about.
#
But you know, I had so many people outside of politics, policy, the world of Amit Verma
#
coming to me and telling me this book resonated with me, you know, startup founders would
#
come and say, you know, people think that startup founders have all the power.
#
I can't fire my design person, right?
#
I want to come into the room and I think it's a lousy website, but I can't, I have to suck
#
I have to like, you know, because there's shortage of labor, right?
#
I had, you know, a top bank, a country head of a top bank, MNC, telling me, you know what,
#
this book totally resonated with me because people think I'm the CEO or the MD of the
#
India version of MNC, but I have two people in London breathing down my neck.
#
And all my deputies in India are reporting to their line counterparts in London, not
#
And so I have to first construct power.
#
I don't have power given to me on a plate.
#
I don't have a mandate given to me on a plate.
#
I have to first construct that power and then use it to bring about change in my bank, right?
#
Which is frankly the Nassim Arau story, which is you don't, you know, it's so easy to say
#
that if you have power and mandate, you should do ABCD to transform India.
#
First, how do you get that power?
#
How do you get that mandate?
#
How do you make sure that you're operating within the constraints?
#
Every person is dealt with a bunch of cards, right?
#
Some of those cards are strong.
#
It varies from person to person, but how do you play with the cards that you're given?
#
And so, you know, before we go for a break, after which we'll discuss sort of your book
#
on Nassim Arau, quick final sort of questions about your personal journey.
#
And I'm curious about your teaching.
#
You know, what is teaching like for you?
#
Of course, you're teaching political science and not history, and as you have been at pains
#
to point out, in fact, the title of the episode could be Vinesh Sitaapati, political scientist,
#
Vinesh Sitaapati is not a historian.
#
So no, no, I'm just kidding.
#
I won't do that to you.
#
But so what is sort of teaching like and what does it mean to teach in a place like Ashoka,
#
for example, because I've heard very good things about the place and I've had many episodes
#
with different faculty members of Ashoka, at the same time, I've heard complaints from
#
people saying, oh, Ashoka is becoming so vogue and so this and so that.
#
So what is it like teaching young people, you know, and how much does that change the
#
person you are and the writer you are, the act of teaching, because just as the act of
#
writing makes you a better thinker, I would imagine that the act of teaching makes you,
#
you know, much more knowledgeable about the subject you're teaching, because after all,
#
you have to explain it to Nani ji and to dozens of curious teenagers who are challenging you.
#
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
#
So first off, again, I'm addressing to the non academics who are hearing this.
#
Most people who do PhDs and want to be an academic don't do this for teaching, right?
#
Nobody says I want to do PhD because I want to teach children.
#
Nobody does that, right?
#
Then you're a school teacher.
#
If you're a university professor, the main focus is research.
#
I was under this illusion too, that look, I've done my PhD.
#
I want to write my books.
#
But rosy roti gili, I have to do some teaching because, you know, teaching is a revenue center,
#
Research is a cost center.
#
So I have to in a university learn to teach.
#
So I reluctantly said, look, let me do some teaching and let me be half decent at it.
#
But Ashoka kids make demands, right?
#
They expect you to work hard.
#
And it has been transformative.
#
I've grown to love teaching, right?
#
My student evaluations are good.
#
I don't think students like me very much.
#
I think they respect me, right?
#
I try to be a tough teacher.
#
What I try when I teach is to tell students that, look, I'm not going to waste your time
#
You know, your parents have paid good money to come here.
#
Ashoka is an expensive education.
#
And instead, I'm going to try to add value to this, to you.
#
So that at the end of this course, you said, okay, I, you know, paisa vasool to hua hai.
#
And what does that look like?
#
It doesn't look like pandering, right?
#
But I'm going to tell you a bunch of things.
#
I'm also going to sort of focus on ways to think about things.
#
So I've grown to like it and I've grown to enjoy it hugely.
#
I just spent a semester as a visiting associate professor at Princeton teaching Princeton
#
undergrads on Indian politics.
#
It's a totally different cultural context.
#
It has certainly helped my research in the sense that it has allowed me to ask questions
#
and demand answers that non-students will not have the guts to ask.
#
You know, one of the beauties of being a 17 or 18 year old.
#
And let me give you this example.
#
When I was at Harvard Law School, I attended a talk where Amartya Sen was speaking.
#
And after he finished doing the question answers, some undergrad got up and said, Professor
#
Sen, I don't think you understand the concept of supply and demand.
#
And you know what, when he finished, there was some giggling in the back of the audience,
#
but you know, Amartya Sen didn't giggle and he answered the question, right?
#
That's powerful because sometimes you ask foolish supply and demand questions, but sometimes
#
17, 18 year olds ask the nub of the questions, right?
#
And I think in the New Testament, if my memory serves, there's a line from the Cornetian
#
called to be a fool for the sake of Christ, right?
#
Say foolish things, say stupid things because out of those four, five, one will be a brilliant
#
And undergrads really exemplify that, you know, they will often ask, you know, weak,
#
you know, something about the BJP or something about Narsimha Rao that is the correct question
#
to ask, but everybody else is too afraid to ask it because it sounds simple, right?
#
So undergrads really push you on that.
#
So you know, the BJP book, for example, before I wrote it, I took a course called right wing
#
politics in India and right wing politics more generally, where I was looking at other
#
political parties also like AKP in Turkey, Rikud in Israel, Christian Democrats in Europe
#
who are also kind of center-right parties to kind of nestle the BJP story.
#
Very, very helpful, you know.
#
So I've, you know, the teaching has been something that is not something that I imagined
#
I would like, but I like it and it gives me a lot of joy and frankly, it helps my work.
#
And as a last thing, Amit, which is the researchers, right, and people of the mind like you, one
#
of the things we suffer a lot is loneliness because, you know, it's not in an odd way,
#
thinking is not a group activity.
#
It's a solitary pursuit.
#
And if you're sitting in some library or you're reading up, you know, when you're reading
#
a book in preparing for this, it's a lonely activity.
#
You know, now if you want to put a spin on it, you call it solitude.
#
So which is why for the world of research, the world of teaching is great because, you
#
know, you're as a researcher, you're selfish, you know, self-motivated as a teacher.
#
You have to give more than you take, right?
#
And if a student, you know, shows you to be foolish, I actually enjoy it.
#
It means that, you know, I've trained my student to be smarter than me, right?
#
Also keeps you grounded.
#
Amit, I remember that, you know, I had gone for an interview with Dr. Manmohan Singh
#
soon after he stepped down as prime minister for the Nasimara book.
#
And he was, you know, elegance personified, you know, he spoke to me, he sat on the same,
#
you know, sofa that I did, was reading, he saw me off, you know, he was in advanced years,
#
he saw me off outside, you know, outside his house to the car.
#
And then I went from there to Ashoka University, right?
#
And as it was the first or second day of class and as I was entering in the mess, there was
#
a bunch of students, you know, in a circle and they didn't know who I was.
#
So I overheard them and one of them says, you know, my teacher's name is Sitapati.
#
And the other kid shouted, oh, he should have been called Ram.
#
And then all of them laughed, right?
#
And it brought me down to earth immediately, right?
#
And for all the criticisms you have of cocky 17, 18, 19 year olds, they have the ability
#
to bring you to earth very quickly.
#
That's such a fantastic story about how you end up being called Ram and Ram Guha will
#
be wondering at this and thinking that is there some place where he would be Sitapati
#
Does being a tenure professor change your perception of time and how quickly you need
#
to do things and so on and so forth?
#
Because I would imagine if you're a salaried person writing a book on the side, it's one
#
If you are, you know, just a freelancer or a journalist writing a book on the side, it's
#
another kind of project.
#
If you're a professor, you know, you've got more time, like you mentioned in your job,
#
you get five months of the year when you can do whatever you want.
#
So how does that then play into the kind of books that you want to write or that you think
#
It's an enormous luxury, enormous, right?
#
Like, as I said, I have no illusions that academia are the smartest people on earth.
#
I certainly don't think academics are the most curious people on earth, right?
#
Like most, you know, a lot of people outside of academia, many of them listening to your
#
podcast are more curious than academics, maybe smarter than most academics.
#
It's just that they have a regular job and they want to earn and they want to, you know,
#
And these are all honorable things to do, right?
#
I'm deeply aware of that privilege, right?
#
Which is why I'm like, you know, if I, you know, if I'm not working on a book or an article,
#
I'm like, yeah, I got many, because I've got a structure, I've got time, I've got,
#
you know, for this kind of thing.
#
All power to those who hold regular jobs and who want to write, you know, there's, you
#
know, I read a book on Panipat written, amateur book on Panipat, I mean, not amateur book,
#
it's a very good book, but it's a historical book on Panipat written by a eye doctor who's
#
doing this on the side.
#
All power to him, you know.
#
I wish there were mechanisms in which people like that who are outside academia formally,
#
but who are brighter than most academics and more important, more curious and harder working
#
than most academics, who are able to engage with academia.
#
Academics can read the early drafts, give back feedback.
#
I hope that there's a mechanism in which the synergy happens, because I'm very, very
#
aware that I'm, I'm far luckier than they are.
#
And those, you know, and I don't use the word amateur in a negative way at all.
#
I would just mean that non-academic historians or non-academic writers, I'm deeply aware
#
of how passionate they must be because they are fighting the demons at home, the demons
#
at work and yet producing.
#
I mean, even Narasimha Rao finally finished his book in his old age.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break and then we'll get to the crux of the matter,
#
which is the life and times of Narasimha Rao.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene in the On Scene.
#
I'm chatting with Vinay Sitapati on his excellent book Half-Lion on B.V. Narasimha Rao.
#
One final meta question before we actually get to the book itself and to Narasimha Rao
#
itself, that out of all the possible subjects that you could have picked, why this specific
#
You've already spoken about how you wondered would this be interesting to people and so
#
on and so forth and I agreed with you that it's a crucial period of our history.
#
But why Narasimha Rao itself and what did you think at the first was a core question
#
behind the book because one of the core questions that you've articulated is understanding how
#
Narasimha Rao achieved so much despite having so little power.
#
But at the start of this, did you have a sense of how little power he actually had?
#
I actually didn't know much more about Narasimha Rao than what was there in the Wikipedia entry.
#
And in that sense, it was actually quite lucky because I didn't come in with baggage.
#
I didn't come in with having to prove that I want to give Narasimha Rao his space in
#
I didn't have any of that.
#
I have no particular interest in Narasimha Rao's legacy in any personal sense.
#
But as I told you right in the beginning of this conversation, my own family's fortunes
#
and lives have changed in the early 90s and I intuitively knew that the early 90s was
#
a period of change in India.
#
And while I was doing my PhD at Princeton, I had even organized or co-organized a conference
#
called the Political Consequences of Economic Growth saying that when you have economic
#
growth in the 90s jumpstart, what are the political consequences?
#
And we had a panel there saying what are the political predeterminants of economic growth?
#
So what are the kind of politics you need for economic growth?
#
So I was thinking a little bit at that time about look, what were the political conditions
#
and Narasimha Rao of course was prime minister in the early 90s when liberalization happened.
#
And then I read a book which transformed me which was a book by Ezra Vogel who's I think
#
a Yale historian on Deng Xiaoping and it was called Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation
#
And it was two biographies.
#
It was a biography of China changing in the 80s and it was a parallel biography of Deng
#
Xiaoping who was instrumental in that change.
#
And I finished reading that book and I said a book like this needs to be written about
#
India and it's about India changing in the 90s and the Deng Xiaoping trigger was this
#
man called Narasimha Rao who I didn't know much about.
#
But that's what piqued my interest because even then and maybe as a political scientist
#
I was like look change in India doesn't happen because of a blueprint or because of ideas
#
or because of a technocrat.
#
There also needs to be a political will.
#
How did that political story unfold?
#
And so that pushed me to Narasimha Rao.
#
I still didn't know much.
#
And then I did some background research, I read up the secondary literature on the debates
#
on foreign policy changing in the 90s, economic policy, welfare schemes and I said it's not
#
just that the first McDonald's came in the early 90s, a lot else changed in India.
#
And then I was lucky enough by talking to people, one of them introduced me to Narasimha
#
Rao's son Prabhakar Rao and I went all the way to Hyderabad to visit him.
#
And as I was going to visit him, I just thought you know I was going to Hyderabad, hometown
#
of Narasimha Rao, everybody would know who he is.
#
And I got into this cab from the airport and I was driving to Narasimha Rao's son's house
#
for the first time and I asked the cab driver have you heard of Narasimha Rao and the guy
#
thought for a second and said yeah he's the guy on whom the flyover is named.
#
And so nobody knew about him even in his hometown.
#
That was a catastrophe.
#
And so I met Prabhakar Rao and we got chatting and then I met him a couple of times, I met
#
somebody else, others in his family and then he told me look Vinay, I've spoken to other
#
members of my family, we've decided to trust you, until then he was still cagey.
#
And I went with him to his, in his office, I went to an attic of his office where there
#
were about 45 cartons and he said you can access it.
#
If there's anything sensitive, I trust that you'll run it through me, but otherwise you
#
And I told myself at that time itself that I'm so lucky to have to deal with an heir
#
who's not like breathing down my neck and not trying to, you know, censor everything
#
And then as I began to access the papers, I was mind blown.
#
I was like this has never happened to any politician in India.
#
You know, Narasimha Rao, we had government documents with file notings on the left.
#
There were Narasimha Rao's private diaries, even his books in various languages, Marathi,
#
Hindi, English, I opened it and I could see his notings, right.
#
And so you had, you know, his letters, right, Narasimha Rao was a fan of computers.
#
So on a dot matrix printer, he used to print out his diary, he used to write down his diary.
#
So for example, when Rajiv Gandhi denies him a ticket in April 91 to contest the Lok Sabha
#
elections and so he's forced to retire, he writes that this is one of the saddest days
#
So you have that level of intimacy, right, or another noting, the day after Rajiv has
#
been murdered by the LTT and his body has been brought to 10 Janpath and all the congressmen
#
are hovering around the body pretending to cry, but actually maneuvering to see who will
#
And Narasimha Rao as he is there, Pranam Mukherjee sides by Narasimha Rao and said, look, you
#
should be the heir, you should be the next person.
#
And Narasimha Rao writes in his diary, I kept quiet saying it shouldn't be me, it should
#
be ND Tiwari, knowing full well that ND Tiwari was unacceptable because I knew the kind of
#
person Pranam Mukherjee is.
#
Think about it, you're getting that level of detail.
#
So I'll be honest with you, Amit, the book success is primarily because I got my hands
#
on this incredible resource, which is the private archives of Narasimha Rao, I of course
#
did about a hundred interviews to supplement it, but it's really those private archives.
#
If I had blown this up, it would have been unforgivable because after being given this
#
kind of access, you know, it would have been unforgivable had it been a bad book.
#
That's such a fantastic story.
#
And you know, I love the way you write about his early years as well.
#
Like for example, early on in your book, you write quote, living on the edge of five linguistic
#
cultures, villagers here spoke Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and even Samaria.
#
And in this land of the Nizam, the language of power was Urdu, while the language of courtly
#
Narasimha Rao would go on to speak 10 languages.
#
These were the tongues he inherited at birth.
#
And you know, he taught himself Tamil as you mentioned at a later point in the book, because
#
he went to some felicitations of his in Tamil Nadu and couldn't understand what was being
#
So, you know, he learned three computer languages when he was in his sixties, you know, when
#
Rajiv Gandhi was saying that, you know, we need to enter the computer age or such like
#
our older politicians can't do it.
#
And he called up his son and said, send me a computer.
#
And before you know it, not just send me a computer, he's not doing Google search, he's
#
programming in three languages.
#
Yeah, cobalt, basic and then you could write code in Unix.
#
And here's sort of my question.
#
He's born in June 29th, 1921 in this village called Bangara.
#
And this is 26 years before India becomes independent, right?
#
This is, you know, to think that till the age of 26, his conception of India was not
#
what our conception of India is.
#
His conception of society was not what our conception kind of is.
#
Most of the people around him were semi literate.
#
You speak about at one point when he's growing up, his father realizes that this little boy
#
of mine already knows more than the village teacher.
#
So he has to be sent to another village where he is all alone at the age of seven, just
#
And in a sense, I can imagine that seven year old saying to himself, what you said to yourself
#
when you got his papers that I can't waste this opportunity and a seven year old must
#
be thinking the same thing.
#
So it's not as if you are figuring out thick desires and thin desires, you know, what does
#
The kid has an opportunity.
#
It is the only opportunity.
#
He's got to get the job done.
#
And that's kind of where he is.
#
And as a person writing about history, I'm being very careful not to use the word historian,
#
I will note as a person telling stories about the past, do you make that mental effort of
#
forgetting everything that we know now and just putting yourself in the shoes of that
#
little boy and tracing the journey that he is taking?
#
Yeah, I try to do that.
#
You know, it's hard, right?
#
Because I'm also keenly aware of the context.
#
And I think that's also important.
#
So to give you one example, Nassim was a bright kid, right, and that's his all him.
#
I mean, I don't want to sound rude here, but the rest of his family are no patch on him.
#
And as I mentioned there, it was a wealthy family.
#
They were revenue intermediaries for the Nizam, but it was not an educated family, right?
#
And part of that reason is structural, which you should know, which is that in Nizam's
#
Hyderabad state, most of the officials and bureaucrats were Muslim.
#
So for a Hindu like Nassim Araw, the family, there was no particular government service
#
at the end of education.
#
So why, you know, why take to education, right?
#
You need to know this, right?
#
But you also need to know that he is a bright man.
#
So there's both going together.
#
So you have to have the internal world of Nassim Araw.
#
He's a man who has a felicity for languages.
#
But you should also know that he comes from a part of India, which is kind of, you know,
#
northern Telangana, right, very, very close to the Maharashtra border, where within a
#
few hours, you could find people who spoke Kannada, who spoke Odia, who spoke Marathi
#
and of course, who spoke Telugu, right?
#
And that matters because when I went to his village Vangara, there were people there who
#
knew a smattering of Kannada, knew some Odia, who knew Marathi.
#
So as a biographer, I can't only look at the internal world of Nassim Araw, kind of the
#
triumph of the will, here is this bright man beating the odds because the odds are determined
#
And that is a larger theme that, you know, runs through this book, which is this tension
#
between structure and agency.
#
I got to focus on Nassim Araw, but I got to look at the cards handed to him.
#
And the cards handed to him on language were actually a good set of cards because he was
#
in the geographic absolute centre of India, very close to Nagpur, but still in Telangana,
#
in what is today's Telangana.
#
And so he had access to all these languages.
#
But you know what, he played those cards very well.
#
So I mentioned that between 77 and 1980, when the Moraji government is in power, the Congress
#
is out of power, Nassim Araw is general secretary in Delhi and has very little to do.
#
So you know what he does?
#
He goes to JNU and enrolls in a Spanish language class and learn Spanish, right?
#
And he drives his own car, parks his car in Jawaharlal Nehru University and learn Spanish,
#
Nobody else in his village does that.
#
And that's a good example of how agency and structure both matter in understanding Nassim
#
Does that make sense, Amit?
#
That makes a lot of sense.
#
And I'm also sort of like, I sometimes wonder that at one level, we are creatures of circumstance,
#
like we discussed earlier, you know, combination of your genes and the things that happen to
#
you and the life that you have.
#
And like you said, the structure and in many ways, you could say structure even determines
#
the agency to some extent.
#
But they're separate, you know, they're separate, like, as I said, right, that, you know, there
#
are lots of people who speak many languages, nobody spoke 10, you know, so, and I don't
#
want to see the Marxists reduce all possible agency to structure, right?
#
I don't want to do that, you know, whereas Hollywood reduces all structure to agency,
#
you know, I don't do that either.
#
So the question I was coming at is this, that one view is that we are creatures of circumstance
#
The other view is that there is nevertheless something essential about people that survives
#
Like when I look back on myself as a young person, on the one hand, I don't know how
#
anyone could have been friends with me when I was 20, because I was an absolute asshole,
#
And hopefully one has changed.
#
And I would think I've changed enough to almost be a different person.
#
But at the same time, there are some essential things that remain, like if you go on Facebook
#
and you look at your school friends, and you might notice that they're all pretty much
#
You know, they might be chubbier, they might look completely different, but the characteristics
#
are basically the same.
#
And in trying to get to the essential, in Narasimha Rao, I was struck by this paragraph
#
you wrote about that separation at seven, when you wrote, quote, the separation of seven-year-old
#
Rao from his family would haunt him for the rest of his life, shaken from the settled
#
rhythms that centuries of cultivation had given his family.
#
He was now on his own, visiting his parents only once every five months.
#
Education would propel Rao from village to town, to city, into politics and into power.
#
It would make him prime minister of India.
#
But it would also cut him off from clan and community.
#
It would make him remote, squirreled away among ideas and words from which he could
#
He would develop a distant relationship with his children, a beleaguered one with his elder
#
And about his marriage, married at 10.
#
And he resented that marriage.
#
That lasted 40 years, but he was at a distance from it.
#
Most of the time he was somewhere else.
#
He had other fulfilling relationships, as you point out, and everybody involved kind
#
of goes through the motions.
#
And that sense of him always being a perennial outsider, sort of disaffected, never having
#
close confidants or at least not a multiplicity of them, not having someone whom he could
#
think of as his clan or his community, perhaps.
#
That's a sense he gets.
#
This is a path he's on.
#
He's maneuvering his way through it.
#
And eventually history places him at this point in time and he does what he has to do.
#
So when you read his papers, that's one sense.
#
And am I correct in thinking that this seems essential to me, this para seems essential
#
Apart from that, what else do you sense about him?
#
We have spoken of his sort of almost fatalistic tendency to accept the cards given to him
#
and then do whatever is rational, whether it is in the wildness of not acting before
#
the 84 riots or whether it is in the enormous will that he did show in 91 when he took over
#
with the country in a mess and acted to kind of resolve it.
#
So if you had to, say, give an elevator speech description of Narasimha Rao, the person,
#
you know, to someone who doesn't know anything about him, a man from Mars, what would you
#
So I would say that the description you gave of an introvert, lonely introvert is a core
#
feature, but it's half the story.
#
The other half is that he's curious and action oriented.
#
So he has a bit of Hamlet, which is what you just described, and he has a bit of Don Quixote,
#
which is an actor, right?
#
So, you know, the sort of, I think it was Dostoyevsky, but I could be wrong, who said
#
that the two great Western fictional figures is Hamlet and Don Quixote, one who thinks
#
but doesn't act, the other who acts without thinking, and Narasimha Rao exemplified both.
#
And I think that's important because what you just described in the paragraph you just
#
read gives, gives rise to an introvert who loves books, who's a theoretician.
#
And that is a well-known feature of Narasimha Rao, right?
#
Even a negative feature, the joke about him is analysis until paralysis, that he is to
#
pout without spouting, right?
#
And that gives rise to kind of the stereotype of a distant intellectual who is like Nero,
#
you know, when the Rome is burning.
#
And that's absolutely not true.
#
The other half is he was curious, he was action oriented, you know, I spent some time talking
#
about how he brings about agricultural reforms in his own village, how he makes modification
#
to the cotton plant to push people from growing rice.
#
You get less money from rice into growing cotton, he goes to Gujarat, he gets the cotton
#
And as Prime Minister of India, I give so many examples of how he's rolling his sleeves
#
and is at the center of economic reforms.
#
He's not just a theoretician in the background.
#
His genius was that to pretend to be a theoretician so that he did not get the blame for liberalization,
#
But the heart of the book is to show you the other end of the, or the reverse of the para
#
that you quoted that here was an action oriented curious guy who knew how to get the job done,
#
But the duality of Narsimha Rao, which is why the title of the book is Half Lion, is
#
that he was half a thinker, but he was half a doer.
#
And at his best, this synergy between an intellectual with deep analytical skills and a man who
#
understood every inch of the state and how to bring about transformation in India is
#
a central feature of the man.
#
So he had a bit the best of Don Quixote and the best of Hamlet, right?
#
I would say that duality at its best gives rise to Narsimha Rao.
#
And that is really the central feature of this book.
#
If he was only a thinker, he would not have been able to transform India.
#
And if he was a doer, he would know what to transform and how to go about it.
#
This is such a fascinating way to think about the man.
#
And, you know, just thinking of your book, for example, his period as chief minister,
#
I think he was more Don Quixote than Hamlet acting without sort of thinking and we'll
#
Now here's my other question and a key way in which Narsimha Rao is different from so
#
many people before and after him in Indian politics.
#
You know, I'd once written a column on Narendra Modi based on something a friend of his told
#
This person was friendly with him in the auties.
#
He worked with him in Gujarat and she described how she was once at his home and it was a
#
gathering of personal friends and people he knew personally.
#
And Mr. Modi started telling a story about how his mother had been very ill once and
#
he went to switch on the fan and he switched it on and the fan didn't turn on because there
#
And as he said, narrated the story, he started crying.
#
And my friend's point in telling me the story about Modi was that he is an experiential
#
prime minister, what I would call an Aakho Dheki prime minister, an Aakho Dheki politician.
#
So when he comes to power in Gujarat as chief minister, what are his priorities?
#
It's electricity because he's experienced it himself.
#
It's roads because he's walked on them, he's experienced it himself.
#
But his great failing as a prime minister is that his knowledge is limited to that.
#
He is not expanding his knowledge and there are some concepts which are beyond experience,
#
spontaneous order, positive sum game, so on and so forth.
#
And that becomes his failing because then he cannot possibly get a handle on the economy
#
or on the larger currents in society and so on.
#
And the point of my column was read more because we form pictures of the world by joining dots.
#
Our experience only gives us so many dots.
#
I don't blame Modi for not being a reader as a kid because circumstances, humble background,
#
But then what you should do is try to cultivate a reading habit and at least surround yourself
#
with experts, people who know and you know, not try to imagine that your folksy instincts
#
will be right in every particular.
#
And it seems that Narsimha Rao is not just the opposite of this, but that is in fact
#
an outlier among politicians in the sense that one of the threads that struck me through
#
your book is how this guy is constantly reading, reading, reading, learning, learning, learning.
#
Even that example in his 60s, he gets a computer, he doesn't learn how to surf Google.
#
I mean, there wasn't Google then.
#
He learns three computer languages.
#
You've described in another incident that he goes to his village and there is some fancy
#
machine which isn't working and he actually opens it up himself, figures out that the
#
steel is dry and that might be one reason the motor is not rotating and he has it lubricated
#
with kerosene and the next day it works.
#
So and again, a man of action here and this is really a combination in a sense of the
#
introspective Hamlet thinking about stuff and Don Quixote actually acting on it.
#
This I find remarkable because I, you know, I can't think of other figures in Indian society.
#
Definitely Nehru, obviously a very well-read man and also a man of action, but also a man
#
closed in certain ways to reconsidering his priors, whereas Narsimha Rao till the end
#
of his life was always reconsidering his priors, most notably for liberalization because he
#
was a socialist until then.
#
So tell me about this sort of aspect of the man and how this played into what his trajectory
#
was that like at one level it is a bunch of accidents which take him to the top.
#
At another level, it is the fact that he wasn't tribal and therefore he was always a convenient
#
compromise candidate, whether when he became chief minister or prime minister or whatever.
#
But was this urge also a big factor and does it not make doubly tragic that the elites
#
of Delhi, you know, look down on him almost as a country bumpkin kind of person.
#
You know, there's a story where Rajiv Gandhi is sitting with a friend and Narsimha Rao,
#
you know, just puts his foot on his lap and he's scratching his foot, which is like a
#
His foot as in puts Narsimha Rao's foot.
#
Yeah, he puts his own foot on his lap and he's scratching it as in fact I'm practically
#
doing my foot is on my lap as we speak right now on my green soul chair and Rajiv Gandhi's
#
friend whispers in his ear and then with great disgust, you know, grabs a foot and puts it
#
And you know, they're treating him like a country bumpkin, but they are the well-educated
#
English speaking, sophisticated country bumpkins and he's a man of learning and knowledge.
#
You know, that story is Rajiv Gandhi is sitting opposite Narsimha Rao and you know, in the
#
villages sometimes you find somebody, people sitting cross legged or with the foot on your
#
other thigh and you're massaging your foot while talking, you know, in sort of urban
#
settings you don't do that, but Narsimha Rao was doing that and Rajiv Gandhi's friend whispers
#
into Rajiv Gandhi and then, you know, puts Narsimha Rao's foot down, which is quite humiliating,
#
But it brings to a different sort of insecurity that Narsimha Rao had, which is that he was
#
a man of enormous learning, right, yet it was a learning unmediated by the West.
#
So he, you know, I think English was the fifth language he learnt.
#
So he was already a cosmopolitan, right.
#
He goes to, if my memory serves, he goes to the, abroad to the US for the first time only
#
in 1952, right, to visit his daughter Saraswati who's having her first child.
#
He goes to New York and that's a transformative experience, but you know, that's the first
#
He was an accomplished translator from Marathi to Telugu, from Hindi to Telugu.
#
He could campaign, you know, like in India we know of people campaigning in two different
#
constituencies, but when was the last time you heard of people campaigning simultaneously
#
in Marathi and in Telugu, right, when he was campaigning in Hanamkonda because he contested
#
two seats, Hanamkonda and Ramtek, Ramtek is near Nagpur in Maharashtra.
#
He's contesting in two languages and then he contests later on in Behrampur in Odisha
#
and campaigns in Odia, right.
#
So here was a man under whom, you know, to be honest with you, Rajiv Gandhi is an intellectual
#
I mean, no disrespect to Rajiv Gandhi, but where and where are we talking about?
#
And yet look at the stereotypes we build for ourselves that somebody who goes to Cambridge
#
University and somebody who may have gone, you know, to an elite school, dune school
#
or whatever is, I'm not sure Rajiv Vande, I think he did.
#
I think he went to dune school.
#
He went to dune school, right.
#
He was considered to be, you know, modern and intellectual cosmopolitan and Narsimha
#
Rao was seen as a country bumpkin.
#
As Natwar Singh told me and I quoted in the book, Natwar Singh was former foreign minister
#
Unlike Nehru, Narsimha Rao did not have to discover India.
#
He had a deep sense of the local indigenous culture of India and cultures of India.
#
You know, his Urdu was so good that when the president of Pakistan, Farooq Laghari comes
#
to Delhi, Narsimha Rao talks to him and his Urdu is better than Farooq Laghari's Urdu,
#
As a student, his Persian was excellent, right.
#
So this is a man who was an unusual cosmopolitan.
#
But Amit, I have to emphasize is that a lot of people see this aspect to Narsimha Rao,
#
to the exclusion of his action oriented side, right.
#
They see this as the hamlet side of Narsimha Rao, not the Don Quixote side.
#
Narsimha Rao had held every single position in India, you know, from a local position
#
to state minister, chief minister, union minister before he became prime minister.
#
He had a ton of conventional experience in that sense when Rajiv Gandhi died.
#
He was a conventional candidate because he was the most experienced candidate in government.
#
You know, there was talk of him as you mentioned earlier in this episode of him becoming president
#
of India in I think 1982 and again 1987.
#
So he was almost up there, right.
#
And so in some sense, he was an uncommon intellect.
#
He had uncommon experience and a man of action.
#
That combination is very, very, very hard to find, you know.
#
And I think India was, you know, this is one of the central points of the book that India
#
was very lucky to have a man with this kind of intellect, this kind of experience and
#
this kind of action oriented self when India had this kind of crisis in 1991.
#
So India should thank its stars that the confluence of events that took place in 1991 was luckily
#
Just imagine in a similar situation, N. D. Tiwari, who is not a man of action, who is
#
not particularly learned and who has experience.
#
So I give him that, right.
#
He has been chief minister of several times, he has been chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
#
Then he became chief minister of Uttarakhand.
#
But he lacks the other two.
#
He is not a man of action and he certainly is not an intellectual.
#
But he was enormously virile.
#
Apparently he was bonking people well into his 80s, right?
#
There was a video, I think he was Andhra Pradesh governor and there was a video.
#
He had to step down as a consequence.
#
And he could have bonked India as well if he was prime minister.
#
Have I ever used a word like this on my show?
#
So to kind of continue and what also struck me is that it's almost as if the rest of
#
his life in different ways was preparation for the role that he played in 91.
#
Like you know the Don Quixote side of him in 1972 when he becomes chief minister of
#
AP would have been a complete disaster in 92.
#
I was you know looking at just immediately post-independency alliance against the Nizam
#
and you write about it quote, the ensuing struggle against the Nizam brought together
#
the unlikeliest of allies.
#
The Indian National Congress wanted to dethrone him and integrate Hyderabad state into secular
#
The Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj disliked the Islamic ruler and in Telangana region
#
an armed insurrection against landlords had morphed into a communist rebellion.
#
These three elements gave rise to an anti-Nizam movement that was secular, religious and radical
#
all at once, stop quote.
#
And so there is this cauldron where there are all these different forces coming together
#
and Narasimha Rao is a young man, he's in his late 20s at this point, kind of watching
#
He has you know one mentor in Ramanandar Tirtha who is more of a radical kind of leader.
#
Another leader is sort of Burgulda Ramakrishna Rao as you describe much more moderate.
#
He becomes the first chief minister of Hyderabad state.
#
Who becomes the first chief minister and much more moderate and all that.
#
And this is the point you write about how Narasimha Rao decides not to choose sides.
#
Like his daughter Eswani Devi described him as an Ajaat Shatru, someone with no enemies.
#
And to me this also seems like a really fundamental quality in what he achieved in 1991 onwards.
#
Because you know just building that consensus, bringing people together, making it happen,
#
Tell me a little bit about those early years.
#
What kind of politician was he?
#
Was he an ambitious politician?
#
Did he want to rise to the top?
#
What's your sense of those sort of years?
#
Like your first chapter is, this chapter is titled Andhra Socialist 1921-71, 50 years,
#
What's happening as he gets from here to there?
#
One is that to understand what Narasimha Rao is up to in this period, you know, 51-71,
#
you have to understand the structure of the Congress party.
#
The Congress party is India at that time.
#
Some of your younger listeners may find that hard to believe when they see today's Congress
#
party, but the Congress was India.
#
And the Congress structure was built around different factions, right?
#
So there was no opposition party of any worth.
#
So the opposition parties of India were within the Congress.
#
So there was a left wing, there was a right wing, there was a Dalit wing, there was a
#
Brahmin wing, there was a pro-landlord wing, there was a pro-tenant wing, there was a pro-farmer
#
wing, there was a pro-consumer wing.
#
That's the nature of Congress party.
#
And at another level, there was a Burghul Ramakrishna Rao wing, there was a Ramanand
#
In other words, there were factions which are based on personalities as much as ideology,
#
something that you see in India even today.
#
So you and I, Amit, are in Maharashtra.
#
And if you look at the Congress today in Maharashtra, well, it may be very small, but even so there's
#
a Prithviraj Chavan wing, there's Ashok Chavan wing, etc., etc.
#
That's just a structure of the Congress, right?
#
And when all these different wings and faction leaders are fighting about who should become
#
chief minister, no one of them can become chief minister because the others threaten
#
And what you end up with is a consensus candidate, right?
#
That's what you end up with.
#
Naseem Arrao's genius was he was always a consensus candidate because he never had a
#
He never sought to cultivate people.
#
He never sought to build a power base.
#
Now, this might sound foolish, it may say, you know, in politics, you should have Chamchas,
#
you should have cronies.
#
Naseem Arrao lacked this.
#
That's why he was seen as safe by everybody around him.
#
That's why in 1971, he becomes chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.
#
And I must emphasize here for those of you who haven't read the book Half-Lion, that
#
that period, 1971 to 73 is very important in understanding Naseem Arrao because that's
#
when he is Don Quixote, you know, Indira Gandhi selects him because she wants to push
#
for a left-wing reform, which is land reform in Andhra Pradesh.
#
She wants to move, land has already moved from the Zamindars to the revenue intermediaries,
#
the Deshmukhs or the Dhoras, who are the spine of the Congress party.
#
These are the Reddies, the Brahmins, the Khammas and Indira Gandhi wants to move the next level
#
to give land to the tiller and to the landless Dalits.
#
And that's what Naseem Arrao decides to do.
#
He gives provocative speeches.
#
This antagonizes landlords.
#
This antagonizes other castes such as Khammas and Reddies.
#
They protest against him.
#
Naseem Arrao, who feels he's in an honorable cause, he's a rebel, he's a revolutionary,
#
he you know, goes all out, he goes on the forefront.
#
The protests he gets are so strong, Naseem Arrao has to step down.
#
Indira Gandhi asks him to step down and he feels his career is over.
#
The big lesson he learns from this is that if you want to bring about reform, you have
#
to do it through the back door.
#
You have to do it subtly, otherwise the enemies to reform will gang up against you and you
#
will have you will be destroyed, you'll have to step down.
#
It's the single biggest learning he takes as Prime Minister.
#
There's no doubt in his mind that India has to change on economics, on welfare schemes,
#
on foreign policy, but he has to do it in a way that doesn't antagonize his enemies,
#
that doesn't antagonize those who are upholding the older order.
#
For that you need subterfuge, you need to pretend to not do anything while doing something.
#
That is Naseem Arrao's great genius and he learns that by being a failure as Chief Minister.
#
Now look, many Chief Ministers in India fail, many politicians fail.
#
What makes Naseem Arrao unique is he converts his own failure into a learning experience
#
and he realizes what not to do and when he comes back to power, he's a chastened man,
#
which means you must reform, you must change, India has to change, but you have to do it
#
in a way in which you pretend to continuity.
#
And that is the genius of Naseem Arrao.
#
The other lesson in this and I wonder if you would say that is an early example of the
#
Congress's centralizing impulses in that concept of the nominated Chief Minister.
#
That basically Indira Gandhi took over power at the center, started centralizing power
#
and decided that she wanted a Chief Minister who would do her bidding, not necessarily
#
someone who has roots and who has independent power of her own.
#
And in a sense, she's kind of trying to gather weak men who cannot threaten her around herself.
#
And Naseem Arrao being an early version of this.
#
And this then leads to the dilemma that while he is politically weak, the reason he is there
#
is he doesn't have backing of his own, he's not a, you know, mass leader in that sense
#
or he always won the elections he contested, but except the very first one, but he's not
#
a mass leader in that sense and he's politically weak, but he's been put in a position of strength,
#
but he can't really do much in that position of strength as he, as he finds out when he's
#
in his Don Quixote phase.
#
And is there something broader also happening here that what happened to him in the microcosm
#
is also happening at a larger level where Indira Gandhi by strengthening herself actually
#
I mean, I would look upon that period, which is 1967, 68, 69, 72, all the way to 71 as
#
I would say the worst four years in India's first Republic, because by de-institutionalizing
#
the Congress, by doing exactly what you said, Indira Gandhi sets the tone for other political
#
So all the regional parties, caste-based parties that are growing in India post-1967, they
#
are looking at the Indira Gandhi model of the Congress, not the Nehru model of the Congress.
#
And even today, if you look at the state we are in, Shiv Sena is completely de-institutionalized.
#
The father headed the Shiv Sena, now the son heads it and is chief minister and soon the
#
grandson will head it, Aditya Thackeray would head it.
#
And in doing so, older leaders, leaders who want to rise will go, will be furious.
#
The same de-institutionalized story you are seeing in the DMK to some extent.
#
The father has given way to Stalin and a lot of the regional bosses are like, when will
#
So the tragedy that you mentioned that is going on during this period, 1967-71, is not
#
just something Indira Gandhi inflicts on the Congress, it's something that by mimicking,
#
all other political parties bar the communists and the BJP are mimicking, are taking from
#
And I think that's a serious tragedy and I think one of the big problems in Indian politics
#
is how de-institutionalized and hollowed out parties have become in India.
#
And I worry that that period set the template for it.
#
And did that then also make feudalism inevitable?
#
For example, I was telling you just before this that I read this delightful sort of essay
#
on Leela Naidu by one of her friends, where Leela Naidu, he mentions at one point that
#
when she grew older, she would constantly share gossip with him.
#
And one of the pieces of gossip that she shared is that she had heard that Indira Gandhi's
#
daughters-in-law kept the fridge locked so that the servants could not access the food
#
because they were worried the servants would steal the food.
#
So they didn't care if the food went to waste, but they kept the fridge locked because they
#
And that feels like what the Gandhis have actually done to the Congress party today.
#
Of course, when I mentioned this before the recording, you gave the counterpoint to that,
#
that in 2009, one would not have said this, but that is kind of where we are.
#
But then does that centralizing impulse inevitably mean that there will be feudalism?
#
Because if there aren't alternative leaders around a leader to challenge them, then the
#
family or the people in the greatest proximity to power will eventually make sure they hold
#
the power and their popular leaders simply therefore aren't allowed to emerge in any
#
I think it's, yeah, I completely agree with you and it goes one step further, which is
#
over time, family control of political parties become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
#
Which is that the family says that, look, unless we have a family, the second rung leaders
#
are so corrupt and so self-serving that they will split the party and destroy the party.
#
That unfortunately also happens to be true.
#
So today if you say that Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi should leave
#
the party, I don't quite trust the others in the political party, right?
#
But that is a consequence of now several decades of hauling out that began with Indira Gandhi.
#
Indira Gandhi is right to say that eventually there was nobody but Indira Gandhi who could
#
hold the party together, but that's a process that she started.
#
And so, Sonia Gandhi today is in this conundrum, right?
#
Which is that it is a feudal party in the sense that, or let's say it's a family-based
#
The alternative to a family-based party might even be worse.
#
It may not be a democratic party, right?
#
The instincts of the second tier Congress leaders that we see today are not particularly
#
So you are choosing between two suboptimal or two worse outcomes.
#
In one outcome you have the Nehru Gandhis in power, in the other outcome you don't have
#
them in power and things are even worse in the Congress, right?
#
So I do feel that that period is a terrible period in India and it could have gone differently.
#
I mean frankly Indira Gandhi had she not done this, maybe in the 1971 elections the Congress
#
would have lost, but you know they lost six years later in 1977.
#
All that meant was Indira Gandhi six years earlier would have been in opposition, she
#
would have come back to power, but she wouldn't have destroyed the party for just three, four
#
And is it inevitable in just the structure of parties and the nature of power, I mean
#
the structure of parties in India, but the nature of power is universal and that power
#
So is it then necessary that even a party like the BJP will eventually go down that
#
Like at one point you could have said that institutionally it's pretty decentralized,
#
you've got local leaders, you've got shit happening.
#
Recently one hears about how Modi and Shah have centralised a lot of the power and you
#
have perhaps one rival power source coming up in Adityanath.
#
As someone who studied the BJP really closely, do you feel that there is a move in that direction
#
or are there safeguards within the party which will not allow it to happen and if so what
#
are those safeguards that were not there in the Congress?
#
So actually I'll push back a little bit, I don't think it's inevitable.
#
I don't think what Indira Gandhi did in the late 60s, early 70s was inevitable.
#
I think power corrupts but that doesn't follow that the carder is destroyed and one individual
#
I'll give you the DMK example that even though Stalin is in power they still have somewhat
#
The communists of course they don't have power but they still have somewhat of a carder.
#
The BJP definitely has a strong carder and it remains so and the RSS plays a big role
#
in keeping that happening.
#
I would actually say the following that given that Modi is so much more popular than his
#
party, it is surprising that in the BJP both Amit Shah and Modi follow the formal protocols
#
of the party even though they don't have to and I would say that after Modi and after
#
Amit Shah the BJP's health will be immeasurably better than it was when they took the party.
#
So I'm actually going to stick my neck out and say that both Amit Shah and Modi are institutional
#
builders it is the reality in India today that Modi is the number 1 leader in the BJP
#
and the number 2 leader is actually number 10 because Modi is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
#
9 and the next leader you can call it Adityanath, Amit Shah, whoever is actually the 10th most
#
popular leader in the BJP and that even though Modi is a centralizer his instincts he has
#
not destroyed the party.
#
The party still has autonomous centers, the RSS is still autonomous, the reason they go
#
behind him is actually a pretty simple reason he wins elections.
#
If he stops winning elections people in the BJP will complain.
#
So I'll actually push back on that just to tell you that there is an alternate model
#
that the Congress could have followed which is but it would have been a party would then
#
would have had to focus on an ideological core and would have had to articulate an ideological
#
not just a catch-all party but a certain clear ideology.
#
In the 1960s that ideology sometimes wins you sometimes loses the BJP is at the same
#
ideology for 100 years and they have won elections they have lost elections the Congress's tragedy
#
and Indra's tragedy was she could not conceive of an India without the Congress and she was
#
willing to do what it takes to just give the Congress a little more power for a little
#
more years and that came at the cost of the destruction of the party.
#
So I'm going to push back and look many people disagree with me on this saying that look
#
in India the de-institutionalization of a party is the norm is inevitable and that power
#
corrupts right and an individual in power will always try to you know make it a mom
#
and pop show I don't think it was inevitable that's certainly not the party that Nehru
#
ran there was no reason that that would be the party that Indira Gandhi ran.
#
I think you know as a former poker player I can come at it from I can cite the law of
#
truly large numbers and the law of truly large numbers basically is that given enough iterations
#
everything is inevitable the most unlikely event is inevitable and here I would say given
#
enough iterations power will corrupt even if it doesn't corrupt a particular set of
#
people on top because but what you are saying is that within the BJP there are institutional
#
How should the sentence power corrupts mean that a party becomes personality centric that
#
doesn't follow because frankly carders expand the power of the party expand like Modi likes
#
having a committed carder because he wins elections if he destroys the carder he may
#
Yeah yeah and I think what you're saying is that the BJP has enough institutional safeguards
#
such as a very presence of the RSS behind it that makes sure that that personality cult
#
cannot form even if power was to corrupt.
#
Also I don't you know let me stick my neck out a second time I don't think Modi believes
#
in his personality cult I think Modi fully recognizes that you need a party you need
#
social media you need money you know it's not that you know the old story where you
#
know Indira Gandhi would you know put a you know the joke was if Indira Gandhi even puts
#
a lamp post as a candidate the lamp post will win.
#
Modi well realizes that's not the case.
#
Yeah but my point is that it's not about Modi forget Modi tomorrow it could be Adityanath
#
the day after it could be Yati it could be anybody else and inevitably if you have a
#
large enough sample size there will be someone corrupted enough to try to centralize power
#
and your point is that's not possible within the BJP because there are enough safeguards
#
which they want in the Congress is that correct.
#
Yeah and you know they may centralize power but it may not be in the cost of having a
#
coherent carder what Indira does is you know destroys any you can still have ultimate power
#
with the prime minister but give chief ministers with some like today you know the chief ministers
#
of the BJP whether Shivraj Singh Chauhan you name it right Adityanath are not puppets of
#
Modi I don't think that's the right sentence right you in fact if anything Shivraj Singh
#
Chauhan was a competitor of Modi right for prime ministership yet he's prime he's chief
#
minister this would be unthinkable in the Congress party and the reason I'm sort of
#
jostling with you on this Amit is not just to create a rare point of disagreement between
#
us because I think that's important too I love the disagreement people think I don't
#
disagree because we are so polite on the show but so they don't know you know disagreement
#
for them is Twitter screaming no no no but you know I because we seem to agree on a lot
#
I want to at least have one or two differences but I want to emphasize here as a political
#
scientist with all my heart that the tragedy of the Congress especially the tragedy of
#
the Congress party organization was not inevitable and it was a series of choices that began
#
with Indira Gandhi and then became a self-fulfilling prophecy because she handed out down to her
#
you know to Rajiv Gandhi she handed down a such a corrupt party that Rajiv said I have
#
to further centralize otherwise am I going to give these jokers decentralized power but
#
that was not inevitable it was something that Indira Gandhi created yeah I mean that's an
#
open question I guess we are actually talking past each other because I'm not even talking
#
about the current BJP I'm just saying in the larger scheme of things you know given enough
#
leaders somebody or the other is going to try the same thing that Indira tried in the
#
BJP as well but maybe not in the maybe the question is moot because the sample size you
#
need for that is too large let's get back to Narsimha Rao and you know you speak about
#
how that period as chief minister ended disastrously even though he was well intentioned he was
#
trying to do things like reduce land holdings to such an extent that his own land holdings
#
would be decimated right but he's and despite opposition within you know half the cabinet
#
because they are of course you know of their landlords so you know and he did that and
#
you write at one point and this is a lovely sentence quote Narsimha Rao the chief minister
#
was pouring kerosene all over himself all that was needed was a matchstick stop quote
#
and so okay eventually the chief ministership is set on fire he sacked game is over now
#
he's in exile for a couple of years where he's you know not in a political position
#
anymore how did that exile change him that's an important question Amit because and just
#
take a step back to a for a second most politicians don't know what to do with exiles because
#
they are 24 7 politicians right exile means that you've lost an election you've stepped
#
on as chief minister all the hundreds of people waiting to meet you have disappeared there's
#
nobody willing to meet you if you don't have hobbies what else do you do right Narsimha
#
Rao was very good at exile because he had hobbies you know he could even paint he could
#
you know he could read books right he could learn languages you know he could you know
#
when the first exile between 1973 and 75 74 he begins to write the book that would eventually
#
become the insider right so he knew he had things to occupy himself during exile this
#
is very rare for politicians which is why politicians when they when they are in exile
#
and all politicians will be in exile at some point or other make foolish mistakes like
#
leaving the party making statements making compromises to get back to power to get something
#
to get a Rajasabha ticket Narsimha Rao didn't have to do that and I think that's what made
#
him unique the other person by the way who had this is Atal Bihari Vajpayee who is a
#
man with a lot of interest poetry he loved the good life he had like Narsimha Rao he
#
had a philosophical attitude to life so when he was not in power right he had things to
#
occupy himself when he was sidelined in my first book I point out that from roughly 1985
#
all the way to 1995 for 10 years he had been exiled from his party functionally but you
#
know he knew things to occupy himself he didn't do anything foolish as leaving the party splitting
#
the party etc etc so Narsimha Rao was both used to exile and B did not do anything foolish
#
during exile which meant that when the stars realigned Indira Gandhi got him back as general
#
secretary right again in 1991 a few months before the elections when Rajiv Gandhi basically
#
kicked him out of politics Narsimha Rao said fine I am going to use this exile I am going
#
to become a monk in the Kottralam monastery and I am going to become a Hindu monk I am
#
going to close my bank accounts right somebody else could have said who does Rajiv Gandhi
#
think he is put a press conference etc etc and you know what if he had done that and
#
Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated the congress won't have gone to him to become prime minister
#
they went to him to become prime minister because he accepted his exile with grace and
#
I want to give you the contrary picture of ND Tiwari also who was in his last legs in
#
the 1991 elections and Rajiv had told him don't contest the Lok Sabha elections but
#
ND Tiwari was worried that his chance to become chief minister in 1991 was ending in UP and
#
as you know as your readers know the Samadwadi party etc comes to power the congress has
#
been finished since then has never come back in UP so ND Tiwari knew this so he disobeyed
#
an order of Rajiv Gandhi and stood for Lok Sabha elections in UP and lost and that's
#
one of the main reasons why he could not become prime minister when Rajiv died because he
#
had disobeyed an order of Rajiv Gandhi right so this is an example of Narsimha Rao who
#
doesn't make foolish decisions during his exile I'll give you a third example Amit which
#
is in 1977 to 1980 another period of exile for Narsimha Rao as all of you know that's
#
when the Janata government is in power Indira Gandhi is cases have been filed against Indira
#
Gandhi many of Indira Gandhi's close supporters like YB Chavan leave the congress during this
#
period Narsimha Rao doesn't leave the congress what does he do he goes to JNU to learn Spanish
#
he doesn't make a foolish mistake right he bides his time so in 1980 when Indira Gandhi
#
comes back to power in Narsimha Rao is one of the few people to have remained loyal to
#
Indira Gandhi during the three years in which she had been hounded by everybody else so
#
how does Indira Gandhi reward him she makes him foreign minister of India which is one
#
of the top four ministries in the union cabinet tells you that Narsimha Rao's big talent was
#
that he knew how to occupy himself during exile and he did not make foolish short-term
#
decisions to come back to power during exile he knew that look he had a philosophical turn
#
what goes down comes up you know and that's exactly what happens to him I know that's
#
a long answer to your question but does that make sense makes a lot of sense and long answers
#
are the best answers because they have the best chance of carrying complexity and at
#
this time like you said earlier he also made an American trip he visited his daughter and
#
so on and so forth and this time being 1973 74 73 74 73 74 so he is this a significant
#
trip is this something that we look at as changing his outlook in any way in the sense
#
that he was a classic socialist all the time before that you know even when he was a modernizer
#
review as you pointed out in the 60s it was a modernizer from a point of view of the state
#
doing modernizing things and not you know liberalizing and enabling people and markets
#
to do what they do so did this sort of and he had a love for technology you point out
#
how on another trip he brought back a Texas calculator for his son and all of that he
#
was into that so you know he's in India all his life he goes to the US he sees how life
#
there is so much better and all that does that you know change his outlook you also
#
mention at one point that he realizes when he's spending time in his village with villagers
#
that the land reforms alone haven't changed anything that they are still poor and that
#
therefore the handouts don't solve the problem you also need to connect them to markets where
#
they can flourish through voluntary trade with others and in some cases he manages to
#
do that where he moves them from rice which is an unprofitable crop to other cash crops
#
and you know they enter markets and start making money so is there some kind of discernible
#
metamorphosis happening in ideological terms because initially why he was socialist in
#
his 60s what else could you be back then you know I can't it's easy to sit here in 2022
#
and talk about economic freedom and this and that at that point in time he there was no
#
exposure to those ideas there wasn't widespread understanding of the failures of socialism
#
as we have today so that's completely understandable but over time do we see sort of a gradual
#
shift and also in general through reading his papers writing this biography what comment
#
would you have on his openness to new ideas which is also a remarkably important quality
#
a quality which for example Nehru didn't have right much to our nation's detriment you know
#
and no politician I mean I can't think of any politicians who really have as much of
#
that as Narasimha Rao clearly did so what's your sense of his intellectual journey so
#
I think to answer the first part of your question that trip he makes in 73, 74 to the US is
#
transformative right you know he travels quite a bit in the I mean in within New York he's
#
traveling he's you know he buys calculators from Texas Instruments he goes to Wisconsin
#
and he meets you know this famous Telugu scholar Velcheru Narayan Rao and in you know Madison
#
Wisconsin he you know he's invited for dinner and he finds the best Telugu food and he's
#
saying you know all these ingredients you're getting here in the Midwest I can't even get
#
in North India you know so he sees the power of American capitalism and he sees the dynamism
#
and entrepreneurship in America quite clearly right and the next time he's visiting US he's
#
now an expert on the US so his eldest daughter who's accompanying him who I think is semi
#
literate she sees a washing machine she doesn't use know how to use it Narasimha I'll teach
#
you how to use the washing machine he's now the expert he's been there you know a second
#
time so he definitely is very excited like a child about the you know entrepreneurship
#
technological improvement in the US that directly manifests itself when he's foreign minister
#
so in 1982 you know onwards when he's foreign minister you also see India moving away from
#
the Soviet Union towards the US right that doesn't manifest itself in his economic policies
#
so Narasimha Rao one of the things I realized was that on economics he was a cipher until
#
1991 it was the you know he had held so many positions from Hindu from Hindu Endowment
#
Board you know industry defense foreign policy had held all this he had never held economics
#
or sorry he had not held industry either so he never held finance economics he never held
#
these positions there's nothing in his archives that showed that the either the US trip or
#
his in the 80s his economic thinking had changed you know he didn't have much to think about
#
it whatever little he thought about it was still protectionist it was really 1991 that
#
transformed him and he realized the crisis he realized that we had to change and I think
#
it's amazing that he changes on he just flips on a dime at that point right and I was actually
#
looking in the 70s for this aha moment where he realizes the importance of liberalization
#
and the importance of capitalism I just couldn't find it you know there's a very famous story
#
possibly apocryphal of Gorbachev right traveling in the United States and I think his car breaks
#
down somewhere it's an apocryphal story I haven't been able to find the footnote and
#
you know there's a Walmart nearby he goes there to a Walmart right in rural America
#
and he's amazed at the range of things that Walmart carries and suddenly he has a eureka
#
moment that he right as the head of Soviet Union as a Soviet elite has less products
#
he can buy in Moscow than a rural American farmer who goes to Walmart in rural America
#
and that's when he has this aha moment about the power of capitalism and actually giving
#
consumers choice so I had the story in the back of my mind and I kept looking to see
#
whether there was this aha moment when Nasimarao goes to US or after and I couldn't find it
#
I was unhappy I couldn't find it but you know I wanted to be or I had too much of a commitment
#
to my reader to manufacture it and the answer has to be Amit that on economics he did not
#
have a change until 1991 on other things especially foreign policy the ardent socialist had softened
#
his position but not on economics yeah and as you pointed out as for as foreign minister
#
he would also have been watching Deng do what he did in China and you would have kind of
#
seen those movements and you know what's going on there so you know Pradham Mukherjee once
#
mentioned as you must have he did because I give a quote there also where he's amazed
#
at what Deng is doing transforming the economy transforming China but he notices something
#
others don't which is Deng is transforming China while pretending to be a Maoist like
#
Deng is making China capitalist while pretending to be a communist and I have a quote here
#
saying that you know where Nasimarao says that Deng Joping reminds him of one of those
#
Sanskrit shlokas or Sanskrit quotations which the same sentence can be read one way or read
#
the other way right and I mentioned here also that one of Nasimarao's favorite Telugu poems
#
was this poem which if you read it one way it was the Ramayana the same text if you read
#
a different way it was the Mahabharata right and Nasimarao loved that and that's frankly
#
exactly what he did as prime minister that he said I am a Nehruvian I am a socialist
#
India believes in socialism while he's opening up India's economy right that's what he learned
#
from Deng so it's not so much the importance of the economy but the how to bring about
#
change in a system that is so one way you cannot have radical changes you have to pretend
#
to continuity while bringing about change and just to give you an example after reading
#
this book you know a CEO came to me and she told me that she had just become CEO and her
#
first instinct was to say that the previous CEO is a fool and I'm gonna bring about changes
#
and I'm gonna make this change that change but she said look I read your book and I realized
#
that if I do that then all the people the old CEO has appointed who are still there
#
in the system will resent her and will push back against her so what she had to say was
#
that oh the previous CEO was fantastic all his choices was fantastic while she brought
#
about changes which were radically different from the old CEO and I said man you understood
#
this book much better than I have because that's exactly the point of Narsimha Rao and
#
I can tell you Amit any of your listeners listening to this who work in organizations
#
right realize that you know will agree with me that changing the DNA of organizations
#
are really hard and socialism was in the DNA of the Indian state was in the DNA of the
#
Congress party just like communism was in the DNA of the Chinese state and the way to
#
do it is the Deng Xiaoping and Narsimha Rao way which is to pretend to continuity in a
#
system while simultaneously through your actions bringing about radical change.
#
This is pretty much as profound and insight from politics that can be applied to everything
#
as say Doris Keyons Goodwin's team of rivals right how Lincoln put his cabinet together
#
where instead of just putting his supporters in his cabinet he got his greatest rivals
#
including the guy he defeated in the presidential elections and put them in the cabinet and
#
that was one big reason for his success and winning the civil war and that's almost cliched
#
I mean both of these could be LinkedIn posts in a sense which are so you know Pranam Mukherjee
#
once told Narsimha Rao that during this period he thought Narsimha Rao was invaluable to
#
Indira Gandhi she could not function without him so tell me about what he is actually doing
#
in government like one gets that when he is out of power he is not creating a political
#
fuss because there are other facets to his personality he is learning Spanish he is going
#
abroad and buying calculator he is doing all of these things and the way that he gets to
#
power is often by being inoffensive to everyone in the sense that this is not someone who
#
threatens me so let me give him an important ministry like foreign ministry or so on and
#
so forth but when he is actually in power when he is in that position one in terms of
#
governance in the ministry itself what is his approach and what is the kind of work
#
that he is doing and how do you rate him as a minister and two in a political sense as
#
Indira Gandhi's aid what's his role there and what role is he playing for her?
#
So I think that as in government Narsimha Rao was good at three different things firstly
#
he was just a consummate draftsman so I would say that you know from the 1970s every piece
#
of paper that would exit the congress party would have his fingerprints on it so he just
#
knew you know in a cabinet meeting he knew how to you know write what the minute looked
#
like he knew what to write the cabinet agenda so you know now look Pranam Mukherjee was
#
good at this Jairam Ramesh is very good at this right so this was a talent that Narsimha
#
Rao had that he was a draftsman right the second talent he had is that in any ministry
#
that he took charge of he quickly understood the issues because he applied himself right
#
so lot of ministers think of a ministry as an ego trip right so Narsimha Rao didn't
#
think that so for example he had been defense minister and foreign minister and and Rajiv
#
Gandhi made him education minister or HRD minister now for most people this is a demotion
#
so Narsimha Rao is not a demotion he quickly gets in he understands the mechanics of the
#
Navodaya school you know he knew all of that so I think the second thing that he was very
#
good at was in the ministry he would very quickly get to the issues and he was a good
#
he could brief the prime minister Rajiv Gandhi or Indira Gandhi about the issues because
#
he actually applied himself to the specifics of the ministry when it came to foreign policy
#
he you know he you know he told his son if I'm his grandson I think when he when Narsimha
#
Rao traveled to a country he first read up about the country the culture the people the
#
politics can you think of any other foreign minister in India Bal Jayashankar doing that
#
out of the question right again when he was defense minister I mentioned here he's quickly
#
you know getting involved in the nuclear program this that and later on when Arunachalam who
#
was heading the nuclear program at that time comes to him and you know he says you please
#
draw out what the nuclear nuclear process looks like he said okay this is where the
#
chain reaction takes place so he's getting involved and then he's briefing Indira Gandhi
#
and Rajiv Gandhi that's a skill ask yourself even today how many ministers actually have
#
depth in their department or their subject expertise rather than looking at the ministry
#
or being a minister as an ego trip which tells them their relative importance in the pecking
#
order for most of people it's in the latter right the third skill Narsimha Rao had was
#
that he could balance action and theory very well right so for example and these were skills
#
that he came to as prime minister also and this is outside his department for example
#
he told Rajiv Gandhi that you know getting involved in Sri Lanka is an error right Rajiv
#
Gandhi didn't listen to him but he said that right on the other hand he pushed for the
#
Navodaya schooling system which is residential schools for poor people where the teacher
#
actually lives in the place right so that to prevent teacher absenteeism because the
#
teacher is living in the school the teacher is less likely to bunk and Rajiv Gandhi you
#
know took you know took charge of that or agreed with that so he had this ability I think all three
#
right he was a good draftsman he had subject matter expertise so he was as good as the bureaucrat
#
to give you an example Modi today by all accounts listens to the secretary in every department
#
every ministry rather than listening to the minister Narsimha Rao knew as much about foreign
#
politics foreign policy as the foreign secretary right I unearthed a document here which the
#
Chinese Indian ambassador to China writes to Narsimha Rao right about the Chinese situation
#
and in Narsimha Rao is writing in the notes on the margins highly detailed push backs
#
I don't know too many ministers who could second guess a foreign secretary or an ambassador
#
because an Indian ambassador to a country has subject matter expertise right so I would say
#
Narsimha Rao had all these three it's a unique skill but you know look Pranam Mukhaji had these
#
skills right that he was invaluable too right where he what he lacked with Narsimha Rao had
#
is the ability to act and to act decisively when he became prime minister during this the landscape
#
changes in the sense Indira Gandhi is assassinated and what you know the aftermath happens we've
#
already sort of alluded to the riots and then eventually Rajiv Gandhi takes hold of the party
#
and at this point you also in fact quote Tacitus where Tacitus after whom I think the term taciturn
#
comes right and Tacitus says quote the higher a man's rank the more eager is hypocrisy and
#
his looks are more carefully studied so as to neither betray joy at the decrees of one emperor
#
nor sorrow at the rise of another while he mingled delight and lamentations with his flattery
#
and stop quote and isn't it a wonderful quote it's a remarkable and so opposite so so so correct
#
to describe Narsimha Rao when Indira Gandhi is died and Rajiv Gandhi is rising and he's very
#
very careful that he knows that he was close to Indira Gandhi now he has to become close to Rajiv
#
Gandhi yeah and unlike Pranam Mukherjee who yeah who makes a mess of it lobbied for the position
#
of prime minister and eventually and then then when he was in exile just left the party and
#
threw a tantrum you know some I think it was Pratap Mehta who told me that the difference
#
between Narsimha Rao and Arjun Singh was Narsimha Rao was clever Arjun Singh was clever by half
#
and Pranam Mukherjee was clever by half and Narsimha Rao as the you know given the quote
#
that you mentioned like was being clever yeah I mean sometimes I think the kind of cleverness
#
that you're alluding to is not just a cleverness to say the right thing but also to shut up at
#
the right time that's right which you know Narsimha Rao would perhaps had done and I gotta tell you I
#
you know I was just reading this book to prepare for this conversation because you know I last
#
read the book six years ago when I had written the book and I was just telling myself I wish I had
#
internalized this year you know that I should keep quiet at key moments I just don't do that
#
I say what I think but Narsimha Rao knew you know the importance of silence or when not to say
#
something when to step back when not to die on that hill something I think I should having
#
reread the book I think I should learn now no I mean I was thinking a little while earlier that
#
Narsimha Rao with his learning and knowledge and experience would have made such a fantastic
#
guest for this podcast but now what you just said I don't know how much he would have told me and
#
if even if he that's problem one problem two is you know I give this story about Narsimha Rao
#
meeting Bill Clinton in 1994 and Bill Clinton really doesn't like the meeting when Narsimha Rao
#
you know is nervous and his response to being nervous is to give a long lecture as an academic
#
long academic lecture he could do that too so either he would be silent to your questions Amit
#
or he would give long-winded boring academic answers that would bore your listeners I don't
#
know which is worse no no I would I would get great masala out of him if he agreed to speak but
#
he would have to agree first and now it's a problem because he's been dead for a long time so
#
what can one do about that but why did you say that you wish you had internalized that quality
#
of knowing when to shut up are you someone who gets yourself into sports by speaking too much
#
I don't know I haven't yet got myself into sports but you know I normally if somebody
#
asks me a question I try to give the straightforward answer even if it's politically incorrect whatever
#
you know maybe you know god knows but maybe you know maybe it's a Narsimha Rao is a more
#
professionally astute way to go about it yeah I mean I hope you don't get cancelled from Ashoka
#
University for something you say in future so watch your mouth as it were now we've already kind of
#
discussed the aftermath of the assassination where of the murder when you know the riots happen and
#
he's been told the police can't report to him and you've described him it as his wireless star and
#
so on and so forth and so I won't go over that sort of area again but once the new cabinet sort
#
of settles down and now he's made the defense minister you know what's the scene like because
#
what Rajiv Gandhi does is he gets a whole bunch of his cronies people he's been to school with
#
many of them at Doon school so people like Arun Singh and Satish Sharma and Arun Nehru was there
#
Manishankar Iyer all of these people so he gets these Lutyens elite as it were and these are the
#
Lutyens elite I think we truly should look down upon and he gets this Lutyens elite of English
#
speaking elites who have you know no sense of India per se and Narsimha Rao is in the cabinet as well
#
so what's the deal how is he kind of jockeying for a position within this bunch of people and
#
what do you think he wants at this point like he's already tried and failed to be nominated for the
#
presidency when you know Indira Gandhi chooses Yael Singh over him what's happening here well
#
he wants to continue to be in power like all politicians I mean I hope I haven't given your
#
listeners the view that Narsimha Rao is bathed in milk he's not right so he's as ambitious as you
#
know complexity is both ambitious and unambitious but he certainly wants to continue to be in power
#
his single focus is to be as close and useful to Rajiv Gandhi as he was to Indira Gandhi
#
the most important thing is he recognizes what you just said that he's an outsider in team Rajiv
#
right and he has to reinvent himself and I have this wonderful story here about how
#
he overhears Rajiv Gandhi making some allusion to computers he's not heard the phrase before
#
you know this is the mid 80s right and Narsimha Rao is in the 60s and he asks his son what is
#
this computer send me a you know send me a sample and his son sends him a sample from Hyderabad
#
to Delhi of a computer it comes by Indian Airlines and Narsimha Rao doesn't you know hire somebody
#
to teach him does that a little bit and as I mentioned very soon learns COBOL basic and UNIX
#
right and it's just an example of how Narsimha Rao is using his skill at curiosity to refashion
#
himself and retool himself to be as useful to Rajiv Gandhi as he is to Indira Gandhi and he
#
successfully so he becomes foreign minister again for Rajiv Gandhi to give him the education ministry
#
is not actually a demotion from defense but it's he's giving it to him because he feels that Narsimha
#
Rao has something to offer and something to add to it right and he for him education is a priority
#
sector so Narsimha Rao is retooling himself but you know by the time he Narsimha Rao reaches 1991
#
he's old Rajiv Gandhi decides that his career is over right he tries again to become president
#
in 1987 but his close friend R Venkat Raman who was the same vintage at him becomes president
#
himself but Narsimha Rao could have become president he was well within the realm of becoming
#
president but the key thing here is that when Rajiv Gandhi asks him to step down doesn't give
#
him a ticket Narsimha Rao doesn't rebel as I mentioned earlier he accepts with equanimity
#
his his his fall most politicians will create a ruckus give a press conference abuse Narsimha
#
Rao doesn't do that right and yet as I point out there's a key moment when Narsimha Rao hears that
#
Rajiv Gandhi has been murdered when at the time he hears it he's in shock a doctor has to come to
#
kind of settle him down but very soon in just a few hours he realizes that by virtue of being one
#
of the senior most leaders of the congress who stepped down when the Nehru Gandhis asked him to
#
do it he is now best primed to become prime minister and within a few hours he's you know he's
#
he's you know moving to Delhi maneuvering trying to become prime minister that's that's amazing
#
political instinct and it taught me that Narsimha Rao's key skill was when he realized that the
#
cards he had been dealt with are not good and I'm sure there's a poker analogy Amit I just don't
#
know enough poker he you know he knows he has a bad hand so he plays it on defense and when suddenly
#
those the hand turns for him he ends up with a good hand he plays aggressively is there a
#
analogy in poker for that I mean I'd have to think of one there are various situations in which I
#
mean you know it's common in poker of course that a bad hand turns into a good hand but often it is
#
not in your control but you can play even a bad hand in such a way that a better hand can fold
#
because you know and so I I won't go too far with the poker but certainly what he the caniness he
#
showed in suggesting ND Tiwari's name as you point out it's just an example of the kind of mind games
#
he's playing that he is simultaneously by that signaling that hey I am not desperate for this
#
position and therefore I'm not a threat to anyone and at the same time he's putting forward a
#
candidate who he knows is unacceptable so they're going to come back to him yeah I'm going to just
#
read out if you don't mind sure but I have the book with me the diary entry of Narsimha Rao
#
this is the day after Rajiv has been murdered the all the congressmen are around the body or
#
shards of the body in ten Janpath pretending to cry while maneuvering to become the next prime
#
minister and while Narsimha Rao is there and just you know just an advertisement to the reader
#
this book is being made into an OTT series directed by Prakash Jha and I've requested Mr. Jha that
#
they must have this visual which is that the dead body is there and then around them all these
#
congressmen in white wearing the congress topi are all pretending to cry but actually they're
#
doing ghusbus on who to succeed right and suddenly what happens is that Narsimha Rao writes in his
#
diary that while we and I'm quoting here while we were hanging around the dead body in ten Janpath
#
Pranab took me aside and told me that there was genuine agreement on me being elected congress
#
president Rao doesn't say yes yes I should become congress president because if he does that
#
Pranab will tell everybody look Narsimha Rao wants to become congress president and then everybody
#
would gun for him so Narsimha Rao this is what Narsimha Rao says I knew that Pranab's report
#
was too good to be true either he was himself a dupe or he was party to some kind of design
#
and was trying to lull me he had done this role many times in those crucial years of Indrajee
#
I did not want to react I mentioned about my health and said I was I feel a bit
#
diffident Narsimha Rao is is pretending to Pranab I suggested NDT who is ND Tiwari instead taking
#
care to add that I was not refusing yet it would be good if he came up after a consensus
#
I also knew that ND Tiwari would be unacceptable as or more so than myself in the scheme of things
#
this paragraph tells me everything you want to know about Narsimha Rao maneuvering just imagine
#
that visual Pranab coming and whispering and look this is written that night it's his diary so that
#
this is happening in the day and in the night Narsimha Rao was writing this and it just told
#
me and it also told me how lucky I was as a biographer to get access to the innermost thoughts
#
of Narsimha Rao in the day that he does it yeah that that's incredible and I can think of a lesser
#
man either enthusiastically saying yes yes or even putting his arm around Pranab's shoulder and
#
saying that if I become PM I'll make you FM which would have been as big a disaster for India
#
which is a disaster because imagine what Pranab would have done he would have gone and told Sonia
#
Gandhi that look Narsimha Rao wants to be prime minister and immediately they would have killed
#
him right yeah so this is beautiful now before we get to the 1991 phase when he takes over as PM
#
a final question I want to ask you about the earlier period which comes from something really
#
interesting where you point out that there were once a set of papers you know with the heading
#
human resource development and there were a bunch of papers and and that happened to have an excerpt
#
that happened to have something that Rao had handwritten himself and that included I'll read
#
I'll read this bit out quote with human resource development as a heading it contained an excerpt
#
from an author Rao enjoyed Antoine de Saint-Exupery I hope I'm pronouncing that right and the excerpt
#
is this is the Saint-Exupery's words quote a rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment
#
a single man contemplates it bearing within him the image of a cathedral stop quote incredible
#
quote right and now your words continue below this Rao had written woman and child development
#
health youth affairs slash sports culture labor question mark and and you continue the note was
#
returned to Rao and he slipped it into the pocket of his kurta later that morning he went to see the
#
prime minister which is Rajiv Gandhi he told Rajiv quote and now Rao's words we see a rock
#
pile of disorganized underutilized human resources you see a cathedral you see a cathedral we can
#
fashion it but we need to go beyond just the ministry of education stop quote and now you
#
continue Rao persuaded Rajiv to integrate the departments of culture youth affairs sports
#
women and child development and later health with education into the new HRD ministry stop quote
#
like first of all I just love this image of somebody sees a rock pile and somebody sees a
#
cathedral a stunning image and also it seems to me that all of these you know culture youth affairs
#
sports women and child development are amenable to scaling right you make a small difference here
#
it reverberates into something much bigger it's not static it scales massively and that's exactly
#
the thing about liberalization as well that economic freedom also scales in a similar way
#
where the state is playing an enabling part as it does in all of these subjects you know and
#
this struck me as really interesting and kind of wise from Rao in getting you know I mean I don't
#
know if he chose this ministry or asked for it or whatever but he was clearly reveling in it but in
#
these specific subjects and labor was left out because it had more to do with taking care of
#
the interests of labor currently and all of that not so scalable but unless you change the labor
#
laws which of course hurt labor more than they help them but that's a different story but all
#
of these are extremely scalable and liberalization in the end also proves to be that so does this
#
sort of indicate that his mindset is broader and thinking at you know a different kind of level
#
than the typical politician who when in put in charge of a ministry may have an engineering
#
mindset that let us tinker we will fix this we will fix that we will fix this but is he perhaps
#
showing a more of an enabling mindset here which also might explain why he was more open to Narel
#
Chandra's note as cabinet secretary so a few years later that's a good question I mean I would say
#
that when it came to welfare schemes you're absolutely right that he had an enabling mindset
#
he had a visionary mindset he could think out of the box that's what we see you know throughout
#
and look he knew what he was talking about he was education minister and head health minister
#
in Andhra Pradesh he was education minister in Delhi so he knew how the state education function
#
how the center education function and he had imagination to say let's transform and he found
#
in Rajiv Gandhi a willing prime minister because Rajiv was passionate about this too right
#
I don't see this on in economics I just don't see it he was a same old stodgy protectionist
#
right and you know again I've thought about this many many times that is there something because
#
there's so much from his life that tells you about how he was prime minister in other ways
#
like how he managed the politics of reform how he managed welfare schemes foreign policy
#
there isn't anything about economics you know and as a biographer I have to go with the evidence
#
and all evidence points to the fact that he was a mild protectionist on economics he hadn't really
#
thought about it but when Naresh Chandra shows him that note he wakes up he says India has to
#
change and once he decides to do that he moves with remarkable alacrity so you know I'll I won't
#
discuss any more of that bit about how he becomes prime minister but I recommend everyone read it
#
because it's a racy read and these are going to be the best couple of episodes in the most fascinating
#
episodes in the OTT you know the way he maneuvers himself to the congress presidency the farmhouse
#
meeting with Shankar Deyal Sharma the way Sharad Pawar tries to get in the way and become the
#
prime minister saying that no on principle the party president cannot be leader of the Lok Sabha
#
and blah blah blah let's talk about actually coming to power and he comes to power and his
#
cabinet secretary Naresh Chandra gives him this note and at this moment he's effectively still
#
a man alone in the cabinet he hasn't chosen the people around him he certainly hasn't chosen the
#
finance minister and all of these choices that he makes will now be influenced by this note tell
#
me about the note what was a problem and what did the note say so just to give you a background
#
before I answer that question since the early 1980s there was a push within the Indian system
#
to liberalize the economy in terms of ideas so there was an LK Jha report there was an Abid
#
Hussain report Montaik Singh had Aloo Walia had authored a famous M document you know and Rakesh
#
Mohan had also authored a new industrial policy what were all these pushing back against these
#
all these were pushing back against what we call the license quota permit Raj what was this license
#
quota permit Raj it had three components first was that it closed off large sections of the
#
Indian economy to private entrepreneurs only the public sector could enter and where the where
#
for example making watches only HMT could do it and HMT was used to making heavy tools
#
Hindustan machine tools heavy industry so you ended up with terrible HMT watches that
#
people still wore because they didn't have any options right and you had then a few sectors
#
where the government where private sector could participate but they needed all kinds of licenses
#
so that was the first thing the government did the second thing as part of the license quota permit
#
Raj was that the size of private companies was stymied by making capital difficult for them
#
because of bank nationalization right by the monopolies and restrictive trade practices act
#
for example so many ways in which the size of private businesses was stymied they couldn't
#
stymied they couldn't actually access the capital markets without permission from the what was called
#
the CCI at that time the third element was you were sealing off India from the world so heavy
#
tariffs when it entry barriers when it came to foreign goods heavy restrictions on foreign
#
capital and entering India a rupee that was artificially valued so it made exports very
#
difficult etc etc etc right since the 80s many bureaucrats were making arguments that
#
these three pillars had to be dismantled right the blueprint that Nasim Harao got was essentially
#
a dismantling of these three wings right to make most of the Indian economy accessible to the
#
private sector to invest right to reduce restrictions on the growth of the private sector
#
and three to allow foreign capital and goods to enter India right this was what the blueprint
#
talked about the blueprint also said that unless you do it the Indian foreign exchange was so low
#
that we would default on an IMF loan we didn't have enough money I mentioned in the book reasons
#
short-term reasons for why the Indian economy was suffering why we lacked foreign capital
#
listeners only have to look to Sri Lanka today to see that it was very very similar a situation
#
now hopefully Sri Lanka learns from Nasim Harao and uses this for long-term reforms of the economy
#
hopefully they do that Nasim Harao was able to do that but I just want to give you that this
#
is the background to that particular document you know it's a great background and you know
#
and just speaking of what Indira did like people castigate her for the emergency and all that
#
which she should be castigated for but for me her economic policies were as disastrous if not more
#
I think they kept millions of Indians in poverty for decades longer than they should have there
#
were a crime on humanity and people don't often think of economics is such a dry subject you know
#
license Raj this that but the point is you have real consequences on real human beings that's
#
you know exactly what happened with her but you know that rant aside it's also just to add to
#
your rant people unfairly criticize Nehru I would be less he had a mild antipathy towards the private
#
sector but look he was obsessed with growth and when he looked around himself in the 40s the
#
country that was able to grow was the Soviet Union it was the growth model just like China is today
#
and so he adopted fire plans etc etc is Indira Gandhi who turned this mild antipathy towards the
#
private sector into complete antipathy and instead of favoring growth she favored her political
#
survival so I would put the blame squarely on Indira Gandhi I would put it squarely on her as
#
well and what makes her particularly evil and I use that word advisedly is that she didn't even
#
believe that this was the right way for India to go it was just a matter of political positioning
#
she wanted to position herself as different from the coterie than in charge of the congress and
#
therefore this massive leftward tilt and you know slogans like Garibi Hatao when what she was
#
actually doing was perpetuating Garibi and there's even an amusing anecdote in your book where you
#
talk about how PV Narasimha Rao at a conference of the Andhra Pradesh backward classes declares
#
quote we will not tolerate capitalists even if he is a harijan stop quote you know similar to
#
you know Nehru's when Nehru told JRD Tata that do not speak to me of profit it is a dirty word
#
stop quote I didn't know that yeah yeah that's a pretty kind of famous so he also had not just a
#
slight distrust but a fair antipathy but you're right that you know he was obsessed with growth
#
you have to give him that his policies much as they were wrong and they hurt us and didn't allow us
#
to go the East Asian miracle way at least you can understand where they came from he was well
#
intentioned he wanted the best I would say more you know he set the template for East Asian growth
#
because look in the 50s East Asia was not growing what Nehru was able to do was move a economy that
#
was growing negatively to a three percent growth rate see we call it Hindu rate of growth that's
#
a wrong phrase but that rate of growth was much higher than what the British left India with
#
and so frankly by 19 mid 1960s the stage was set perfectly for Indira Gandhi to do what the East
#
Asia was doing at that point East Asian growth began in the 60s that was the Indira Gandhi period
#
and you know Nehru had provided more of a base than say Thailand or Malaysia or Indonesia had
#
at that point so it was Indira Gandhi who completely blew it up Indira Gandhi who completely
#
blew it up in multiple ways and the interesting thing is that today people try to do a little
#
rewriting of history and say that oh Rajiv Gandhi really started the reforms and all of that but
#
as you sort of show in your book that initially there was you know the talk of reforms did come
#
from policy wonks and bureaucrats and so on within his administration but he showed absolutely no
#
will from from it turned away from it and well I just just pushing back a little bit he initially
#
tried so you know in 1985 he gives a speech against power brokers in the congress you know
#
he expands what was called the open general license so more and more sectors became available in the
#
Indian economy for the Indian private sector to invest he was the most pro-American prime minister
#
since then so in that sense his instincts to liberalize were I would say more than Narasimha
#
Rao what he lacked and this is the key argument of the book is the politics of reform he just
#
didn't know how to do it so from 1986-87 when he was when he had strong headwinds Bofors the
#
growth of Hindu nationalism and the BJP Salman Rushdie's satanic verses being banned he completely
#
lost balance you know and that's the point of the book which is that look the ideas were there in
#
the 80s four prime ministers including Rajiv Gandhi had the ideas right prime ministers such
#
as VP Singh Chandrasekhar especially Chandrasekhar and even Rajiv Gandhi even had the instincts to
#
liberalize if you remember VP Singh was the liberalizing finance minister of of Rajiv Gandhi
#
right what they lacked is the political ability to remain in power and push through reforms
#
that's the core ingredient that Narasimha Rao book brings and I want to repeat this that
#
liberalization in India is not about ideas good ideas are well known in India right it's not even
#
about political will it's about political ability right that's the key ingredient the political
#
instincts or the political will to reform existed with Rajiv Gandhi initially but then he just
#
couldn't manage the headwinds of actually running government and he retreated Narasimha Rao was able
#
to manage parliament manage party manage Sonia Gandhi and bring about change that's the central
#
point of the book when I when I think of Rajiv Gandhi as CM is just someone who is bumbling
#
through governance who has no core convictions for example you use a fantastic phrase comparative
#
communalism yes right in the context of first he does Shahbano then he overcompensates by opening
#
the gates of the Babri Masjid then he overcompensates to that by you know with the satanic versus ban
#
we were the first country in the world to ban that book and so on and so forth so he's just
#
bumbling from one thing to the other you could say you know to go back to a thick and thin thing
#
he has no thick convictions it's all thin convictions he's just following sort of the
#
winds of the moment or do you do you feel that he had thick convictions of any sort
#
I think he had that you know I would be favorable to say he had a thick conviction to liberalize
#
but he simply didn't have the chops to see it through and when that happened when he had pushed
#
back it's not that he lacked conviction he lacked courage and there's a slight difference between
#
the two right he had the beliefs were intact you know but he just lacked you know when he was when
#
there was pushback he just lacked the ability to navigate that he was a child that you know
#
children have thick convictions right but you know I think they are thin but intense I mean
#
because I would the way you describe thin was that they came from other people you know I felt that
#
again who knows I haven't gotten to Rajeev's mind and certainly the book is not on Rajeev but
#
I felt that his you know he was sincere and his belief in transforming India was deeply held
#
but that's not all you need in politics that's the point I mean again and again right yeah that thick
#
conviction needs ability to actually transform that on the ground right I may deeply deeply believe
#
that I want to end poverty right but unless I have the chops and the mechanisms to do it that deeply
#
held thick conviction matters for not right and not just that is you may believe you want to end
#
poverty and you may even have the political chops to do whatever it takes but you may have a
#
misunderstanding of the problem to begin with I don't think Rajeev had a misunderstanding yeah
#
I'm not saying he did but I think he had a correct understanding I'm just pointing out that these are
#
all the qualities that would go into change that one you have to have the conviction two you have
#
to have the understanding of what requires to be done and three you would need the political chops
#
to kind of pull it off so moving away from Rajeev because like you said your book isn't about Rajeev
#
and why are we even talking about him but you know for me the tragedy of Rajeev is even the greater
#
you know just to end that which is here's a man who had convictions who had a mandate
#
I mean he had the largest mandate I think 404 or 405 seats in parliament much more than Narendra
#
Modi almost you know more than a hundred more than Narendra Modi right so imagine right imagine
#
somebody who is 25 percent stronger than Narendra Modi is at the moment right or even 30 percent
#
stronger just imagine what that looks like and still he messed it up right it's unforgivable
#
really it's it's unforgivable let's sort of now talk about you know he sees red note from
#
Naresh Chandra and there is a body of work which has gone on Rakesh Mohan like you said
#
in 1988 there's a decade of work that has gone on that precedes that note yeah Manmohan Singh
#
played a key part in that preceding decade too yeah yeah yeah and so so what what happens now
#
at this point he sees the note one which something that impressed me a lot is is that you said he
#
grasped the enormity of the crisis immediately and that by itself is impressive because you know a
#
lot of politicians when you're sort of told something about the economy and it's an abstract
#
subject and you don't have prior understanding of it that in any way can be called deep like
#
he had of so many other subjects you know for him to just figure out that this is a big deal
#
and I need to do something and and this has to be the sole focus because it seems to me that after
#
that from the events that you describe everything that he does politically seems to go towards
#
solving the problem right down to choosing the finance minister whereas you said Pranab Mukherjee
#
supported his rise to the congress presidency and the prime ministership and Pranab had been
#
finance minister under Indira as well would have been a natural choice for him but he didn't pick
#
Pranab because he thought that I have to solve this problem and that is a wrong man for this
#
problem so tell me a little bit about how things start unfolding now and how he comes to his choice
#
of finance minister and so on. So Naseema Rao understands very clearly that these three pillars
#
of the license permit Kota Raj has to be dismantled full stop right so what does he do firstly he
#
realizes that the key element is the first aspect right first and second aspects which is that you
#
have to reduce restrictions on domestic entrepreneurs what we call internal liberalization
#
step two is external liberalization which is you have to allow foreign capital and foreign services
#
and goods to enter India but the first step is industrial de-licensing so he keeps the industry
#
ministry for himself people forget this right that's a very key element right second is he
#
appoints a principal secretary who is a key bureaucrat for every prime minister who was
#
a former industry secretary Amarnath Verma well-known liberalizer right third is he tells PC
#
Alexander who's helping him at that time that look I need a finance minister who is open to the world
#
right who is able to assist with external liberalization and there are two names given there
#
the first name IG Patel who is the head of the London School of Economics at that time says no
#
the second name is Manmohan Singh so Manmohan Singh says yes and he becomes the finance minister
#
and look Manmohan Singh has many many skills that Naseema Rao who already knows him appreciates one
#
is Manmohan Singh is incorruptible right with an ethics of a different order from most people in
#
politics and bureaucracy and this is important because Naseema Rao has an instinct even then
#
that liberalization will give rise to allegations of corruption and so as the economy is opening
#
up to the private sector it's very important for to have a finance minister who's insulated from
#
the shenanigans of the private sector right you don't want to have somebody who's friends with
#
Dhirubhai Ambani friends with the Tatas friends with the Birla's and Manmohan Singh is that guy
#
right second is that while Manmohan Singh has also had multiple views on liberalization over
#
the years he's much more of a conviction liberalizer than Naseema Rao and third is that
#
Manmohan Singh has held every single position for of economic policy in the Indian government
#
I mean there are five positions of economic policy in the Indian government finance secretary
#
finance minister deputy chairman planning commission chief economic advisor of India
#
and RBI governor Manmohan Singh has had all of them until he becomes finance minister right so
#
he knew every inch of the economic levers he knew how to while the political cover would be given
#
by Naseema Rao actually implementing it on the ground would be the person you know would be
#
Manmohan Singh and Manmohan Singh was ripe for the idea so his incorruptibility you know and his
#
ability to understand every inch of economic policy in India was very important to to Naseema Rao
#
that's why he was selected right he also had other liberalizers for example he had P Chidambaram as
#
minister of commerce he had Montek Singh Alwale who are playing a key role so he surrounded himself
#
with advisors and what I find noteworthy in this amit is that Manmohan Singh I mean Naseema Rao
#
wasn't insecure that he knew nothing about economics he understood that a job needed to be done
#
and he said who are the best people for the job he and Manmohan Singh didn't have a personal
#
equation or personal chemistry that was not relevant to Naseema Rao and this goes back to
#
his childhood that here's a man who's used to being lonely who's not used you know who's not
#
looking for chamchas cronies you know who will mouth what the master wants he said I want the
#
best people for the job to be able to do what the job takes I think that's a remarkable quality
#
there's an anecdote that also is interesting in this context like we are recording this on
#
the day that episode 281 released this episode will be 283 and 282 which you haven't heard yet
#
but is the episode that releases before yours is with Naushad Forbes oh wow and Naushad told me
#
that in that episode he speaks about how he was at a meeting that Manmohan Singh had convened of
#
the top industrialists to meet the top industrialists so the finance minister can kind of talk to them
#
so he went to that meeting and I think he was positioned between Ambani and Tata so all the
#
photographs the next day had Naushad Forbes in the middle because he was sitting between those
#
two guys and Naushad gave his usual outspoken views on the importance of liberalization and
#
all of that at that point and after the meeting ended you know when Manmohan Singh was shaking
#
all the hands individually one by one he told Naushad that you know what you said in this
#
meeting please say it outside and please say it again and again and please say it loud you know
#
and just sort of indicating again what you said about the conviction now you know you've laid out
#
the different kind of obstacles that now existed over here one the congress has a minority in
#
parliament two there is a bombay club which is basically your existing bunch of big industrialists
#
who have benefited from the license raj and who don't want competition coming from outside
#
you know underscoring the point I keep making that what big business wants is not free markets
#
it's never that they want to hold on to their position so market friendly and business friendly
#
are entirely different terms and right what people like us should aim for is market friendly
#
because that's where common people like you and me benefit and the third was the legacy of the
#
party itself that this was a party that had built this edifice part of which you know Narsimha Rao
#
and Manmohan Singh were now going to start tearing down and there is this lovely sort of passage you
#
have which I'm going to read out which describes what Rao's strategy was towards dismantling the
#
congress legacy and before this one quick note of context that you know the congress manifesto
#
before this had nothing about liberalization it was completely protectionist and it was a standard
#
the same old same old and your para reads quote that afternoon Rao convened a meeting of CWC at
#
his house he began by saying that all the new policy did was to reverse Indira Gandhi's sharp
#
leftward tilt in 1969 and take the country back to the more flexible 1956 policy resolution of Nehru
#
the congress Rao added continued to believe in the commanding heights of the public sector
#
having played one Nehru Gandhi against another Rao now let his finance minister speak learning
#
from his political master Manmohan invoked the 1991 manifesto to show that within it lay the
#
seeds of the new industrial policy this was far from the truth but as Manmohan Singh came out of
#
the meeting Arjun Singh told him quote Dr Singh you have read the manifesto more carefully than
#
we have stop quote and this just speaks to sort of so much sagacity to realize that what they are
#
proposing is so incredibly radical but everything came down to how do you frame it by framing it as
#
a return to Nehru which it wasn't by framing it as a continuation of the promises made in the
#
manifesto which it wasn't they kind of manage to win the game so tell me about these two games
#
the internal game within the congress party to win everybody over and then the external game
#
because they are still a minority party in parliament so tell me a bit about these
#
So the internal story is quite fascinating because the party of Nehru and the party of Indira Gandhi
#
saw liberalization as going against the core DNA of the congress so that was the you know the core
#
issue here the way he went about it you know I mentioned here which is that you know every
#
single liberalization document was presaged with you know homilies to Nehru to Indira Gandhi to
#
you know to Rajiv especially because Narsimha Rao's crafty approach especially when it came
#
to Sonia Gandhi was to say that all that he's doing is what Rajiv Gandhi would have done had
#
he not been cruelly interrupted that was the kind of the argument right he also unleashed the
#
intelligence bureau on the on the congress I have here I'm quite proud of it an intelligence bureau
#
document showing who are the different congressmen in and congress women and what are their views
#
when it comes to liberalization and how you should deal with them you know so it's an actual
#
intelligence bureau report so Narsimha Rao you know the agencies that Modi unleashes he's hardly
#
the first person to unleash them right the intelligence bureau was unleashed by by Narsimha Rao
#
far far earlier than that when dealing with the parliament outside Narsimha Rao survived three
#
no confidence motions one confidence motion and I think one vote of thanks motion he did it by
#
ruthlessly splitting the I mean the he always needed 20 or 30 votes to win because it was a
#
minority in in parliament and he did it by by let me put it bluntly by corruption right and other
#
allurements by splitting smaller parties and independent parties and getting them to vote
#
for the congress but that's not all he did so for example after the Babri Masjid demolition
#
when there was a no confidence motion against the congress Narsimha Rao went and told the left look
#
you should stand with me because this is a fight about secularism so don't talk about liberalization
#
let's focus on secularism and you know he won he won that handily I think it was 300 200 or
#
something like that he won that no confidence motion so that's the second thing he employed
#
in parliament which is to at key moments to basically tell the the left that look let's
#
not talk about liberalization this is a fight to death against secularism in that battle we
#
are on the same side against the BJP right he also reached out to many members whether it was Jaswant
#
Singh in the BJP Vajpayee who was a good friend of his Chandrashekhar VP Singh so he was constantly
#
trying to engage with other politicians in other political parties I think that was another skill
#
he had but you know it's hard to answer this at a meta level Amit because really the way he managed
#
the party and the way he managed Sonia Gandhi and the way he managed parliament is day to day
#
kabaddi it's not some meta question day to day he's maneuvering to get you know so really in some
#
sense Narsimha Rao is you know they say you're living hand to mouth he's living confidence motion
#
from to no confidence motion every day he's worried that somebody would bring a no confidence
#
motion and the government would fall and look at this his temporal circumstances the two governments
#
before him both minority governments collapse within a year right the three governments after
#
him also minority governments collapse nearly within a year right he alone was able to last
#
five years and I think that is incredible and that's a you know and again and again I want
#
to emphasize that unless you know that story liberalization doesn't happen right unless you
#
know how power is is accumulated power is stabilized and then power is expended for
#
liberalization just understanding the economic policy is neither here nor there like in a sense
#
this is a very good companion episode and a companion book to the earlier episode I done
#
with Shruti and Ajay on the importance of our 91 reforms what a big deal they sort of were for
#
India and you also have a chapter on what you kind of call the middle overs right now initially you
#
can say that okay there was a crisis they had to do something you know the IMF demanded some reforms
#
as well and all of that and okay so these reforms happen initially but these guys kept the game
#
going further than that they didn't just stop they continued with you know one reform at a time
#
continued kind of moving through though I feel that as the years went on the momentum got slower
#
and slower and I guess political imperatives play a part in that as well so tell me a little bit
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about you know that period which may be missed out by many people may a lot of people miss it
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out because they assume that liberalization India because happened because of IMF pressure
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and IMF pressure was when India had a crisis which is in 91 92 right so the entire focus is
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on that for example Jairam Ramesh has written an excellent book called back from the brink
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which focuses exclusively on this period right but the reality is that even after the crisis
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ended which is in 1992 when India has stable foreign currency foreign exchange even after that
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so many reforms were planned like to give you an example the single biggest
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reform that touches us today is telecom reform right that you know mobile telephony that reform
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happened in 1994 1995 much after the crisis has ended opening licenses for new banks HDFC ICICI
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a key ingredient in you know allowing credit to reach entrepreneurs in India today happened
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much after that crisis ended right opening up the the airline sector to private airlines jet
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damania east west some of you may remember these names happened after the crisis ended and I could
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go on and on so many you know reforms happened look I'm also a critic I also point out that
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there were many reforms that Nasim Harao didn't do in agriculture for example on the labor markets
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for example Nasim Harao didn't touch that at all right on education and health you know while his
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instincts were right he didn't go as far as the UPA government and the today's Modi government
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have done right so you know the policies were in the right direction but they weren't as carefully
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crafted and frankly they didn't have the use of technology that you have today there was
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something he simply didn't have but so many reforms happened after that and the point of
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that chapter Amit was to was to push against this view that it was the IMF who did it and India only
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reforms under crisis there was no crisis in those three years right and yet so many changes so many
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reforms happened it was because both Manmohan Singh and Nasim Harao were conviction reformers
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I'll leave it to my listeners to actually go read your excellent book and you know go into the weeds
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of all of this is a fascinating story and I can understand why like I think Prakash Jha made a
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very smart choice this is going to be a big hit but so in the 20 minutes or so that we have left
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before you have to go some quick questions on areas that we can't really leave untouched and
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one of them is the demolition of the Babri Masjid where it is common today to you know to blame
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Narasimha Rao for that and a lot of it of course comes from the congress desire to disown him and
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wipe out his legacy and we'll talk about that as well because we can't not talk about that
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but the sort of common canard spread is that he allowed the Babri Masjid demolition willingly
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and I think Sonia Gandhi has even said that if I think Rahul Gandhi has said that if Rajiv was
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alive it would never have happened if Nehru Gandhi was in power the Babri Masjid well so I've answered
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this question many times so let me put it in this manner which is in India the police come under the
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state in June 1991 the state government of UP where Babri Masjid is located was won by Kalyan Singh
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of the BJP he contested on the plank of demolishing the Babri Masjid and he won the
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election he is a duly elected chief minister the BJP enjoys a majority government in the state of
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Uttar Pradesh they are in charge of protecting the Babri Masjid because the police state police have
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to do it right this is a conundrum so anyone who says that the Babri Masjid has to be protected
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really you have to go back not to December 92 but to June 91 to say that a party has come to power in
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UP which has the constitutional obligation to protect the Babri Masjid yet its political
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obligation is to destroy the Babri Masjid should you dismiss that government I would like your
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listeners to answer that question should you dismiss that government right what do you think
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Amit can you dismiss a government I don't think you can dismiss a government no I agree with you
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it's a conundrum it's a conundrum you can't even if you've been voted in to do something
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unconstitutional you you punish them after the act you can't you can't dismiss them preemptively
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the only way to do that to protect the mosque under this circumstance is to impose central rule
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dismiss the Kalyan Singh government take charge of the Babri Masjid and protect it there's nothing
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else you could have done so the real question before Nasima Rao was why did he trust Kalyan
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Singh why did he not dismiss the government that's a valid question but that would have
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you're saying that would have been like punishing a thought crime because it hadn't been done yet
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that's the first problem as the law secretary to Nasima Rao said that look this is a problem
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because there can't be a potential for breakdown in law and order to impose article 356 there has
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to be an actual breakdown you can't dismiss someone for a thought crime right secondly all
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those politicians who say that Nasima Rao should have imposed article 356 why didn't they say that
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before the mosque fell right why didn't Mr Chidambaram say before the mosque fell that
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Kalyan Singh should be dismissed why didn't Sonia Gandhi say before the mosque fell that
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Kalyan Singh should be dismissed why didn't Sharad Pawar say that why didn't Arjun Singh
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of all people say that biggest critic of Nasima Rao the fact is that nobody was willing to give
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Nasima Rao the political cover to impose president's rule and the reason for that was half the game was
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demolishing the mosque the other half was demolishing Nasima Rao right and everybody
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was hoping that which whatever happened on December 6 1992 Nasima Rao would fall and Nasima Rao was
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praying and hoping that somebody would give him political cover to impose article 356 impose
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president's rule dismiss Kalyan Singh nobody was willing to say that VP Singh didn't say that
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Jyoti Basu didn't say that everyone was hemming and hawing and saying that we are concerned we
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stand with the prime minister but nobody was actually saying that sentence right now Nasima
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Rao as prime minister was not nobody he was somebody who should have done it on hindsight
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he didn't it was an error but it was a very very difficult error to decision to make had he imposed
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president's rule definitely BJP would have brought about a no confidence motion saying murder of
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federalism congress is up to its old tricks and Nasima Rao was not confident that his own cabinet
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would support him in fact after the demolition of Babri Masjid when many of the cabinet ministers
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like Arjun Singh or ML Fotehdar were complaining saying Nasima Rao you know behave badly this that
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Pranab Mukherjee says in his in his memoirs that he told them don't speak now all the while before
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Babri Masjid fell all of you were agreeing with Nasima Rao none of you were sticking your neck out
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and saying impose president's rule why are you doing it now right the real question here is not
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the demolition of Babri Masjid Amit I think the mistake we make is that those secularists amongst
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us see the rise of the BJP right as as ending Indian secularism and the and the standing of
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Babri Masjid as the standing of Indian secularism but it isn't the real question is the rise of the
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BJP and is there any law in India that could have prevented it no because it's a it's a bottom up
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democratic rise and once that rise was ordained the demolition of Babri Masjid was preordained
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once Kalyan Singh comes to power in UP it becomes very difficult to protect the Babri Masjid if not
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then then a few months later if not a few months later then a few months later something like this
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could have happened and the only thing that could have prevented that Nasima Rao didn't do it's an
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error he didn't do but he was terrified if he did it nobody else would back him up and on this I
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think I agree with him yeah and I think this is a situation where he truly got bad cards which he
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could do nothing with because had he like you correctly said you know had he dismissed the
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Kalyan Singh government immediately anti-federalism and authoritarianism and all of that comes into
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play and rightly so and he didn't dismiss them and he got screwed anyway so keep in mind Amit that
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it immediately after the demolition of Babri Masjid all the non-BJP parties rallied behind
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Nasima Rao so at that time they were not paying for his blood this canard that Nasima Rao did
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Babri Masjid was spread by the congress party after Sonia ji takes control of the of the congress in
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1998 as a way of destroying Nasima Rao's legacy so the the story that Nasima Rao did Babri Masjid
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is not spread by the BJP or the opposition spread by the congress party and if the congress party
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is saying that their own person their own prime minister did Babri Masjid why will anyone else
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stand up for Nasima Rao the catastrophe for Nasima Rao is he's a man without a constituency
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you can say anything about him and get away and the Babri Masjid is a good example look I'm very
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critical of him in his role in the Sikh riots but in the Babri Masjid case he's been unfairly maligned
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fair enough let's move on to our sort of second last topic on the subject which is going nuclear
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you know you you have a fascinating chapter where you mentioned that Atal Bihari Vajpayee
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when he took over from Nasima Rao they met and Nasima Rao apparently told Vajpayee
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samagri tayar hai so basically saying that I have set everything in place and now it is in your
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hands and so tell me a little bit about that because this is also not very well known in the
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sense that people give Vajpayee all the credit or the debit as it were for India actually going
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nuclear but Nasima Rao put it completely in place and if not for circumstance and the main
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circumstance being losing that election it would have happened under him as Vajpayee himself
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recognized well it's the my favorite chapter in the book so I'm not going to tell you all
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it's a there's a mystery there and I hope your listeners buy the book and read the mystery
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but I'm proudest that I don't think anyone else has had access to the documents and the interviews
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that I have had on India's nuclear program nobody right has had access I can't unfortunately
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on this show or on the record say how I got access to it but suffice to say that you know
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it gives you a sense on a on a minute by minute view of how India's nuclear program is done
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who is in the nuclear committee I talk about how Nasima Rao accelerated the nuclear program in 1991
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onwards he didn't just accelerate the nuclear program he also accelerated the program for
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delivery of the nuclear bomb which is both in terms of having a missile that's where APJ Abdul Kalam
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comes in as well as through planes right so that both of these are delivery mechanisms for the
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nuclear program and Nasima Rao had brought the program to fruition by 1995 I talk about the cat
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and mouse game between his and the Americans and look I know this chapter is not footnoted is
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deliberately not footnoted but it's the most fun chapter I had doing because there's a genuine
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mystery there and there's a there's a thrill there in how Nasima Rao outwits the Americans
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and yet you know is sagacious enough to not take credit by exploding the nuclear bomb so close to
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an election if he had done it he would have won right but for him national interest was more
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important which is why an opposition leader from the BJP Vajpayee who we credit with testing
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nuclear weapons in 1998 actually said in his words that the true father of India's nuclear program
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was Nasima Rao and he says this emotionally when Nasima Rao dies in 2004 saying that this is the
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man whom we should thank and we haven't done it and yeah I don't want to say more I'd like your
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listeners to actually read that chapter yeah and and statesmanship on the part of Vajpayee to give
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credit or debit as it were where it is due something that the congress did not do and and
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this is perhaps the most heartbreaking element of this whole story that after doing all of this you
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think that okay he gets up he surely they'll give him the Bharat Ratna for whatever it's
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worth surely he'll be a national hero forever he'll die a much loved man and so on and so forth
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but instead what happens is he dies in 2004 in Delhi and the congress does not want him to be
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cremated there they insist that the body be taken to Hyderabad because Sonia just doesn't want him
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to remain a major figure to have a samadhi in Delhi or whatever all of that and then eventually
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he is sort of taken to Hyderabad there's a cremation of sorts there and gradually people have
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paid their respects and they kind of move away and then there is a sentence from your book where
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you say that night television channels showed visuals of the half-burnt body skull still visible
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lying abandoned stray dogs were pulling at the funeral pyre stop quote which is an amazing
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heartbreaking sentence that here is a man and his skull is you know still visible and stray dogs
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are pulling at his funeral pyre and that seems to me to be a metaphor for exactly what happened to
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him that's right that's why the chapter is called half-burnt body yeah i mean you know
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what more can i say i mean in any religious tradition the treatment of the body even the
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worst human being the body is treated you know in hinduism this is particularly important that the
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body is treated with respect and the fact that even that didn't happen for the man tells you
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that how far his legacy has been forgotten by us right and i just hope that the book and this
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this particular conversation we're having helps resurrect him it has resurrected him but i hope
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it resurrects him even more because look there are plenty of things about him that are a problem
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right but he transformed india and he transformed india mostly for the good it wasn't fated to
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happen right it required tremendous skill and it's something that we can learn about not just in
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politics today but outside politics today yeah yeah and absolutely remarkable leader and you
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know before i read your book in fact i i already admired him and giving credit for a lot of what
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happened but reading your book actually just seeing that entire journey just made me go wow
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because we don't have a politician like that and it's it's so tragic that you know that he
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should be treated like this by his own party for their own image building reasons and you know the
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kind of narrative manipulation that goes on and and there's so much else in your book which i'll
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you know ask readers to go to so let me kind of end with a final question as we just have like
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five minutes left what are you reading these days well i just finished reading my colleague
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upinder singh's book ancient india culture of contradictions i would recommend it very strongly
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it's a you know it summarizes several of the key issues when it comes to ancient india equality
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gender liberation freedom etc etc she has a way of sticking to facts she has a way of being
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accessible she's opinionated like you know the best scholars are but it doesn't interfere with
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with the way she tells the story so i really like that book and she also happens to be the daughter
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of one of the protagonists of one of the people who comes out looking really good in the story
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manmohan singh because even after the congress party turns their back on him he shows up every
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year at narasimha rao's uh you know birthday celebrations and all of that and he's kind of
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still sort of maintained that loyalty and that warm feeling very much but i would say upinder
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singh is very much her own absolutely yeah i didn't mean to i mean no one should be known
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as someone's daughter especially yeah she's like you know she's one of the top absolutely top
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scholars uh on on indian history so it's you know been quite you know definitely been quite
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enlightening uh so it's an amateur uh i mean mine is an amateur interest uh in in history so it's
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nice to uh you know to engage with the works of such a professional historian maybe you're the
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narasimha rao of political scientists so you're interested in so much else thank you very much
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well i i i i think i take that as a compliment it was made as a compliment uh what else anything
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you'd like to recommend to listeners in terms of books films music well you know i i recently
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read this book called bride's head revisited um by evelyn war it's a phenomenal book phenomenal
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um it's it you know it's been made into a film recently but i would suggest you avoid that
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i think it was itv there's a basically a um a six part or six or seven part series
#
you know that came out in the mid 1990s widely seen as the best tv series ever made right at least
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at that time before the ott explosion it was seen as you know it was very expensive series to be
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made around the same time pride and prejudice was made by bbc so i would recommend that strongly
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it's a bit slow by today's ott standards but bride's head revisited the six or seven part
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series i would recommend if you don't want to read the book fabulous so when i thank you so
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much for coming on the show may vinae ram or vinae sitapati as it were continue to flourish and
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write many books thank you very much this is a pleasure it's the first time we're doing this
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in person it just tells me that how inadequate zoom is when it comes to building chemistry in
#
such a conversation so thank you very much amit absolutely thank you for being here thank you
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thank you for listening
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did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
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production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
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