#
I have often said on this show that in my eyes there are three problems with India right
#
The first of them is the proximate problem of the party in charge.
#
Now this is of course subjective and you can disagree with me on this.
#
Now here are the other two.
#
These are deeper problems that have been with us for much longer.
#
One is our fractured society, especially the way religion and history have been weaponized
#
for narrow nationalistic purposes and the way Muslims have been othered.
#
These strains have been with us for decades but they found their most vociferous expression
#
in these current times.
#
In fact the first problem is really a consequence of this second problem.
#
Politics after all is supply responding to demand.
#
But what I want to talk about today, what I want to talk about now is a third problem,
#
the oppressive Indian state.
#
I have been writing about this for so long, more than 20 years in fact, that everything
#
I now say will sound like my personal set of cliches.
#
But I'll say it anyway, the Indian state is designed to rule us and not to serve us.
#
We are effectively subjects and not citizens.
#
All we did in 1947 is we replaced white skinned rulers with brown skinned ones.
#
We kept the colonial apparatus of subjugating the people.
#
We centralized power and instead of protecting the people from the state, we protected the
#
Every political party that has held power has taken advantage of this.
#
We can all agree that this is a problem.
#
Where did it arise from?
#
When I say our state is designed to rule us and not serve us, what do I mean by designed?
#
Well this design is our constitution.
#
Our constitution may have been framed with good intentions, but there is so much wrong
#
It does not protect our rights enough.
#
Consider all the caveats on the right to free speech for example.
#
There is much about it that is illiberal and horrifying.
#
Ambedkar himself was so disillusioned with it that in 1953 and again in 1954 he said
#
he wanted to burn the constitution.
#
Now one can find in the constitution things we like and things we don't like.
#
In a healthy discourse, we can talk about all of it.
#
But in this present moment, criticism of the constitution which I have been doing for a
#
couple of decades has become associated with this government and their critics are now
#
treating the constitution as some kind of holy book which is just crazy.
#
There is also the imputation that those who criticize the constitution want a new constitution.
#
That's a lunatic suggestion.
#
I shudder to think of what constitution this regime would frame, but think about this for
#
Why would they want a new constitution when this one enables them to rule India with impunity?
#
Anyway, my broad point is that we need to keep talking about what ails our country.
#
The design of the Indian state is one of those things.
#
I'm going to keep talking about it.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Orgo Shengupto, a brilliant lawyer who founded the Vidhi Center for Legal
#
Policy about a decade ago.
#
Now I wrote a post on my newsletter last week about insiders and outsiders.
#
Outsiders sit outside government and criticize it freely.
#
They always speak truth to power, but they don't have any short-term impact on policy,
#
even if they do tell themselves they're playing the long game.
#
I'm the classic outsider.
#
And then there are insiders who work within government or with government and try to bring
#
about change in an incremental way.
#
They don't criticize the government or other insiders, as they know that is the best way
#
to stay within the system and bring about short-term change.
#
But even if they're driven by public purpose, they can be seen from the outside as being
#
too close to government.
#
Now the Vidhi Center for Legal Policy does a lot of work for government and have been
#
accused of being their stooges.
#
I'll leave it to you to make that judgment, but I think the allegations are unfair and
#
Now Orgo recently wrote a book called the Colonial Constitution.
#
He's received a lot of flak for it, for people assuming he is advancing the government's
#
alleged agenda against the constitution.
#
People who say this haven't read the book.
#
He's quite clear in the book that he is against making a new constitution.
#
All he wants is discussion and debate.
#
I agree with him and I also argue with him.
#
I ask the tough questions I want to ask.
#
I state my disagreements with some of his points, but broadly I found it an incredibly
#
enlightening conversation.
#
We started speaking about the book and the constitution after the two-hours mark.
#
Until then we discussed his journey, we discussed Vidhi, we chatted about what it is to work
#
The whole thing is fascinating.
#
I think you'll enjoy it.
#
But before you begin the conversation, let me inform you that after being super lax with
#
my newsletter, I have burst into life.
#
I have written four posts in the last few days, three of them in the last week, and
#
I will be regular, quite as regular this year.
#
That's my 2024 resolution.
#
So head on over to my newsletter at India uncut dot substrack dot com and please subscribe.
#
And now for a quick commercial break, do you want to read more?
#
I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
#
This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and essays.
#
There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
#
But the problem we all face is how do we navigate this knowledge?
#
How do we know what to read?
#
How do we put the right incentives in place?
#
Well, I discovered one way.
#
A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ compounds at CTQ compounds
#
dot com, which aims to help people up level themselves by reading more.
#
A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called the Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read the subjects covered
#
went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
#
This helped me build a habit of reading.
#
At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
#
So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQ compounds and check out
#
New batches start every month.
#
They also have a great program called future stack, which helps you stay up to date with
#
ideas, skills and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
#
Future stack batches start every Saturday.
#
What's more, you get a discount of a whopping twenty five hundred rupees, two thousand five
#
hundred if you use the discount code unseen.
#
So head on over to CTQ compounds at CTQ compounds dot com and use the code unseen, up level
#
Welcome to the scene and the unseen.
#
It's actually about time that you came here because I've had so many episodes and just
#
a constitution and that's kind of been a running trope on my show, like in larger ongoing
#
discussion across 40, 50 episodes across three, four years.
#
But before we go to that, and I really enjoyed your book, of course, but before we even get
#
to that, I want to sort of talk a little bit about your life.
#
And before we even get to that, I want to dig into what you were just saying, how CR
#
Park Bengalis are not actual Bengalis.
#
So can you can you elaborate on that?
#
They are actual Bengalis.
#
It's just that the Bengali that is spoken here in CR Park is very different from the
#
Bengali that we speak in Calcutta.
#
And there are these CR Parkisms that one of these is a very infamous Kanoki, which is
#
a bastardized take on Kyoki because the CR Park Bengali has this innate ability to combine
#
Hindi and Bengali and make the best or the worst of both.
#
In Bengali, the word is because, which means, which is Karun in Bengali.
#
But because in Hindi, it's Kyoki, it becomes Kanoki, which seems quite intuitive in some
#
sense, but is really jarring to the ear of someone who hasn't been here.
#
But I've spent some of my best years in CR Park, so I'm not going to burn those bridges
#
I think there are only some quirks in the way in which Bengali is spoken.
#
But the food is great, the fish is even better, and I'm a regular there and I love every bit
#
Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me this great saying, Kos Kos Par Badle Pani, Char Kos
#
So what is Bengali like in terms of dialects?
#
Like you go outside Calcutta, you go to District Park, does the language change?
#
If the language changes, do you feel that the change also reflects something fundamental
#
about the people there as well?
#
Yeah, I think that this is true with any language.
#
It's not spoken uniformly everywhere, even in the same state, and it's certainly true
#
My forefathers came from what is modern-day Bangladesh.
#
Three of them were from, one was from Dhaka, one was from Poritpur, one was from Borishal,
#
which are all sort of staple names in East Bengal.
#
And my paternal grandmother was from Calcutta, so there always used to be this feud in the
#
houses to whether we are going to support East Bengal or Mohun Bagan.
#
I was firmly on the East Bengal side of it, thanks to my mother.
#
But the language that was spoken there, and I went to Dhaka quite recently and had a chance
#
to go back to the ancestral village where my great-grandfather had come from, because
#
they had come actually even before the partition of Bengal, so it was a while back.
#
But I did have a chance to see the school and I had a chance to see, there were some
#
writings that he had left behind about a little pond in the village.
#
And the language that was spoken there was different, but somehow the same as well.
#
And there were obviously certain words that were different.
#
So we say in Calcutta, you'd say nun for salt, there you'd say lobon.
#
And there was an interesting word, which is the word maujar.
#
The word maujar just means funny in Bengali.
#
But in Bangladesh, when you say maujar, it actually means great.
#
So how's the food, maujar, which means that it's great.
#
So there were these kind of quirks which were unique to the place itself, and it's not just
#
When I was in England, most of the Indian restaurants, as you will know, are run by
#
We got along because we spoke the same language, but only ostensibly so, because I could follow
#
only about 40 to 50% of what was being said and tried to guess the rest, because we were
#
usually talking about cricket.
#
And so it was easy enough to guess the rest.
#
But again, as there were significant differences, but I think that's really the way language
#
is because borders are transient and borders are, well, actually, they're a pretty new
#
If you look at the Treaty of Westphalia, it was, what, 17th century, and the idea of borders
#
is very much a 19th century idea, but there was free movement across, as always.
#
So it's no surprise that in Silet, the language there, as it is much more similar to what
#
you'd hear in Bengalis in Tripura or in Meghalaya, in Chittagong, again, as it is closer to Burma,
#
and whereas what you hear in Calcutta and so on is sort of its own animal.
#
And that's why what you hear in Delhi, in CR Park, is a mixture of Hindi and Bengali.
#
It doesn't make things, in my view, it doesn't make it any less legitimate.
#
It just makes it different.
#
And one of the things I find so delightful is that being in India, we can hold these
#
So you can have a really rich sense of being a Bengali or even a Bengali of a particular
#
Equally, you can have a rich sense of ownership as an Indian.
#
You can have, you know, a rich sense of belonging to whatever place you're actually born in,
#
which may not be, you know, Bengal, and you can be an individual, and that's kind of delightful.
#
One thing I often envy when I hear people talk about their great-great grandparents
#
and all of that is that I can't really trace my family history beyond my grandparents,
#
And I love people who do, like, I think Devanshu Dutta was on the show, and he spoke about
#
his four great-grandfathers, I think.
#
And one of them was a river pirate, and the others had colleges named after them.
#
For the lady, you have to take everything with a pinch of salt, but it made for a great
#
No, no, but I think his stories sound incredible, and then at some point you realize that they
#
I'm sure they are true.
#
No, I wish I actually knew more.
#
We have records still, my father's great-grandfather, so that's five generations, but my wife's
#
side, which is from, they're from Bombay, but originally from Junagarh, they have records
#
actually going back a little bit further, so like seven or eight generations, and that's
#
actually, I feel, really depends on who is a great documenter in the family.
#
It needs that oddball in the family who kind of sits down and does this record keeping,
#
and in Dhwani's family, as in her father, does that role, and someone must have done
#
It wasn't me or my father or my mother on her side, but yeah, we've got about four
#
generations, and it's lovely to, and it was particularly lovely to go back to the village
#
to somehow see where it all, what you think at least, began.
#
You know, it was interesting, because to be perfectly honest, right at the beginning,
#
I didn't feel anything, except for the fact that it felt that I had come somewhere which
#
had seen some members of my family.
#
It's obviously not a place that my father or my grandfather had seen or been, so it's
#
not as if I had any living memories.
#
But what made the place come alive was actually the people.
#
The people welcomed me as one of their own.
#
Initially, there was this suspicion, because there is always, I was told this later, that
#
there's always a suspicion that if there is someone coming from West Bengal who claims
#
that they were from the village, there could be a property dispute, and I'm a lawyer, and
#
so that really sets the alarm bells ringing.
#
But I think once they got beyond that and they realized that this is not someone who's
#
come back to take his ancestral land, I think there was a certain warmth, I mean, almost
#
borderline aggressive warmth, which meant that I drank four cups of tea in one and a
#
half hours and had to have a meal, was taken around and given a guided tour of the village.
#
I mean, I would say that it came close to feeling a sense of belonging for a place that
#
was otherwise quite alien.
#
But again, the only connecting factor, if I were to go back to that time, was language.
#
And I think that that's what made me feel that though I was in a different country and
#
I needed a visa to go back to my ancestral home, that at least we didn't need a visa
#
to connect with people who felt that they were exactly a kindred spirit in some sense.
#
So it was a feeling that I haven't fully processed.
#
And I guess one sort of unseen way in which it might make a difference, if you can trace
#
your genealogy back, that then you also have some sense of family history and that also
#
gives you some sense of history of this nation itself in the sense that we weren't always
#
It was something pretty different, it evolved over a period of time and just having the
#
sense that, oh, my great grandfather did this and my great great grandfather did this, could
#
Whereas if you're born without that sense of history stretching decades back, you may
#
So tell me about your early childhood, like all of it was in Calcutta, I'm guessing.
#
So take me through your childhood, what were you growing up years like?
#
Yeah, I'll just come to that in a second because an interesting thing struck me that when I
#
was writing my ICSE exam, when I was seeing the languages that were available for examination,
#
the first language on that list I still distinctly remember was Ao.
#
And I actually didn't do any research at that point of time and I still haven't done it.
#
The thought just came back to me as you were saying it.
#
And I felt at that time that I don't even know what this language is.
#
I don't know who speaks it.
#
I mean, I have a vague sense that perhaps it's a language in the Northeast just because
#
of the name, but I'm not really sure what this language is.
#
But this is the first language that a board examination in India is available in.
#
And I think that's the kind of feeling that I get, which encapsulates what this country
#
That this country is really what you were saying, it's really about that diversity,
#
where you start with Ao and end with Zo.
#
And even in the language like Bengali, it's spoken in X number of dialects.
#
And so the fact is that I think as you were saying that the idea of this nation has never
#
been one of a homogenous nation.
#
And that is very much a post-Westphalian, European idea of a nation as a homogenous
#
unit of people speaking the same language, being of the same race, looking the same way.
#
The idea of the Indian nation has never been really about that and there has never been
#
We'll of course come to this when we are discussing the book.
#
But my ICSE exam and going back to my childhood was in Calcutta and a very blissful childhood
#
And as a fellow Bengali, I think the best way to describe my childhood was that, you
#
remember there's this apocryphal saying that what's common between a Bengali boy and Jesus
#
Is that both of them think that their mother is a virgin and both mothers think that their
#
And I think that actually captured very much what kind of childhood I had.
#
It was a quintessential middle-class Bengali childhood.
#
I went to St. Xavier's School, which was a school my father had gone to and my mother
#
I had a great time there.
#
I hear of all these stories on your podcast as well of army kids who've grown up all over.
#
But I actually wouldn't trade my childhood for anything.
#
It was a beautiful time.
#
There was Christmas and New Year walking around Park Street, biryani every week, at least
#
five sweets after every meal, and of course Durga Puja, which was our highlight of the
#
year where there was a license to stay up the whole night.
#
It was a really blissful childhood and one that I think I really hold on to because the
#
city is very different.
#
I kind of have an insider-outsider perspective having not lived in the city now for over
#
I see the city very differently than I did at that point of time.
#
But those were, in that sense, some of the best years of my life.
#
It was a blissful childhood playing cricket on the streets when there were buns of which
#
there were many, which is why I have a very complicated relationship with the benefits
#
or otherwise of communist rule because having lived through it for the better part of my
#
childhood, I saw how the theory and the practice worked together or didn't, as the case may
#
But at the same time, there was always this great plurality.
#
There was a kind of blissful ignorance of divisions of class and caste, certainly of
#
religion, and it was a good time to be in Kolkata.
#
I had a very good childhood.
#
Just going back to the Aav language, I just find by quickly Googling it that it's a Naga
#
language which is written in the Latin script.
#
And of the five dialects which are mentioned, two of them are apparently, quote, nearly
#
mutually unintelligible, which is, you know, so it's fascinating.
#
And it being in the Latin script indicates that essentially the British really came and
#
figured out how to write it down and how to record it.
#
And in the recording of something also, you run the danger of ossifying it and so many
#
I'll double-click again on sort of your childhood.
#
You mentioned your mom was a teacher, you know, I'm guessing that there would be books
#
around the house and, you know, Bengalis of a certain type generally like to have books
#
around the house anyway.
#
So tell me a bit about your parents, what were your mom and dad like?
#
What was the texture of your early days in childhood?
#
Were you reading a lot?
#
What kind of kid were you?
#
Yeah, my mom was a teacher and my father was a banker and both were avid readers and I
#
So you can imagine what that household might have been like.
#
I grew up with, I mean, I grew up with a whole library full of books, an interesting story.
#
My mom, this was April 1990 and my mom had won a contest, one of these lucky draw contests,
#
which I didn't know people could actually win, which is you get something at the bottom
#
of a Pepsi can and stuff like that, which my mom won.
#
And the prize was that Kapil Dev would come to your house.
#
And Kapil Dev was at that time the biggest draw and it actually happened, it was a rainy
#
day, I remember, I could bunk school because it was this big occasion and Kapil Dev was
#
coming to our house and the whole neighborhood had packed into our living room, which was
#
So the living room could comfortably accommodate about 15, but there were about 150 people
#
there in that living room.
#
And our living room had this large bookshelf running through and Kapil Dev came into the
#
house and looked at the books and said, wow, so many books, who reads them?
#
He was like, wow, I must read some.
#
It was a very interesting introduction to Kapil Dev.
#
And so books have always been a very central element in the household, wherever we found
#
space, we managed to pack in some books.
#
A lot of my initial reading was in English, though it was a bilingual library.
#
My father read a lot of Bengali himself, was a great fan of Tagore.
#
But so I used to listen to a lot of Bengali, particularly music.
#
But reading was primarily in English.
#
So I guess like a kid of the late 80s and early 90s, it was, I guess, after the kids'
#
books, which I don't remember, but Enid Blyter, so started with Five Find Outers and Famous
#
There was Billy Bunter, which my father had a few old copies of.
#
There was William, and then it became Hardy Boys and Three Investigators.
#
And then after that moved on to Jeffrey Archer.
#
I remember Kane and Abel was the, I felt like it was the single biggest achievement of my
#
life, finishing Kane and Abel.
#
And then, of course, I guess it goes on from there.
#
So I think books form a very central part.
#
Music forms a very central part of our growing up.
#
There was a wide variety of music that was there, keeping with the stereotype of Bengalis
#
My father, unwittingly, of course, he didn't know what the ramifications of this was.
#
He was a big fan of Jim Reeves.
#
And Jim Reeves had a song called Bimbo Bimbo, where you got to go you.
#
So he decided that my dark name would be Bimbo.
#
Something that at first was problematic.
#
But then over a period of time, there was only one way to get through this, which was
#
So there was Jim Reeves, there were the Beatles, which my mother was a big fan of.
#
There was a lot of Hindustani classical.
#
There was a lot of eclecticism in our musical choices.
#
There was a lot of Ramindra Sangeet, which I found right at the outset as the most deathly
#
boring piece of music that I could, but over time, realize my folly.
#
Because I realized that it's essentially about the lyrics.
#
It's really, I mean, it's really not as much about the song.
#
And I was recently listening to, I was telling you before this conversation started, a podcast
#
with Chandril Bhattacharya, who's a member of the Bengali band Chandra Bindu.
#
And he was saying that what makes a song a hit song is really the tune and not so much
#
And he gave the example of the Beatles.
#
And he said, I want to hold your hand.
#
I want to hold your hand.
#
I mean, this is a song that any class five student could have written.
#
There's nothing particularly spectacular about the lyrics, but it's a hit song because
#
there is something about the tune, the beat that makes the song work.
#
And I think that Ramitras again kind of flips this because there are notable exceptions,
#
but except for those exceptions, it's really very much about the lyrics.
#
So it's not perhaps child-friendly music, but there was a lot of it at that point of
#
And so there was a range of music and books in the house.
#
There was a lot of sport on TV at all points of time.
#
So I was always allowed to see sport on TV.
#
And I remember my father taking me.
#
This was one of my earliest memories.
#
The 1987 Cricket World Cup final was in Calcutta.
#
I was three years old then.
#
And my father got me in without a ticket.
#
The policeman first protested, but then I was picked up on my shoulder and taken in
#
to watch an Australia-England game, that final.
#
So there was always a lot of sport.
#
And as I said, the sport was more watched rather than played.
#
Very amateur and terrible cricketer and footballer.
#
But there was a genuine love for sport that was inculcated at that time.
#
So yeah, it was a great childhood.
#
And I must commend your courage in revealing your nickname because I too have a Bengali
#
nickname, which I will never reveal in public, never.
#
Like you hold a gun to my head.
#
I will say, press the trigger.
#
You're not always trying to press it.
#
I was in that boat for a while.
#
My God, and then you got into oil.
#
And I was like, no, I can't do this.
#
I used to watch the NBA when cable TV had come and there was a basketball player called
#
Oh, that must have helped.
#
And I was like, I mean, but I don't know why he had that name voluntarily.
#
But given he did have that name, I was like, yeah, okay.
#
I mean, that was one of the, I guess, one of the factors.
#
So what kind of kid were you in terms of what did you want to do?
#
If so, what kind of daydreams did you have?
#
And I spent in class four.
#
I got my class four or five.
#
I got a computer, which was a 486.
#
And I used to fiddle around with MS-DOS trying to just work my way around what this magical
#
And basically, books were my vehicle into different worlds, which because we, at that
#
point of time, as my father was working at the State Bank, the State Bank of India,
#
so he had, we used to wait for when he could take his LTC.
#
And I think the furthest we went, we had a very, I remember my first big holiday was
#
when we came to Delhi to see Delhi and Agra and Jaipur, the usual.
#
And then I used to really look forward to our holidays.
#
I always liked travelling because I think that's what reading, particularly reading
#
Satyajit Ray, the Feluda mysteries had really created this wanderlust, this going to places
#
which you have only heard of.
#
And there was this, a non-Satyajit Ray book, but a beautiful book, which I don't know.
#
I'm sure Arun Nawa Sena must have translated it by now.
#
It's called Chander Pahar, which was a book by Bibhuti Bhushan, the person who wrote the
#
book on which Pathir Pachali is based, which was a really magical story about a young Bengali man
#
who finds himself in Africa.
#
And there is this monster that on the top of a mountain, then he has to go and find it.
#
And that sense of mystery, I think, was inculcated that I really wanted to travel.
#
But of course, we never got to Africa.
#
The furthest we went to was Rajasthan.
#
I mean, this is very much sort of before the fruits of liberalisation have come into the country.
#
So I remember we had a long 25-day trip in Rajasthan, including Shonar Kella,
#
which was the golden fort in Jaisalmer, which is every Bengali's dream to go to.
#
Where Bengali was spoken, actually, by the locals as well.
#
Because at that point of time, actually, there were not that many tourists in Jaisalmer.
#
You had to go about six or seven hours from Bikaner or about five or six hours from Jodhpur.
#
So very few made that trek, except the hardiest of Bengalis in their monkey caps,
#
of course, because they wanted to have a picture taken at Shonar Kella.
#
So at that time, I was essentially a child who was a classic good kid, did well in school,
#
studied hard, waited for my summer and winter holidays to go off somewhere,
#
read books in my free time, fiddled around on my computer and played cricket badly.
#
I think that was basically sums it up.
#
So what did you do after that? What were your colleges like?
#
And when did you come to sort of fructifying a sense of what am I going to do next?
#
So I was a good public speaker in school.
#
I did well in my extemporary and debate competitions.
#
So as with all good public speakers, my mother said, you should think about doing law.
#
And she said that in class seven.
#
I wasn't clear what I wanted to do, except that I was clear,
#
which was actually a big call at that time, that I wasn't going to do engineering or medicine.
#
So despite being a so-called good student, I didn't take science in my 11th and 12th,
#
which was a big call that surprised many of my teachers.
#
But I was clear that I didn't want to do the sciences.
#
And I was one of the only students or the only student who took humanities.
#
Since it was a boy school, it didn't offer humanities as a stream.
#
We only had science and commerce.
#
And but I took humanities because I felt that that's where my inclinations lay.
#
I wasn't sure whether it was going to be economics or law.
#
I was so I did well at my boards.
#
I thought I'd come to St. Stephen's and do economics.
#
I didn't get in as well.
#
But I had written the National Law School, Bangalore examination.
#
That time, there were very few national law schools and the exams were separate.
#
So I only wrote the National Law School examination.
#
And I got it just about by the skin of my teeth.
#
And then suddenly I was in this dilemma because I was pretty sure that
#
that, you know, I would go because my board results were good.
#
I liked economics as a subject.
#
I got St. Stephen's with hostel, which I was told was a very big deal.
#
And so I was going to go there.
#
But then I got NLS and everyone said that, you know, you might as well think about this
#
a little bit unless it's a great school.
#
And I thought about it a little bit and not that it was a particularly rational thought.
#
But instinctively, I felt that I'd find a home in the law.
#
And my mother was convinced because I was a good public speaker that I should do it.
#
And so I decided to go to NLS, which was the best decision in my life.
#
I loved those five years in Bangalore.
#
These were by far the best years of my life.
#
And yeah, and I studied law and I had absolutely no regrets that I didn't do economics.
#
And I think over time, my affinity with numbers has reduced even further.
#
Or perhaps I never had any particular skill to begin with.
#
So I feel that this choice was a good one.
#
So tell me about those five years were so great for you.
#
Like at one level, I imagined that the kind of pedagogy you were exposed to was completely
#
different the way you were taught and all that would have been different.
#
And two, was it also the case that the sort of rigor required in law and the systematic
#
ways of thinking that you have to start doing?
#
Did that fall in naturally with your inclinations and what you were good at?
#
I think the first reason as to why it's great is more prosaic.
#
Is that for the first time, I was outside home and I was in a hostel.
#
I had to fend for myself.
#
Those hostel rooms were terrible.
#
It was one room where three people had to kind of jostle for space, but it was kind
#
of separated by three curtains.
#
I'm going to try and give you a graphic picture.
#
And there was a cot, there was a metal table, a chair, and a little rickety wooden cupboard
#
that was inside the wall.
#
And it was essentially maybe five by five something.
#
So it was essentially a kind of reality check of some kind.
#
And we had to do everything on our own.
#
We had to fend for ourselves for our own food.
#
We had to figure out who our new friends would be.
#
I was in a boy school, so it was the first time that I was really talking to girls.
#
And it was a new world.
#
And I liked the trappings of this new world.
#
I liked the freedom that it gave me.
#
I liked the intensity of the academics.
#
So I think it was the entire atmosphere around the classroom that first made me feel that,
#
hey, this is something that I really like.
#
Inside the classroom, I would say that the first trimester was really a continuation of school.
#
I didn't fully get the hang of it like in school.
#
I got a sense that I have to do well.
#
So it was a little bit like school where I felt like I was mugging up stuff and,
#
you know, trying to be the best at what I can, trying to do the best that I can.
#
But then I slowly got into it and I think a great credit for that goes to our history teacher,
#
Professor Elizabeth, who at that point of time I had a frosty relationship with.
#
But irrespective of that, I give her great credit for opening our minds by asking the
#
very simple question, what is history?
#
Now, this is a question that I never thought of.
#
I had never even dreamt that there would be a question of what is history?
#
I was looking for a definition from somewhere.
#
But it made us question some fundamental assumptions that we thought were dogmatic truths.
#
And she was provocative.
#
She was provocative and it was an assault in some sense on all that we held dear.
#
She said India was not a nation ever.
#
It was a constructed entity.
#
It came into existence in 1947 as this mass, but there is nothing sacrosanct about it.
#
It struck me as very problematic at that time.
#
I mean, it was certainly making us question some very fundamental assumptions that made
#
us really uncomfortable.
#
And I think that's the first time that I realized what college education should be like,
#
which is why I'm actually a big votary of ensuring that one, that law,
#
education in law not happened as a standalone stream.
#
I do think that law should be a graduate degree wherever possible because I think that
#
18 is too young and I think you need a grounding in life and other disciplines before you get into
#
And also because from my own personal experience, the courses in social sciences for the first two
#
years, I think really set a great foundation.
#
So I think we need a little bit more of that and not less because the prevailing sentiment
#
in law school was, oh, we have to get by these courses before we get to the real stuff,
#
which is contract law and constitutional law and so on and so forth.
#
But I think that really opened our minds and then came a course on constitutional law where
#
we had a great professor, Professor Uday Raj Rai, to whom I owe a lot in terms of
#
fostering this love for constitutional law.
#
And he asked some very fundamental questions in terms about why do we need a constitution?
#
What does it do for us?
#
What does it do for us that politics can't?
#
Why is it that people of a generation, in our case, those who lived between this 1947 to 50 period,
#
decide for all future generations what this constitution is going to be like?
#
What gives them the legitimacy to do that?
#
These were all some very fundamental questions that were being asked and questions that I didn't
#
have an answer to, but certainly fueled a spirit of inquiry that I wanted to understand this more
#
and to think for myself about this.
#
So there was a heady intellectual atmosphere in the classroom, a great peer group, and I felt that,
#
although some of my friends might disagree, that I was on my way to becoming a man.
#
So tell me more about your intellectual evolution at this point because I'm fascinated by the
#
different ways in which your, you know, Professor Elizabeth and your constitutional sort of law
#
professor were asking all of these questions which, you know, make you go back to basics.
#
So I'm curious about how your frame of looking at the world, how that developed through this
#
period, because I imagine you come in with what is a relatively standard, simple way of looking at
#
the world, but that becomes more and more nuanced and much sharper as you go through that.
#
So, you know, describe some of that evolution for me.
#
What are the subjects that you started thinking deeply about?
#
What are the, you know, the TILs that you had during that period?
#
How did you change your mind about stuff?
#
I think I started understanding India in that period. I think till then, I was living in this
#
bubble that was South Calcutta, and I thought that this is what India was.
#
Maybe NLS was a slightly larger bubble. We were in Nagarbhavi, which was at that point of time a
#
boondock in Bangalore. Now there's a huge ring road that runs through it. But we were, of course,
#
very different in that sense from the town folk who were around, and there was a huge difference,
#
which made us always think that we were still in a bubble of some kind. But it was at least a very
#
diverse and heterogeneous bubble with people from many different parts of the country.
#
So I think for the first time, it made me think more deeply about the country that I call home.
#
And at that second, it made me comfortable about dealing with
#
ambiguities. I think there was, as you said, a part of my childhood was
#
marked very much by a quest for certitude. I mean, you know, this is what a,
#
I would say over time that this is what the problem of our school education system is,
#
that everything has to be kind of in black and white, and you have to answer and write
#
or wrong and stuff like that. It doesn't prepare you for the world which is actually full of
#
shades of grey, right? So I think that there was this certitude that was perhaps a characteristic
#
of my being when I was in school, which was completely punctured in college. And I realised
#
that that was okay. That was okay, because everything doesn't need to have a right answer.
#
Everything doesn't need to always result in a definitive yes or a definitive no.
#
And I think that's what was the biggest draw in college at that point of time.
#
And I would say that as far as the law was concerned, I was still feeling my way around.
#
I didn't develop any particular point of view while I was in law school.
#
I think it was essentially being exposed to various facets of law, yes, but also various
#
people and various parts of the country that I knew very little about. So for example,
#
one big, I wouldn't call it a revelation, but NLS was the first time that I had to deal
#
openly with issues of caste. And this of course is a facet as I realise of the fact that I do
#
come from a high caste background. And so it is not something that came up in my time in Calcutta.
#
Caste wasn't a big issue in politics in Bengal at that point of time. So it was not as if I
#
was reminded of my caste, whatever it might be. I knew what my caste was, but it was not as if
#
I was reminded of my caste in every election. But this is where we really got into issues of
#
caste. I read Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste and not only did I read it as a theoretical treatise,
#
but it was very live in front of you because you're sitting in the same class with people
#
who everybody knows has come in on with schedule caste, schedule tribe reservation.
#
And there is always, you know, in our political science class, I remember there was always this
#
sense of, you know, uneasy tension that existed in the classroom about these issues. And I had
#
to think for myself for the first time that what I felt about it. And I think that I didn't have
#
any easy answers at that point of time. There was no, we were reading it in both our political
#
science classes and our constitutional law classes as issues of constitutional law. So it kind of,
#
we kind of foreclosed that question slightly because then it becomes a kind of doctrinal
#
question of what the Supreme Court said on subclassification between schedule castes.
#
So it becomes a kind of academic question. But I saw it in front of me. I mean, we didn't see it in
#
any, any, any violent fashion. Like it was, it was very much, this is 2003 to 2008. So it's not as if
#
people didn't sit on the same table with someone they considered to be of a lower caste. It was
#
not that kind of stuff that happened there. But there was this real uneasy tension and there were
#
these debates in class in terms of merit versus reservations and you know, the usual kinds of
#
debates. But what my takeaway was that the answers were no longer simple. And I think that's
#
something that I hold today. That one is that answers are not simple and it's best not to judge
#
somebody who has a different point of view, even if that point of view may not be well founded.
#
And I think that was the biggest evolution in that period that suddenly my world had been
#
turned upside down from this world where everything was certain and right or wrong to a world where
#
everything was shades of grey. And I was really trying to find a way to deal with it.
#
Because there are very few people who can deal with complexity, even in an environment like that,
#
I'm guessing, it becomes really tempting to adopt a simplistic worldview and to make that the hammer
#
with which you beat every nail. And therefore what you can often find in our discourse is that you
#
have a battle of vociferously argued, virulently argued simplistic worldviews and that recognition
#
of complexity isn't there. And as the debate gets more and more polarized, I guess it's a danger
#
that then, you know, expressing any kind of complex view runs the risk of being cancelled by every
#
side. What is sort of your sense of dealing with that? Like how did you see that play out? Like
#
when you talk about how, you know, you gave up the quest for certitude while you were there because
#
of the kind of pedagogy that was happening, because of the kind of questioning. Is that
#
something that by and large you saw in all your classmates and colleagues, et cetera, et cetera?
#
Or is it that, no, some of them found positions that were sort of attractive to them and stuck
#
to those. And, you know, therefore from their point of view, they could just claim a much
#
greater virtue than someone who is otherwise accepting that there is complexity and therefore
#
seems to be waffling. Yeah, I think there were two factors there that were critical
#
in NLS in the time at which I went. The first is that this was an age that was pre-social media.
#
So there wasn't the posturing that is necessary today. So I think some of this urge for simplicity,
#
for bite-sized pieces to do away with nuance comes from the fact that we want to have social media
#
likes and we want to get all the retweets that we can. And so I think this was, not I think,
#
it was before that time. And so people were okay with not necessarily having a strong point of view
#
that would become the dominant narrative from now on in college. So I think that because it
#
was pre-social media, it was not as if people wanted to have that one point of view and that
#
one theory that explains everything. The second thing is also that we didn't have political
#
parties on campus. And I think that also made a difference because it was not as if people were
#
in camps. And these camps were ones that couldn't see eye to eye on some issues. So my friends who
#
went to colleges in Calcutta, particularly the Presidency College where many of my friends went,
#
I mean, you could see that they fell into different camps and then you had to
#
toe the party line. I think neither of these existed at that point of time.
#
So I think that we were all, and I can't really speak on behalf of everybody,
#
but we were all trying to find our way at that time. And it was a genuine quest of discovery
#
in terms of what our own views are on particular issues as to whether there is a right way of
#
looking at some things. And of course, there were divisions of opinion. So I remember that
#
at that point of time, the Narmada Bachao Andolan issue had come up in some shape or form.
#
And Arundhati Roy had said something, had given a speech
#
abroad somewhere talking about it. And I remember that there was a really spirited debate in class
#
where there were people who completely castigated Roy for not saying what she did, but for saying
#
what she did abroad. Okay. So like, don't wash our dirty linen in public. And while that struck me
#
as strange at that point of time, you see that this is a commonly held view that seems to
#
dominate our politics today as well. There is this fear of the foreign hand, of the other,
#
that what you do here stays here. Let's not do it abroad. And it's a kind of strange sentiment
#
if you think about it. But it's a fact. And I think the person who was saying it was just
#
channelizing that sentiment that clearly existed from wherever he or she came from.
#
So there was a real diversity of points of view. But I think the key difference between them and
#
what I see now, one is, as I said, in social media, so you get to see the real person. And
#
as you were saying before, that people are much more polite in the real world than they are
#
on social media when they have a license to abuse. And I think the second thing was that,
#
I think a lot of these discussions were in good faith. Like we could have this and then we could
#
go and have a filter coffee in the canteen together, irrespective of whether you agreed
#
on this or not. So I think things didn't get possible. And so it was really formative.
#
And if I were to really put a pin on it, I think it was formative because it,
#
one, made me realize what country I lived in a little bit better. And two, because I learned
#
though this may sound paradoxical that it's a law school, but I learned not to judge,
#
that people held different points of view. And I feel that some of that carries through
#
to the way I am today. I want to double click on a question that you mentioned that,
#
you know, your history professor made you think about, which is about the notion that India as a
#
state, as a nation state, as we are now, these lines on a map is relatively recent, 1947. Also,
#
it is extremely contingent. You have all kinds of events and the lines on the map could be extremely
#
different in various different directions. And this is just a small sort of sliver of history,
#
you know. And therefore, then, you know, while our default sort of approach when we are growing up
#
is this is my country and you're patriotic and all of that. I think where it shades into nuance
#
over a period of time is that you begin to wonder what am I really in service of in terms
#
of my values? Am I in service of this country? Am I also in service of the people? Am I in service
#
of the culture? Am I in service of a particular way of thinking that I would like to see more of
#
and etc, etc. And you know, you mentioned your friend saying that, oh, why did she speak abroad?
#
Which to me sounds completely ridiculous, because my loyalty to my country is number one,
#
it doesn't override my general sort of humanist sense. And number two, I think the loyalty to the
#
country also involves this broader sense that to make this a better country, we have to keep
#
criticizing it and keep examining it, and so on and so forth. Though I don't agree with Arundhati
#
on most things, she has a right to do that wherever she kind of wants to. But just in terms of,
#
you know, this really fascinating and important question, which you mentioned came up over there,
#
how have your thoughts on it evolved? Like if I am to ask you, what are you in service of?
#
Yeah, so I think that the idea of a nation was always a problematic idea. And that's because,
#
I mean, very early on, as you said, we all start with this notion that, you know, we have to be
#
patriotic, and we sing the national anthem on 15th August. And all that is great, as you feel a
#
you feel a heady sense of belonging, you're not exactly sure to what, but you do feel a heady
#
sense of belonging. And it was interesting for me, but this idea of a nation was always a bit
#
complex for me right at the outset, because this question was as to whether I should sing the
#
national anthem in Bengali or in Sanskrit. This was a big question for me. Should I say Janaganamana
#
or should I say Janaganamana? This was always a question and I realized at some point of time
#
that I could do both. So sometimes I did one, sometimes I did the other and it really didn't
#
matter. Because there was always this kind of Bengali identity which was sitting side by side
#
with a larger Indian identity, which was sitting as part of a larger identity of being human.
#
And a lot of that had to do with Tagore, not only because of the fact that he had written
#
the national anthem, which when you read in Bengali, you will read as Janaganamana. You
#
will not read it as Janaganamana because that would be wrong. But when you read it in Devnagari,
#
you will read it as Janaganamana. And this is the lens that I use for this really silly India-Bharat
#
debate that we've been having. I mean it's India when we speak in English, it's Bharat when we
#
speak in Bengali, it's Bharat when I speak in Hindi, Bharat when I speak in Bengali. So I don't
#
think that this is necessarily an either or in any shape or form. So I don't think we need to
#
manufacture these debates where none exists, particularly when it comes to language. Because
#
when it comes to language, as in my view has always been, sorry I'm digressing a little from
#
your question, but my view has always been that actually diversity is what makes India what it is.
#
And if there is the only way that India will be in trouble is if there is too much unification.
#
You know this one nation, one language is actually going to be the death knell of this country if we
#
do go down that line. So the idea of the nation was always a little bit problematic in terms of
#
what you were in service of. And to be very honest, I don't have an easy answer to your question.
#
I would say, as in having read a lot of Gandhi for the book and before, that I'm trying to be
#
the best version of what I am and I'm trying to find what I think would be a truthful argument.
#
Right? And truth certainly knows no nationality, truth knows no boundary. And the fact is that
#
sometimes it may lead to an uncomfortable point of view and we will come to the book later. But
#
the book has caused some discomfort to people because any talk about changing a constitution
#
at this point of time seems to be talk of or be conflated with calling for a constitutional
#
Hindu Rashtra, which my book is not. But the fact is that it does cause some discomfort to people.
#
But my abiding sense has always been to try and say something which I firmly and deeply believe
#
in to be true. And of course, that's a point of view. And whether there is a universal truth or
#
not is a different question that you can get into if you want to spend eight hours.
#
I want to spend eight hours.
#
Yeah, no, I'm happy to get into that. But I think what that time in law school did was that it
#
one, as I said, made me feel that there isn't always a right answer. It's about the answer
#
that I find and I believe to be true. And it's okay if that is not in black or white,
#
because usually answers that are in black or white are either the product of complete
#
enlightenment, Gautam Buddha, Prophet Muhammad Jesus Christ type, or it is the product of
#
complete ignorance. And with ordinary mortals like us, it will possibly be the latter and not
#
Well said. Tell me also about how through this period and after law school, how does your sense
#
of purpose develop? Right? Because many people may not have a sense of purpose at all. It is
#
not necessary to have a sense of purpose to live a life. In fact, you could say most people don't.
#
You find what you're good at, you find how you can make a living, you find what makes you happy,
#
you kind of go down those tracks, and that's perfectly fine. But equally, you know, they can
#
also be this sort of, you know, as a background hum, this sense of this is who I am, this is what
#
I believe in, etc. So tell me a little bit about how that evolves and also how your journey after
#
law school then evolves. Like, what do you really want to do? Because you've done law school, but
#
there are so many options open to you at this point.
#
Yeah. So I think the, and this actually segues from your last question quite well, because my
#
sense of the nation develops actually when I'm not in the nation. When I'm in England,
#
I go to England after NLS. I got a scholarship to go to Oxford and I think I'm going to spend
#
a couple of years, end up spending a good five and a half years there doing a masters and then
#
an MPhil and then a DPhil teaching for a couple of years. So I spent a long time there.
#
I think that's where my sense of what I want to do in life becomes a bit clearer,
#
and it becomes clearer in two ways. One is that I'm clear then that I want to live only in India.
#
I have a clear sense that one, this is not my country when I'm in England,
#
that this is not my country. And this is not because there's some overt racist incident
#
or anything like that. There are small acts of everyday racism that many people face,
#
which I do as well. Not to say that that's the reason that I take this call, but I feel that
#
that law works in a particular cultural context and it works a certain way depending on that
#
cultural context. Let me give you an example. When we started National Law School Bangalore,
#
the first class that we take is law of torts. Now the law of torts has this most famous case
#
called Donahue versus Stevenson. Now this is a case from 19th century England where a woman went
#
to a pub and she ordered a bottle of ginger beer, found a snail in her ginger beer, and this became
#
the defining case of the law of torts or negligence that was did the pub owner owe a duty of care to
#
the customer to ensure that the drink was hygienic. And this went all the way up to the house of lords
#
and became so famous that one and a half centuries later, halfway around the world,
#
the first thing that a law student in Bangalore is learning of is Donahue versus Stevenson.
#
And I wondered at that time that, you know, if this happened in India, the woman would have thrown
#
the snail and drunk the rest of the ginger beer, right? This happens all the time, right? And the
#
only reason it became a famous case is because it happened in England. It happened in a particular
#
cultural environment where not only was this not acceptable and seemed to shock the conscience in
#
some way that you wanted to go and file a case, but also something that was, you know, captured
#
some zeitgeist of the time that it went all the way up to the house of lords and became some defining
#
case of negligence. And that made me realize that, you know, these guys have built a perfect system
#
for themselves and it works there. As if if you go to, I mean, I was there for five years in Oxford
#
and a lot of our universities are modeled on that college system. And the fact is that,
#
and there is a lot, a lot to take away from that system as an extremely high quality of education,
#
maintenance of institutional integrity, just beautiful city, beautiful buildings,
#
and the rest of it. But but I felt that it became clear to me that what we've been doing
#
is trying to be an intelligently framed copy. And I felt that that was not going to work.
#
And so that made my resolve on coming back even stronger. I mean, I used to facetiously say that
#
we should all come back till the till till the amount of money that is the equivalent of the
#
Kohinoor diamond is repaid. But the fact of the matter is that I was pretty clear during my five
#
years that I had a great time there. I really enjoyed myself there. And I owe Oxford a lot
#
because I wouldn't have been able to, and I'll come to that later, wouldn't have been able to
#
start with he had it not been for my time in Oxford. But but it also made it very clear that
#
this wasn't the place that I wanted to be. And so I'm, I'm really grateful to it. I know a lot of
#
people I was listening to your podcast, which with Shubhashish, who was who was with me in Oxford a
#
few years after me. And he said that it was a it was a kind of it was the best years of his life,
#
and it was quite life changing in some way. I think it was life changing for me too,
#
but in a very different way, in terms of the fact that it made me made me realize very clearly that
#
my sense of purpose, which is what you asked right at the outset, was to come back and try
#
and find what a legal system that I'm borrowing from Gandhi here, that is, I quote, instinctive
#
to India is. And I think that's what that's what I think was the intellectual challenge for me.
#
And yeah, and I came back because I found the weather terrible.
#
You're sitting here in the cold of Delhi and let me tell you as a Bengali from Bombay,
#
the weather here is not incredible. It's not great. It reminds me of Oxford as well. Yeah,
#
but hopefully a polluted Oxford, hopefully a passing phase. Yeah, but yeah, weather's not
#
Delhi's strongest suit. So I think it's best as Wittgenstein said that what we cannot speak of,
#
we should pass over in silence. The famous last words of Fractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
#
So here's what I'm going to ask you to do. I want you to educate me and my listeners really briefly
#
on how laws evolve. Like this is again, one of those things I guess we normalize and take
#
for granted at how there are laws, there are states, et cetera, et cetera. But how do laws
#
actually evolve? What sort of laws should we have? Like there is one notion that a society develops
#
norms and conventions over a period of time and they harden into laws and et cetera, et cetera,
#
and that is one way to live. And there is another notion that enlightened people from above can see
#
the faults in society and they can frame laws on how people should live and what Hayek might have
#
called law versus legislation. How do laws evolve and how does it apply sort of in an Indian context?
#
You know, we've had invasions, we've had colonial rule, we've had sort of our constitution, which
#
we can talk about later, but a lot of it seems to be, there seems to be this ongoing tension
#
between a top-down imposition of certain rules and bottom-up norms and conventions.
#
And you can make arguments for both sides. You can say that, look, a system of laws is only
#
going to work if it arises from within the society. But equally, if there are huge problems
#
within that society, huge illiberalism and sexism and whatever, then you might say that, no,
#
better we've seen the world, we also have to control those sort of impulses. So give me a
#
sense of how you think about all of this. I think of law like a club sandwich. I think it's
#
layer on layer on layer. And then someone decides that there needs to be some ketchup that's thrown
#
in in the middle of layers two and three. And so someone throws in that ketchup and you can keep
#
building that sandwich for as long as you want. And I think you're right on both counts that
#
it builds over time. It builds from social conventions. It builds from customs that exist.
#
If you ask this question in a particular historical context of India, as you said,
#
as this is going to be a real simplification of about 1,500 years, but essentially, what do we
#
have? We have a range of customs, right, as in the range of customs are traditional practices
#
that have been followed in small communities. There's never been this idea of this large state
#
and there are decrees that come from the Maharaja, as in which were either, you know,
#
it could be pharmas of some kind, it could be other kinds of royal decrees that have come.
#
But it's these two always kind of working in tandem. Partha Chatterjee has this excellent
#
book, Nationalist Thought in a Colonial World, where he describes this very well,
#
which is that, you know, that when the British come in, as in there is a move towards ensuring
#
that change in society happens through legislation. Now, this is the first time that this kind of
#
move happens when you're talking about sati and widownee marriage, where what you're looking at
#
is essentially social customs which have operated in a certain way, which have not remained static,
#
I think it's a mistake to think that everything remains static, everything changes maybe glacially,
#
but it changes. But now you want this kind of, you know, nuclear weapon, which is a legislation
#
that can come in and can change it. So, this is the first time that we have this idea of this binary,
#
that this legislation that is top down and the catch up in that sense and the layers of the
#
sandwich interacting with each other. And both these processes continue and you have examples of
#
this in post-independent India. You have laws which are, you know, so-called progressive,
#
enlightened. So, the Hindu code will is a good example where obviously the Hindu religion does
#
not want to be limited in terms of number of times that a man can marry and a whole range of other
#
reforms, but the first parliament led by Nehru is insistent that we pass the Hindu code bill,
#
which completely reforms and codifies Hindu personal law relating to marriage,
#
divorce, adoption, guardianship and inheritance. And then there are laws that develop over a
#
passage of time because they reflect what we think is where society has now currently,
#
has currently reached. And of course, you could take laws in relation to,
#
say, the Epidemic Diseases Act. The Epidemic Diseases Act was passed by the British in 1897
#
because epidemics had become a real thing. The state needed, and this is in the aftermath of
#
the Bombay Plague, where the state needed wide powers in order to control these epidemics. So,
#
it's a very short three-section legislation which essentially says that no law applies. We can do
#
whatever we want when it comes to controlling an epidemic. So, that's kind of a law that's reacting
#
to something that's happening in society, following society rather than leading society.
#
And I think both these are ways in which laws have evolved over a period of time. It's not to
#
say that one is right and the other is wrong. But I think there is a general point that which
#
sort of relates back to the point that I was making about the legal culture in which a law operates,
#
is that you can't have a law from left field that has no acceptability in society. Perhaps I think
#
this is even truer now of judgments, of courts, that sometimes you get these judgments that are
#
well ahead of their time. And while sometimes that may be fine, you do think that for something
#
to be actually implementable on the ground, what you actually need is, and this is the fundamental
#
basis for all law being law, is that people accept it as the law. I mean, if you go to the
#
Noachian way of thinking about law, the older, positivist way is that the law is the command of
#
the sovereign that is enforceable by sanction. But then Noachian comes in and says that, no,
#
it's not just that. That's the external aspect. But there is an internal aspect. I am not breaking
#
this light, not because I know I will be fined 2000 rupees, though that's a reason, but also
#
because I know that this is the law and this is the right thing to do for a well-ordered society.
#
So there is an internal reason, which has nothing to do with the fine that I have to pay
#
for following the law. So I think that there is that social acceptability of the law is a
#
very critical element. And that's why these pulls and pushes will always happen. So when the
#
Sabarimala judgment was handed down, as you do realize that this is something that has
#
gone well ahead of where society perhaps is willing to be at this point of time. So there
#
will be a pushback and then we will arrive at somewhere that is acceptable. So I think the way
#
that the law operates in India, particularly, is that it doesn't operate necessarily in the way
#
that this is the way, which is how we think of the law. The law is essentially an instrument
#
to make things more efficient because then everyone doesn't have to second guess. There
#
is a reason why there are traffic lights so that you don't have to keep looking as to what the
#
other person is doing. You can follow the light. But in India, and this is sort of a kind of
#
incipient thought that I have, that the law is an instrument of negotiation. It's just another
#
instrument of negotiation. Yes, that's what the law says, but you know, this is something that is
#
really alien to a different cultural context. And we all have it somewhere within us. I remember,
#
again, just to give you an example from my time in Oxford, is that every summer we had to clear
#
out from our rooms because they wanted to give those rooms for conferences. And I had a lot of
#
stuff and I had a flight to catch. So I was like, yeah, I'll clear it out, but can I keep this one
#
little loft where I can keep this stuff? And the person was like, no, you can't. If you do that,
#
it's 13 pounds a night. It's like keeping the room. Okay. So I was like, she said, that's the
#
rule. So I was like, okay, I get it, but it's only a loft. So what about I pay you one pound a night?
#
And the person just didn't know how to respond to that. Like I realized that it was not like we
#
were having a conversation anymore. She was like, what, what, what? I mean, this, this is alien
#
because it's not in the playbook. There is no such thing in the playbook. So then you realize that
#
there is a lot to do with the culture in which a law operates. And I think in India, there is a,
#
there is a lot of wiggle room that exists with, even with the law.
#
Yeah. So my friend, you know, Shruti Rajgopalan says about me that for Amit, traffic lights are
#
but a mere suggestion. You know, I mean in Bombay after midnight, I mean, come on, like,
#
what's the point? That's right. But you're always trying to take a call, right? I mean,
#
my parents used to live in Bombay for 12 years. And I, and I remember this, that Haji Ali,
#
I always stopped at because I felt that Haji Ali was a major one. But when you go forward from
#
Haji Ali and that Mahalakshmi temple, that even if it was red, I went on better road. So, you know,
#
you just always are, this is not, you can't really rationalize it and everyone will be making their
#
own decisions. Yeah. I remember I was in New Jersey a few years back, staying with a friend,
#
Yazajjal. And one day I said, Hey, I want to take your car for a spin. I want to drive in America.
#
So I took his car out for a spin. And at one point there's a traffic light, but it's like 1 AM and
#
there's absolutely no one there. So I just went through and he was like, stop, stop, stop. What
#
are you doing? You can't do that here. And then he immediately gets a notification on his phone
#
for the fine he has to pay. Yeah. So tell me more about, you know, that journey after Oxford,
#
that you decide to come back, but come back and do what? You know, what was the journey
#
to Vidhi sort of like in that period? Yeah. So when I was in Oxford as a PhD student,
#
you just end up having a lot of free time because there's only that much time that you can spend on
#
reading articles on one subject. My work was on judicial appointments in India,
#
very topical, has remained topical over a period of time. But there's only an extent to which I
#
could really talk about that. And at that point of time, India had signed this Indo-US nuclear deal
#
and we had to have this nuclear liability legislation that had to come in to operationalize
#
the deal. And together with a friend of mine, Prashant Reddy, who was a classmate of mine from
#
NLS, now writes on pharma regulation. He wrote that book with Dinesh Thakur.
#
Exactly. So Prashant and I decided that we will send in an unsolicited report to the standing
#
committee, critiquing the bill and making suggestions on how to improve it. And so we did
#
that. And it was a long 90-page submission because we had lots of free time on our hands.
#
And one thing led to another, and we were called to depose before the standing committee. So we
#
were about 26 years old or 27 years old. And that time was a great opportunity. You know,
#
you're coming back to parliament, you're called in. So we went in. It was a long one-hour
#
deliberation before the standing committee. It was first busted by the myth that all politicians
#
are up to no good. They wanted to do the right thing. But we have this general middle-class
#
notion that politicians don't want to do anything. It's all dumb. But it busted that myth very
#
clearly because there were about 30 members on that committee and you could see that the question
#
of nuclear liability was a difficult question for them. It was a technical matter. There were
#
issues of compliance with international law. There were some conventions that India had signed.
#
There was also our own history of the Bhopal gas tragedy and how Dow got away. So there were lots
#
of competing tensions and they wanted to do a balancing act that worked both for the people
#
of India but also made sure that the deal was operationalized. So we came in and we were
#
classic technocrats in that sense, giving some heavily technocratic legal solutions.
#
So we had an hour-long deposition. It was great. And then after that, we got a call from the
#
minister saying that, you know, why don't you help us draft some sections? You know, I still
#
remember because you're talking about Bombay. I was outside the Inox Theater in Nariman Point
#
because it was my holiday. I wanted to watch this movie called Taxi No. 911. It was a terrible
#
movie. Actually, my time would have been better spent on nuclear liability than Taxi No. 911.
#
But I hammered through a draft of some kind over the course of that night and together
#
with Prashant, we submitted it. And two out of those 17 suggestions became the law of the land,
#
not that it helped the cause because there was still a lot that was broken.
#
But as graduate students, this was absolutely earth-shattering. In one moment,
#
you send in some unsolicited report. The next moment, what you've given has become suddenly
#
the law. And it's like, wow, what has happened here? But as citizens also, you realize that this is a
#
bit scary, for lack of a better word, because who are we? What do we know about this subject?
#
No one asked us these questions. This kind of sentiment. So we realized that there is a gap
#
that exists inside the governmental machinery, which is that good ideas don't make it to
#
good legislation. So that's where the seed of Vidhi was born. Can we as lawyers not wait for
#
disputes to arise and then come in on the act and try to solve it, whether through
#
regular bipartisan dispute or through a public interest litigation of some kind?
#
But can we do this upstream? Can we try and help make better laws in areas that we are competent?
#
And so after that, for about a year and a half, as we continue working with some standing committees
#
of parliament, some ministries, we work on the judicial standards and accountability bill,
#
then we worked on a public procurement legislation. There was an enemy property legislation,
#
which was very interesting about properties of persons who migrated to Pakistan.
#
And what would happen to them? There was a huge case around the Raja of Mehmoodabad
#
that was happening at that time. So a kind of diverse and eclectic range of cases.
#
And then after doing that for about a year and a half, it was heady stuff. As it was,
#
you know, you're talking to secretaries in government, ministers, and you're like,
#
okay, this is really interesting. And I think there could be something here.
#
There was a sense that, you know, this is time to either commit or quit,
#
because I was at that time a lecturer and I had to apply for a job. As if I wanted to stay on
#
in the country, I had to apply for a regular tenured position. And I was clear I wanted to
#
go back to India. I wasn't, I wasn't keen on applying for the job. I would have as a default
#
option of a lawyer who wants to give back in some shape or form is to do litigation.
#
And this is all what our predecessors used to do as in those who wanted to give back. So I would
#
have gone into litigation. But then by this time, this idea had gained a certain amount of traction.
#
And so we felt that maybe this is time to see whether we can set up very full time.
#
And at that point of time, there were many people who helped us as a foremost was there were two
#
people actually who helped us immensely right at the outset before we even began. There was
#
Dr. Ashok Ganguly, who was he was former chairman of Hindustan Lever and he was then a member of
#
parliament in the Rajya Sabha. He was very bored sitting in Delhi because parliament was never
#
functioning. And he actually gave a gave me the confidence to say that if you want to do it,
#
you know, I'll help you in trying to find the right funders. Because I was an academic from
#
Oxford as in that to risk of us Bengali. So it's not as if I was going to come to Delhi rock up
#
and start my own thing as it seemed all very alien. So I think he gave the confidence that,
#
that you know, this idea has some merit. And maybe you should think about doing it on your own.
#
And the other person who encouraged us greatly at that time was Arun Jaitley. Arun Jaitley was the
#
leader of the opposition at that time. He was a lawyer. So he like many lawyers, he spent his
#
summers in London. So I met him on a number of occasions there. And, and it was the I mean,
#
it was a very different political time because there were people from all political parties who
#
were sitting together. Maybe they still do in London. I don't know. As you said, what happens
#
there is a different story as long as you don't bring it here. But he gave us the confidence that
#
the governmental system would genuinely benefit from the type of things that we were, that we
#
were doing. And so then we said that, okay, this idea has some merit. And my parents were very
#
supportive at that time as well. And so, yeah, and so I came back for a year, tried to get some
#
funding to get this going, managed to get some funding. And we started from a basement in
#
Jangpura in Delhi in 2013, four of us, another similarly cold day like this, almost exactly
#
10 years back. So that's what the journey from Oxford back to Delhi was like.
#
I'm curious about the why. Because you've done all of this, you've studied law, you've, you know,
#
wrote scholarship, gone to Oxford, been a lecturer there. The opportunity cost for you
#
for doing something like this is huge because there is so much else you can do. You could choose
#
a career in academia, which you said you weren't interested in, you wanted to come back. But even
#
having come back here, you could have chosen, I'm assuming, you know, a career in corporate law,
#
which is far more lucrative and ruminative and etc, etc. And not kind of gotten into this.
#
So what is driving you?
#
No, I had closed the option of corporate law a long time back. I wasn't cut out for it. I
#
wasn't good at it. I was not going to do that. And I think the deeper point is that I genuinely
#
haven't thought of my life's choices in terms of opportunity costs. Maybe it's a good thing that
#
I didn't do economics in college. But I've just gone with what I felt is right. And this hasn't
#
perhaps always been the most rational decision. But it does go back to this sense of purpose.
#
This is a question that you asked earlier. And I felt that as a lawyer and certainly as a citizen,
#
I wanted to give back. This was a very strong sentiment that I've always had. I haven't really
#
deconstructed why I have that sentiment. But I guess there's a range of factors that have
#
that have impelled it. So I was always clear that I wanted to give back. And I was looking
#
for the right vehicle to do so. Litigation was the default choice for lawyers, as I said,
#
but it always felt suboptimal to me because a law has been passed, some action has been taken,
#
someone has been hurt by that action. And then the lawyer has stepped in to try and solve this
#
problem. So it seemed like a suboptimal way of dealing with a problem at any sense of scale,
#
as it is a micro case, it's great. And it also played to what my mother thought was my greatest
#
strength of public speaking. But those apart, it didn't really seem like the best way to solve
#
a problem at scale. And that's really what I was looking for because I was looking for the macro
#
of the law and not really the micro. And this is what my time at Oxford had also given me,
#
that the system, that law itself, as you go deeper and deeper into the field,
#
as it is essentially a lot of very fine micro points, it's almost like neurosurgery, right?
#
I mean, this is kind of fine reasoning, subtle distinctions, as this is what is really the cutting
#
edge of the law or a legal argument or legal reasoning. I was more interested in the big
#
picture. And if you are interested in the big picture and you're looking at something at scale
#
and you still want to do law and not start some kind of retail company, then I think you would
#
necessarily look at parliament and you would look at making of laws. And Vinny seemed to fit,
#
that it seemed like a good way of I could give back. I could give back in a way that played to
#
my strengths. And it was an idea that most importantly had some proof of concept.
#
And I'll be perfectly honest, I wouldn't have been able to start Vinny if I had not been in
#
Oxford at that time, because it was easier for me at that point of time with a card that said
#
lecturer in law at Oxford to get any appointment that I wanted to in Delhi that it is now after 10
#
years and a great body of what I think is a great body of work. It's still much harder now. It was
#
much easier at that point of time to do it. And I think that is just the power of the brand and
#
also our colonial hangover. Yeah, indeed. No, and I love the sense of trying to engage with the big
#
picture, which I imagine would be both much more stimulating and also much more consequential,
#
because you make a much bigger difference that way. When Vinny started and you're entering that
#
legal ecosystem as a completely new kind of player, tell me a bit about what the problem
#
statement is. What is wrong with the ecosystem and what is the role you're looking to play
#
that fills those gaps? Yeah. So our mission was a very simple one. We want to write better laws
#
for India. And that's remained the mission for the last 10 years. It may have evolved and developed
#
some facets, but that was the core proposition of what Vinny stood for. And what was the problem?
#
The problem was that at that point of time, I remember we had a pitch document which said
#
that the problem is five C's, that our laws are not clear. They're written in this dense legal
#
jargon that nobody understands. Can we make them clear? Our laws are often not constitutional.
#
Many examples of that. You don't need to get into it. Our laws are often always not coherent,
#
because you realize that like a club sandwich, you're putting layer on layer. Okay. And you have
#
to be a little bit careful as to what you're putting on each. You know, you just can't put on
#
basically a roti on top of a piece of bread and- Mustard and mayo wouldn't go together.
#
That kind of stuff. So it's not coherent. So you have to see what it is that you're,
#
where this is fitting in. Laws are not compliant with our international obligations. There's a
#
shocking ignorance of international law in this country. There are a handful of people who do it
#
well, but there was no understanding of that. And laws are not contemporaneous. And this,
#
I think, was the biggest problem is that in India, we felt that the question that we ask
#
fundamentally when we are drafting a law is not, what is the problem I'm trying to solve in this
#
law? You'd imagine that that is the basic question that you're trying to ask. The basic question that
#
I often found that we ask is, how is this done in Europe? How is this done in the US? How can we
#
adapt it to India? And I felt that this, I'm not saying that this is not a relevant question. It's
#
a relevant question, but it's surely a second or third order question. The first question is,
#
what is the problem that I'm trying to solve in India? And I was part of this committee that
#
worked on data protection. And I think the first question was, should always admit that what is the
#
privacy problem that we are trying to solve here? I mean, is the privacy problem only Aadhaar? Is
#
it also Gmail? I mean, is it also the guy at the airport? What is the problem that we are trying
#
to solve here? But instead of that, I think the first question that we were often asking was that,
#
what does the GDPR say? And how do we try and translate that into India? So, you know, so these
#
were the five clear problems that we felt existed in our legal system. And the pitch was clear that
#
here we are a group of six smart individuals who have, as you said, had huge opportunity costs.
#
I've given all that up and come back to help you make better laws. So now please give us the laws
#
to work on. Of course, things don't work out quite like that. I think so for the first one
#
and a half years, it was just a lot of hard research. So original research in various areas
#
where we think change was needed. So we put out reports on the laws that need to be repealed.
#
So there were a hundred laws that we identified together with NIPFP and Center for Civil Society,
#
that hundred laws that need to go. There was an early piece of work that we had done on why India
#
needs a privacy and data protection legislation. There were several other things around the judicial
#
reforms that we had done. So there was a lot of that right at the outset. And then there were two
#
projects that came through. One was you had KP Krishnan on and KP Krishnan was the bureaucrat
#
whom we worked with on the insolvency and bankruptcy court. So my colleague Devanshu Mukherjee
#
worked on that and taking the court from idea to fruition. And it was the 14th finance commission
#
was also constituted at that time. Dr. Mayuri Reddy was the chairperson of that commission.
#
And we worked with that finance commission on this issue of cesses and surcharges, which
#
seemed like a proxy way, has become a proxy way of imposing a tax, but not sharing revenue with
#
states. So these were two issues that we worked on. And then we realized that the idea that we had
#
right at the outset, that there is a, and this is something that you hear on a lot of your shows,
#
there is a woeful lack of state capacity. And we were here to fill a tiny part of that gap,
#
which was that we were trying to ensure that we had good policy ideas and that was translated
#
into effective legislation. It would be tempting for someone with identical concerns to yours
#
saying that, you know, working with government is so hard, movement can be glacial at times,
#
there can be so many frustrations that why don't I just sit on the outside and build a public profile
#
and bring out all these great papers and, you know, all my positions can have a certain purity
#
and I'm never compromising, I don't have to enter these difficult conversations. But instead,
#
and some people have made that kind of choice and instead you made the choice that, no,
#
we are going to get into the weeds and we're going to engage in all of that. Give me a sense of what
#
those engagements were actually like in terms of, you know, the day-to-day interactions, was it
#
frustrating? You mentioned before and I completely agree from all the episodes I've done that
#
politicians and bureaucrats in this country, you know, so many of them actually have a sense of
#
purpose, they want to make a change, but the incentives are all completely screwed up and the
#
system is completely messed up. So how did you, and by the time you started with it,
#
you knew all of this because you've done some work with government, you've been in the sort of
#
thereabouts around the system during this time. So what was this kind of process like of engagement?
#
How receptive were politicians to you? How receptive were bureaucrats to you?
#
And what was the kind of give and take that happened? Give me a sense of like this engine
#
room of making laws as it were. Yeah. So I think first up, the government
#
of India and state governments remain the largest change agents in the country. Now,
#
whether that's a good thing or not, we can debate. But the fact is that both the governments themselves
#
in their self-perception as well as the people in their perception of government see them as
#
my babsarkars and they are there to do everything. And I'm coming around to the view that that is
#
something that needs to be fundamentally rethought in terms of, I think the idea of
#
individuals for sure that we know of, but also the idea of communities, which I think is a
#
critically overlooked part of political theory in India, needs to be thought through much more
#
closely in this individual versus state dynamic. But more on that later. The government of India
#
and the state governments were the largest change agents in the country. So we knew that if we
#
wanted to make change, then we would have to engage with them. There was no way other than
#
engagement. The second point was that if I wanted to be an academic and maintain that purity of
#
thought, then I would have just remained in Oxford, right? And why would I come back here? And
#
some friends of mine had and great respect to them, but it's basically you're stuck with a lot
#
of teaching and essentially you're marking papers most of the time. And you can do that. It's a
#
price that you pay for earning your freedom of doing research. But the fact is that why would
#
I do that in a suboptimal setting? So it was always clear to us that we wanted to see the impact of
#
the work that we do. And that is what actually made Vidhi an attractive proposition for my
#
colleagues who joined on as part of the founding team and for the 250 odd lawyers who have come
#
after. That we get to see the impact of the work that we do. And this is the reason as to why people
#
are happy to take a cut of their salaries, the opportunity cost for everyone is high,
#
but to come and work with him because they see that they are part of something larger. And I
#
think there is a kind of deeper human sentiment that we want to be part of something larger.
#
And so that is essentially the reason why this wasn't even much of a question in our heads,
#
yes, this is going to be hard, yes, this is going to be slow, but this is a monopoly. I mean,
#
this is a monopoly that you'd hope actually that there wouldn't be a duopoly or an oligopoly,
#
though we are kind of heading in that direction. But you have to work with the state as and if you
#
want to make real change happen when it comes to laws, because the state is the only legally
#
empowered entity. Monopoly on violence.
#
Monopoly on violence, monopoly on laws, this is the system that we are in and we were not anarchists.
#
And so that's the why we did it. As far as the engine room is concerned in terms of what that
#
was like, the first big realization was, and this is the time we are working under the NDA government,
#
this is 2000, so we started 2013, but what I'm talking about now is 2014-15,
#
is that government is not a monolith. And I think this is the biggest realization that I've had over
#
10 years, is that there is a perception of the government of being a certain way as depending
#
on where you are and what kind of conversation you're having. Either it's this authoritarian
#
state that is plunging India into darkness or it's the greatest thing that has happened since
#
sliced bread, depending on who you're talking to. But the fact that I realized that both of these
#
are equally untrue because government is not a monolith. There are, as you said, there are a
#
number of people there, many of whom, and I would say, stick my neck out and say a vast majority of
#
whom are trying to do the right thing. And we worked primarily with bureaucrats and we realized
#
that that was a way that we could also ensure our independence. Because at Vidhi very early on,
#
we realized that there are three values that define us, independence, excellence, and impact.
#
So we want to be independent and work with any government irrespective of political party,
#
but we will only work with governments because we think governments can change things, so not with
#
parties. Second, we want to be the best at what we do, whether it is the law we draft or the tea we
#
serve in our office. And third is that we want to ensure that there is impact, that the work that
#
we do, we can see it through. Now, these are all goals, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.
#
But right at the outset, we realized that, and this is something that I felt, that there are two
#
things that can make change happen. And the first is high quality work. There are very few people,
#
certainly people within the governmental mechanism, machinery don't have the time
#
or the capacity to do research. You don't even expect them to do it. But bureaucrats are very
#
good at spotting faff and waffle and kind of separating the wheat from the shaft. They are
#
very good at doing that. So they know when you're talking shit or when you're making sense.
#
So the first thing is that we need to produce high quality work. That's the first important
#
ingredient of success. And the second is that we have to approach whoever it is that we are
#
working with in a genuine spirit of engagement. So right at the outset, there were a lot of this,
#
there was all that kind of stuff, there was this patronizing stuff that you get a lot of.
#
But we felt that there were always about six out of 10 IAS officers who saw merit in what we were
#
doing. And this is across areas, whether in center or in states. And I think we needed to
#
find those internal champions to be able to work with them and to be able to ensure that the work
#
that we do translates. Now, the second big realization is that when we came in, we felt that,
#
oh, we are going to change things, we're going to make things better. We have the ideas, we know
#
what needs to be done. We'll talk to people, we'll make sure that we get the best law that we
#
deserve. But the second big realization was no one can say that they have themselves drafted a law
#
or that this law was their idea. I mean, legitimately, perhaps only a politician
#
can claim that because ultimately it's their fate on the line. But no one can really say
#
that they have done it because it is a genuinely collective effort. And I think sometimes,
#
when we think particularly in this climate, when we see that parliament is dysfunctional,
#
I think there is a sense that checks and balances are going. I think parliamentary checks and
#
balances are certainly going. Judicial checks and balances are a mixed record. But executive
#
government too is not a monolith. Now, there might be some very hot-button issues which may matter
#
a lot to particular political parties. Okay, so whether you're talking about the Article 370
#
amrogation for this government, whether you're talking about Manrega for the UPA government,
#
there may be some which are political hot-buttons. But other than that, for your regular legislation
#
which affects lives of people, there are so many people involved in that lawmaking process. So,
#
you wanted that idea of the engine room. Now, the idea of a law emanates at the nodal ministry.
#
So, let me give you an example of this data production bill. It emanated with the Ministry
#
of Electronics and IT. That ministry set up a committee which usually they do in terms of
#
important legislation. That committee has, usually it will have government officers,
#
it will have outsiders, it will have some kind of mix. That committee will submit a report.
#
Either it will have a draft law alongside the report or on the basis of that, someone in the
#
ministry or outsourced by the ministry will draft a law. That will be the first draft. Once that
#
first draft is done, that draft will go first up the line in the ministry, right up from whoever
#
has drafted it, joint secretary, additional secretary, secretary, minister. It will have to
#
be cleared. Then it will go for inter-ministerial consultation, especially on important ones.
#
So, then it will come back, you will get a lot of responses. Then it will go for public consultation
#
which has happened most of the time. Sometimes, unfortunately it hasn't, but most of the time it
#
has happened. So, you get a range of responses from the public. All this gets put together
#
and then you have the final version of the legislation that is finalized by that ministry.
#
Then that goes to the law ministry. The law ministry again then suggests
#
hajar changes to this, making it legally sound and whatever, all the things that I,
#
some of the things that I spoke about. Then this ministry has to be happy with it. Once both of
#
them agree, the law ministry puts this up before cabinet. Now, cabinet, usually things might go
#
through, but because the inter-ministerial consultation has happened, but some minister
#
might say something and there is that even one word which is kind of seems semi-negative
#
can postpone the bill. So, everyone has to have some consensus and there's not always consensus
#
in these, but once cabinet says yes and it gets cabinet approval, only then does it get to
#
parliament and then parliament is a different story. So, there are a lot of wheels within wheels,
#
wheels within wheels, which in my view, as there are problematic elements of that,
#
because then you get kind of that purity of a prop that first draft goes. But net-net,
#
it makes the law better because it's a, as long as you ensure that there is a diversity of voices
#
or the diversity of viewpoints that get factored in and there is good faith in cooperation of that,
#
net-net, that diversity of voices makes the law better. Of course, parliament is the apogee of
#
that. Like that's where you get the real diversity because this is still a kind of closed diversity.
#
So, one can only hope that this, the parliament becomes functional again. I am a bit cynical
#
in this regard, just in the way in which governments are going globally and that standing
#
committees of parliament can be resuscitated, but those would make laws truly consultative
#
and would make them better. But this is really the process and this has been followed for all
#
laws. We've worked on about 369 laws and rules of centre and states in the course of the last 10
#
years and there's some variations here and there, but largely this is the process that's been.
#
So, where is Vidi in the process and where do laws originate? Like, are you there at the
#
committee stage? Is it the case that a ministry will come to you and say, hey, we're thinking
#
of doing this, we need help? Or is it the case that it works the other way that you give a paper and
#
make a suggestion and then they say, yeah, good idea, let's do it? How does that process take
#
place? So, in three ways. One is that we are sometimes not there at all. When you have a truly
#
radical research idea and you want to pitch it, then we are basically trying to ensure that
#
someone in government meets us and likes the idea. So, an example of that is that it is our view that
#
consumption of small quantities of drugs is not a criminal law enforcement issue,
#
but a public health issue. We must invest in de-addiction centres and not in jails. Okay.
#
So, this is a completely different approach saying decriminalised drug consumption.
#
And we did this project in Punjab where essentially you're looking at 40% of Punjab's
#
farmers who are of Punjab's youth, as it were, between the age of 15 and 35, right? So,
#
you're not kidding me, right? That you're going to put 35% of these people in jail. You're not
#
going to do that. No government is ever, ever going to do that. So, all you're doing is essentially
#
creating opportunities for rent seeking for some local policeman. So, I mean that, and of course,
#
there were many other reasons for saying that we have to think of this as an addiction problem.
#
There was a quote that my friend found, I can't remember who it was by, but it said that, you
#
know, if somebody has tuberculosis, it's not like you're going to put that person in prison.
#
You're going to get that person treated. But what we are doing is putting addicts who are essentially
#
people who are sick in some way in prison and hoping that it'll get better. It's shocking.
#
It's absolutely shocking. But there are, I mean, at that point in time, there were no takers for
#
that idea right at the outset. So, this is where we want to be in the room as it says that line in
#
Hamilton where it says that I want to be in the room where it happens. So, in this, we are not in
#
the room where it happens. We want to be in the room where it happens because we think that there
#
is an idea that is worthy of consideration. We started that in 2015. Now, it's nine years.
#
I think we've made some headway. There was an encouraging statement by the Home Minister
#
that we have to treat them with sympathy that addicts are not criminals, which was extremely
#
encouraging because politicians always want to be seen as macho on crime. And I think a lot of
#
mainstream opinion after this Rhea Chakraborty and this Aryan Khan case has turned saying that
#
what are we doing putting these type of people in prison? It doesn't make sense. But of course,
#
this is really the tip of the iceberg. The people who you are really putting in prison are your
#
daily wage laborers and so on who you're picking up and putting in prison. So, that's one part.
#
Sometimes we have a paper that we present to the government and say that, you know what,
#
this is what we think the contours of this law could look like. So, the bankruptcy code
#
is a good example of that. The first draft of the data protection bill is a good example of that
#
where we have a paper, we have an idea which government is also keen on. And so then we work
#
with the government to try and translate that idea into a draft legislation, which will be
#
actionable. And sometimes it happens the other way, which is that government has an idea,
#
we have our own impact criteria on what we think are ideas that we will work on. And there are three
#
criteria. One is that we must be competent to work on them. Two, it must be a large enough problem,
#
again, on this macro versus micro issue. And three is that we must ensure that there is an
#
internal champion who will see it through because otherwise we felt that on these ideas,
#
there's a lot of waste of time. So, there are many ideas of this nature. So, currently something
#
that we are working on is in relation to the real estate sector. There's lots of pending RERA cases
#
and RERA which started off with a lot of promise as it needs to. We need to take a deeper look as
#
to how the system is working, try and see as to what improvements are needed to ensure that
#
home buyers are protected. So, that's a project that we're working on. It's not an original idea
#
of ours. It's something that the ministry wants to do, which we feel fits our impact criteria.
#
And so, we work with the ministry in order to produce that first draft.
#
Over the course of the last 10 years, we've come to the view that if we can make impact in that
#
first draft and can shape the contours of that first draft, then you've got a fundamentally
#
good product. There will be changes on that. I mean, the data protection bill is a good example
#
as to how there are pretty significant changes on that first draft. But the basic structure
#
of what you have put down remains because it takes a lot of time and a lot of
#
knowledge to be able to fundamentally rework the basis of a draft because most of the changes
#
that happen are, you know, cut out these words, put something else, cut out and all, that kind
#
of stuff. And we live with that. So, we think that if we can be there with the nodal ministry
#
and try and work with them on getting a good first draft after getting consultations from people,
#
I think that would be a, I mean, that's the place where we can ensure both that we maintain
#
our independence and can ensure impact. Have you ever been in a situation where you're
#
asked to work on laws or perhaps take some existing law in a particular direction,
#
which you are not comfortable with because it doesn't align with your values?
#
How do you deal with that? Many times, many times. In fact,
#
this is a question that we ask for most of our interview candidates that, you know, you're asked
#
to draft a law where there is a, where the bureaucrat is saying that we must have the death
#
penalty and you are morally opposed to it. What would you do in that situation? So, we did have
#
that situation. I won't get into the details of which law it was or who it was, but we did
#
have that situation. And then you present your point of view. And I think here there's an
#
advantage because at the end of the day, we are lawyers and it is our job to provide independent
#
legal advice. So as with he, we will never say that we drafted this law. We didn't, we assisted
#
in the drafting of laws by providing our inputs. And in this, okay, in this, we said that for ABC
#
reasons, we think that death penalty will not be a deterrent in this case and will not help you serve
#
the purposes that it is. This is our independent view. Now take it or leave it because at the end
#
of the day, it's their law. So this is with our standard point everywhere is the fact that we
#
will try to persuade you that this does not work. But if our persuasion fails, then at the end of
#
the day, it is a law that is drafted by the parliament of India and it is presented to the
#
parliament by the government of India and they are legitimate to do it. Now we may not like it,
#
but it is not our law. So that's how we deal with this situation. And this happens quite often.
#
I mean, this death penalty, I gave this example because it's an extreme example,
#
but it happens always. But I think there is, there is a lot that you can work out if somebody
#
has an open mind and is willing to be persuaded. And if they're not willing to be persuaded,
#
then you try your best and you move on. You've mentioned in a recent interview that
#
among the things you do, you know, the three ways to bring about better laws,
#
original research, engagement, and shaping the public narrative. And you've already spoken about
#
original research and engagement. Tell me a bit more about shaping the public
#
narrative and how big a part that plays in, you know, your scheme of things, how does one
#
go about it and so on. Yeah. So we realized this during this decriminalization of drugs issue,
#
which was actually one of the first times when we realized that, and this actually rifts off a point
#
that we were making earlier, that it has to be the right environment for change. Like a law operates
#
in a particular context. So we realized that with decriminalization, that the idea of
#
decriminalization itself was too radical for people to buy. It's like, no, these are drug addicts,
#
they're shady. How can you put them in a de-addiction center and you feed them three
#
meals a day and put them in jail? You know, so there's this kind of prevailing sentiment.
#
And until and unless that you can attack that sentiment in some shape or form,
#
the law will not fully change or even if it changes, it will not have that acceptability.
#
So we realized that the way to do that first up is by ensuring that, and this was the first time
#
that we put out our report in Punjabi. So this was hard work because it's not just a quick case
#
of translation as it's extremely difficult to do that. But we put it out in Punjabi because we
#
realized that first it cannot be something that these English speaking people from Delhi have
#
come and told us to do. That's the first. The second thing is that we realized that we need
#
to humanize this story. So I may be getting this slightly wrong, but I think there was a
#
locality called Makhmulpura outside Amritsar, which was known as the locality of widows,
#
because essentially each of the men in the house were first arrested and then died
#
of some drug related offense. And that was also, I mean, it spun off an independent piece of
#
research as to why are women not drug addicts. And this is my colleague, Neha Singhal had done
#
that. That was interesting as well. But we realized that you have to humanize this by saying that
#
basically this is destroying families. This is not an esoteric question of whether you should
#
consider something a public health issue or a law enforcement issue, but this is a question of how
#
do you keep families whole. So that became a critical part of that campaign. So in Punjabi,
#
we collaborated with a lot of grassroots organizations in Punjab, worked with them,
#
worked with the PGI in Chandigarh, with their de-addiction center there and continued to
#
have many interesting meetings with the government at that point of time, which understood what we
#
were saying because they knew that this was not going to work. So shaping the public narrative
#
sets really the base for reform, particularly on reforms which are generational. So if you are
#
going to decriminalize drugs, then that is a reform that actually will take 20 to 25 years of
#
time. And this is another realization that impact and reform takes time. So whenever we have reforms
#
of this nature, which is the system is not ready for and which is mostly stuff in the
#
stuff in social justice and healthcare and education, this is stuff that the system is not
#
ready for. And again, a range of factors for that. I think there is where we feel the need that there
#
is a critical need to shape the public narrative. So to give you another example, we've been doing
#
this case in the Supreme Court for a long time on dying with dignity, end of life care or living
#
wills. So that you should have a living will say, if I have ABC, I don't want to be put on a ventilator
#
and it should be taken off. We had intervened in a petition that common cause had actually
#
initially filed in 2015. Then we got a favorable order. Then that order did allow for living wills
#
in the country, but allowed it in such a convoluted fashion that you needed a judicial magistrate first
#
class to sign on this, that you knew it was unworkable. Then we got another order from where
#
we got the constitution bench of the Supreme Court to revise its earlier order and clarify and make
#
it a little bit more workable. Still not wholly workable, but a little bit more workable.
#
And then we worked with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to develop an end of life care
#
policy for them, hoping that that will become the template for other hospitals. We are now
#
working with the Ministry of Health to finally come up with a uniform definition of death in the
#
country because that's also an issue as to when is a person considered dead and move towards
#
palliative care. And we realized there that the Supreme Court actually is a good way for
#
raising the profile on issues, much more than it is on actually changing things on the ground.
#
Because my father-in-law wanted to register a living will after the Supreme Court order
#
and the magistrate that he went to said that I haven't received this order.
#
I mean, you don't have to. There's a provision in the constitution which says that this is now the
#
law of the land. But he said, no, I'm sorry. I understand what you're saying is right,
#
but I have to receive a notification from the High Court saying that this is now I can do this.
#
Otherwise, how can I register this? It's not within my scope of powers. This is my scope of powers.
#
Where is it written? He's right. It's not written. Now this is how the administrative mechanism
#
functions. So we realize that there is a lot that happens after a judgment is delivered.
#
And particularly in cases like this in social justice, environmental law, judgments may be
#
great, but what happens on the ground is different. But it's great for raising the profile on issues.
#
So I think there's a lot of public momentum around end of life care. And we are part of
#
an alliance working with a group of doctors called the End of Life Care Task Force in order
#
to ensure that there is a decent, dignified death that everyone can have instead of being
#
cubed up in hospitals when you don't want to do it. So shaping the public narrative is critical
#
whenever you're talking about reforms that's going to take a long time. And so we found,
#
it's unfortunate that mostly in areas of our work around health, disability, education,
#
these are areas where we need to shape the public narrative much more, whereas
#
work around financial regulation, data protection, AI, this is where the political economy of reform
#
is favorable. So there, there's a lot more direct engagement with government.
#
And it seems to me that these are, you know, there are two really different things kind of
#
coming up side by side with each other. And one of them is that when you're in the business
#
of working with government to frame laws and et cetera, et cetera, you go at a really slow place.
#
You go within a window of what is acceptable and progress can be slow and it's an inch at a time
#
and you make a difference in the margins. When you aim for public engagement, especially your
#
big issues like this, you are trying to shift the overton window at some level. That is when
#
long-term change really happens. And for those of my listeners who haven't heard the term,
#
the overton window is really that window of what is acceptable in a public debate.
#
So, you know, if you take an extreme position on one side, say on the side of freedom, then
#
you help make people at the edges of the overton window more acceptable and see more mainstream.
#
So that shifts. So how does this kind of work? Because then isn't there some dissonance here,
#
right? If the government that you're working with also sees you be public with positions
#
that are pretty extreme, does that color how they feel about you and you know, how does that work?
#
Yeah. So the way I see this is that independence and impact is on a spectrum
#
and one end of the spectrum is complete independence and the other end of the spectrum
#
is this fictional idea of complete impact. If you want to be completely independent,
#
then basically it's what you call to have that purity of thought. You stay out,
#
you stay out, you write your papers. What impact happens then is completely contingent.
#
It's not in your hands and you're willing to make that you're willing to make that sacrifice
#
and you're saying that I leave that to other people and that's where I maintain my complete
#
integrity and that's a fair position to take. On the other hand, what I would call complete
#
independent impact is basically what law firms do, right? Law firms essentially very openly are in
#
service of their client, right? So they want the client wants X law firm's job is to go and get
#
that X to happen without of course, I mean with while following the law. So then you're happy to
#
tow the line if there is a call that you take, which is unconscionable, maybe you're willing
#
to do that because it gets you what you want. Okay. So that I would, this is what I define
#
as complete impact. Now, anybody who wants to do a little bit of both and somewhere all of us at
#
this goes back to life, not being black and white somewhere, all of us want to do a bit of both,
#
right? You want to be independent largely in what you're saying, but you also want to see
#
I mean, by all of us, I mean, all of us at VD who want to do this, all of us, I don't want to speak
#
for everybody, but you also want to see the impact of the work that you do. And it's about
#
straddling this line. And so far in the course of the last 10 years, and we have worked with the
#
previous UPA government, now the NDA government for 10 years, and in seven states, so lots of
#
state governments, I think people largely respect the fact that you can have an independent position
#
on issues while also being able to work with them. Now, it's true that perhaps over the course of
#
the last few years, there is a general sense that this space is shrinking of being able to do this.
#
I personally have not felt it, but I know colleagues who have and whether in VD or outside,
#
as there are many who have felt it. But the fact of the matter is that again, I say this that
#
the fact that we are lawyers and provide professional independent advice is maybe
#
something that's working for our benefit. So if it's something that they don't like,
#
talk to another lawyer and go with that person's advice. So my sense is that there is everybody
#
in this spectrum of lawmaking and that includes certainly government who's actually making the
#
laws, lawyers who are assisting them in making them well, technocrats who are giving the policy
#
ideas, persons in civil society, some of whom may be supportive of the law, some of whom may be
#
opposing the law and others who are in virulent opposition of the law. Everybody plays a role
#
in making the law better. And I saw that firsthand when we worked on Aadhaar and it was our point of
#
view at that point of time that Aadhaar is a hugely powerful tool for social welfare delivery
#
in the country. The biggest criticism at that point of time was that it was the largest biometric
#
identification program that was happening without any law. So we felt that it was
#
commonsensical when we were asked to help in drafting the law, that we draft the law.
#
And so then one big obstacle, which is that you're having this by executive fiat,
#
goes that you now have a law which has been debated and has been passed by parliament.
#
And so you do that. And then as we were right at the beginning, then we were bombarded by criticism
#
that you're helping set up a surveillance date, as if you're ensuring that tracking and so on.
#
And the fact is that now it's what? Now it's almost like seven years, as in I would certainly
#
take up this Aadhaar case again, as if it was offered to me, as in then you have to draft an
#
Aadhaar Act today. I would do it again. Absolutely. Because I continue to believe that it is the
#
biggest tool for social benefit transfers. And we could see that during COVID in terms of the
#
amount of savings and so on. And when you're talking about large technological systems,
#
you have to always strive to make it better. And I don't think that we can be laudate and say that
#
we don't want this at all. I mean, yes, we can decide as to where we want it and we don't want
#
it. But I don't think that that's an option to say that we don't want technology. I think we want
#
responsible technology. But at that point of time, as in frankly, some of the criticism really
#
irritated me. And that I was, impulses of my youth, as in I was perhaps a little bit more
#
strident than I should have in retrospect. As someone in the government had said to me once,
#
there can only be two types of dals, a naram dal and a garam dal. And I always belong to the garam
#
dal. But I've over time softened, I think. And I feel that every person, certainly someone scholarly
#
like Usha Ramanathan, who was completely ideologically opposed to the bill. There
#
were others, I mean, you had Apar on your show, as in who was opposed but engaging.
#
There were people like Rahul, who you also had on your show, who were supportive of the bill,
#
but at the same time maintained their independence. And there were folks within the government,
#
whether it's Ramsevak Sharma, as in who was the CEO, then Ajay Bhushan Pandey,
#
who was the CEO during the time of the drafting of the other act, who all saw this argument. It's
#
not like they didn't see it. It's not like there was some ideological drive to crush the
#
dissent of any kind. And I think every person contributes to the law that you ultimately get.
#
And I think all that opposition made this law better, made sure that we have a data protection
#
bill, which is now a law, and will also ensure that this is not the end, that it will evolve
#
into something that has even more safeguards for the citizens. So my sense is that it is possible
#
to remain independent while working with governments. And this again goes back to
#
the fact that government is not a monolith. And if it stays that way, then I think we'll be fine.
#
One of the things that has been happening recently that's kind of disturbing is that more and more,
#
you know, organizations outside the government, which are full of English speakers, Latian's
#
elite, as it were, and superficially, you would, you know, appear to look like one of them.
#
There are more and more crackdowns on such organizations, like what's happened to CPR
#
recently. It's just horrifying. It's a tragedy. But you guys have always kind of stayed out of
#
that. Is that because you're not directly in the political process of anyone? You're just working
#
with a deep state, like you said, and it's just bureaucrats and that's where you are. And you can,
#
you know, pick and choose what you work on and et cetera, et cetera. How does it all function?
#
Because there is a certain perception out there at hey, Vidhi is aligned with this government.
#
And the moment you use a phrase like this government, it feels extremely simplistic to me,
#
because like you said, it's not a monolith. But you know, how do you feel about that? And how does
#
the criticism affect you? Yeah, I think the short answer to this is the fact that in Delhi, I hear
#
a lot of this, that Vidhi is aligned to this government. In Bombay, people think that we are
#
aligned to the Congress party because Dr. Ashok Ganguly was a nominated member of the Congress
#
party. So, you know, there are all kinds of views that people have. So this kind of stuff actually
#
doesn't bother me. Okay. I mean, it doesn't bother me at all. But what you said is that in terms of
#
what the playbook is, as far as we are concerned. And I think this goes back to something that is
#
deeply personal for me. And I hope that in some sense as it has, this has set the, this is something
#
that our founding team all believes in, is that we have to speak what we think is the truth,
#
which in this case is the correct position of law. Now that might be inconvenient in some cases. It
#
might work in your favor in some cases. That's not our concern. This is something that we have done
#
for the last 10 years. And we have not bent to anybody in terms of trying to say something that
#
they like, or we have not deliberately opposed somebody. I think the atmosphere that we are here
#
in Delhi is that if you're seen like, if you're working with this government, you must be a part
#
of this government. But the fact is that doesn't bother me because I worked with the government
#
of India, which is the biggest change agent in the country. So that, and that's, that's fine.
#
And we have our criteria on which projects we work on. And, and as long as we can maintain that,
#
I think that's, that's something that we are, we are happy to live with. And so the, if you can
#
continue to, in that sense, speak honestly, say what it is that you, that you want to,
#
I think people will respect you. And this is the, this is largely the sentiment that I had. Of
#
course there are people who want, okay. And then you just know that those are not people you want
#
to work with. And, and I'll be honest in saying that that's certainly not been the majority of
#
people that we have worked with at all. I mean, the majority of people that we've worked with are
#
look much more like Tarun Bajaj and KP Krishnan than this mythical person who only wants to,
#
wants you to say what he or she wants you to hear.
#
So we'll go in for a break. On the other side of the break,
#
we'll talk about your wonderful book. But before that, a question which kind of intrigues me,
#
you mentioned a colleague of yours, Neha, was working on, you know, why don't women get
#
addicted? So can you give me a short potted answer? Because now I'm kind of curious.
#
But what are the, like the theories?
#
So you have to speak to her because the, I think the one is that a lot of this is not picked up,
#
number one. And the second is that it's the men have gotten addicted first. So someone has to
#
manage the household. It was something like that. So there was some data points on that. I'll share
#
that with you. We'll keep that off the record.
#
We'll keep that off the record. So yeah, let's go in for a little break.
#
Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from me
#
to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good friend,
#
the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it everything is everything. Every week,
#
we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane,
#
from the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with
#
which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our journey and please support us
#
by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
The show is called everything is everything. Please do check it out.
#
Welcome back to The Scene On The Unseen. I'm chatting with Orgo Sengupta on his wonderful
#
book, the colonial constitution and indeed on his life because we haven't even mentioned the book
#
so far. I want to commit this with a meta question first before we get down to talking
#
about the book. Since the time I've been a columnist 20 something years ago, I keep often
#
writing about our constitution, both in the sense that it is obviously a more liberal constitution
#
than our society, but also in the many, many flaws that it has. You know, our rights aren't
#
protected properly, especially the right to free speech has so many caveats and all that.
#
And I have said this so often that it sounds cliched that we have a constitution designed
#
to rule us and not to serve us. You know, that we are subjects and not citizens, that it is almost
#
as if we replaced a bunch of white-skinned rulers with a bunch of brown-skinned rulers and that's
#
the only difference. So when your book came out and I saw the title, I was delighted. I said,
#
finally, book length elaboration on this. But that particular fact seemed indisputable to me
#
because all through our history, across political parties, we've seen the damage that power can do,
#
how power corrupts and the effects of that. I had an episode with Gyan Prakash on the emergency
#
where he pointed out that, listen, it wasn't unconstitutional. Power was centralized when
#
the constitution was written because of the circumstances all around. Let's not pass judgment
#
on the people who wrote the constitution at the time, but it is terribly flawed. But after your
#
book, what I sense more and more is that it is now not even cautious to discuss this, that somehow
#
our discourse has reached a place where one group of people will hold out the constitution to be a
#
holy book that you cannot say anything bad about. And for another group of people, it is a root of
#
all evils. And I have even seen that when Appaar was on my show, in fact, he kind of refused to
#
even dignify the issue with discussion. He just didn't want to talk about that aspect of it.
#
I see this also in many of the bad faith responses to your book as if you have an agenda and perhaps
#
it's because you're associated with, he is associated with the government in some way.
#
People have the mistaken impression that, hey, they are the whatever. And there is a noise in
#
the right that, hey, we want to change the constitution. And it almost seems as if you're
#
the standard bearer for that, which of course you're not because as your book amply makes clear,
#
most particularly in the epilogue, that's exactly the opposite of what you're asking for. All you're
#
saying is let's discuss this. And we were actually discussing it a while back, but now the discourse
#
has become like this. Did this take you by surprise that the book would be received like this?
#
No, I expected this because as you rightly said, we've reached a situation now where
#
we cannot have any discussion on the constitution because it's become this kind of holy book.
#
And whenever I hear the term holy book, which is used for the constitutional lot, I actually
#
get worried because for me, when something is a holy book without getting into too many nuances,
#
the fact is that it is not something that can be engaged with. It is something that has to be
#
followed. And that worries me. And I think that if there is one short way of ensuring that the
#
constitution recedes into oblivion, it is by treating it as a holy book because then no one
#
has a view on the constitution. Everyone thinks it is something. And then suddenly before you know it,
#
it's something else because the holy book is nothing but the word of God and it could just
#
if the God changes. So that is what actually is the present situation where we are in,
#
as you rightly put it. And I think you've essentially paraphrased my book better than
#
I ever could, but I want to challenge this. And so I'm not surprised that some of the responses
#
have been like this. I think the instinctive responses have been of the kind that you've
#
mentioned where it's been seen as some kind of agenda. But I think people who have read the book
#
and once they have read the book, they have commented on it. They have found that this is
#
perhaps more reasonable than they otherwise thought it might be. So I only point them to
#
the age old adage that just don't judge a book by its cover. But I think some of our old pearls
#
of wisdom are often forgotten. So I'm not surprised by this response. But the fundamental point is,
#
as you said, that it's a document that is large and given that it's a document that is large,
#
it is bound to have some good bits and some bad bits and some ordinary bits and some terrible bits.
#
And this is not to chastise anybody. Everybody who wrote the constitution did what they thought
#
was the best for the country. And so the fact that we are writing this does not in any way mean that
#
we are demeaning anybody. But I think at this point of time, and let me talk about the elephant
#
in the room here, the elephant in the room is Ambedkar. And this is something that would have
#
perhaps affected him more than anybody else. It's not possible now to have two views on a lot of
#
Ambedkar, I thought. And here is a person who was reviled by the communists, sidelined by the
#
Congress, not given the time of day by the Parivar, who now suddenly has become everybody's
#
poster boy. And any engagement, let alone criticism, with his views is often seen
#
as disrespect, not only to him, but to an entire community of Dalits. And I fundamentally resist
#
these urges because I feel that, as I said, Ambedkar and Annihilation of Caste was one of the
#
first eye-opening books for me. There's a lot that is remarkable in his thought, but no person
#
is beyond critical engagement. And I think that we need to discuss the Constitution,
#
and any discussion of the Constitution does not mean any disrespect for Ambedkar.
#
You know, like many people who straddled public life over decades, he contained multitudes.
#
You know, like Gandhi, for example, Gandhi has a hundred volumes, Ambedkar has, I forget the exact
#
number, but a whole bunch of volumes. And, you know, I did an episode on Caste with Chandrabhan
#
Prasadji, the great Dalit scholar, and Chandrabhan made the excellent point that if you just read
#
Ambedkar's later works, in fact, if you read all his works, it's a fascinating record of how he is
#
changing his mind through time because of circumstance. In fact, the sort of importance
#
he gave to socialism during the early debates on the framing of the Constitution. By the early
#
60s, he changed his mind in his writing. You know, there is a reason he had that view then.
#
He's talking much more about markets and so on by the early 60s, and he's kind of shifted,
#
and appreciating those multitudes is important. He's one of, absolutely one of the great
#
intellectuals of the 20th century, but to, you know, to put him in a box and say, you know,
#
this is it, is kind of a folly. And I want to ask about, you know, I think one misconception tons of
#
people have has to do, and it's a well-meaning misconception, but it also, you know, goes back
#
to an Ambedkar quote, where at one point when he's presenting the draft Constitution, you quote him
#
as saying, indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason
#
will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that man was wild,
#
stop quote. And today, with the benefit of hindsight, we can look back and say that, no,
#
the whole point of a Constitution, as I think the American founders realize, the whole point
#
of a Constitution is to protect the people from the state, and therefore, you build in those
#
safeguards. So it doesn't matter if the wildest person on the planet is a president, you know,
#
your Constitution will protect the people against that person. So it is not the Constitution is
#
good, but we've elected the wrong people. That is nonsensical. It makes no sense. The Constitution
#
has to protect us all against the worst people coming to charge and against the worst possible
#
excesses of majoritarian politics. And yet it isn't just Ambedkar, but in that time of the framing,
#
and you've quoted many people on this, there is a sense that look, the people are at by and large,
#
are sort of ignorant, and they need to be guided. And we are great people. And we have the best,
#
their best interests in heart. So we will take care of all that. And the rules are framed
#
accordingly, making that assumption. And of course, many of them were great people. But at
#
the same time, you can't just make that assumption and assume that it will remain the case. In fact,
#
when you centralize power so much, you are actually guaranteeing that the wrong kind
#
of people will come into politics and that profile will change completely.
#
So what is your thought on this? Like, is this, in a sense, one of the original sins at the heart
#
of how we approach framing this Constitution? This was a sentiment that comes to us in many
#
different ways, right? Our Constitution is fine. Our systems are fine. Our people are bad. Our
#
politicians are bad. And I find these as intellectually lazy explanations of why we
#
are in the state we are. Yeah, sure. Maybe the people are bad. Okay. I'm the one to judge that.
#
But the question is that the Constitution is, one of its key purposes is essentially catastrophe
#
planning to ensure, as you said, that even if power comes to the worst hands, can something
#
fundamental about our nation and its values survive? And in that, I actually find it surprising
#
that this heady optimism of the time swayed the framers of the Constitution this much.
#
And the reason I find it surprising is because of the fact that they were, in that sense,
#
constitutional pundits, as Shankar Rao Deo described them. He was a congressman. He said that
#
he was actually saying it rather wistfully that our Constitution is drafted by certain
#
constitutional pundits who perhaps have great knowledge of constitutional law in other countries,
#
but perhaps not much of a feel of what is the pulse of the nation. But because they had a
#
knowledge of constitutional law in other countries, I would have expected that there would be greater
#
realization of the fundamental premise on which the American Constitution is based because the
#
American Constitution was a great inspiration to our framers. And the American Constitution is based
#
on the premise that man is vile. Man is evil, self-seeking, and only interested in personal
#
ambition. And that is why they set up a system which is a system of designed gridlock. You want
#
gridlock of some kind because out of the interstices of this gridlock, something good will emerge.
#
So it seems very counter-intuitive at the time. What you want is that you've now just won freedom
#
from the British. You've got rid of the monarch. But what you want is not a system that replicates
#
that, but what you want is a system that creates a sense of cautious gridlock. And how do they do
#
that? By ensuring that both the legislative and the executive wings are elected. It was a radically
#
new idea at that point of time that you have the senate that's elected, you have the house that's
#
elected, and you also have the president who's directly elected. Why? Because they fear at that
#
point of time that the legislature otherwise will become too powerful. So you need an elected
#
president to kind of countervail that. And as Hamilton writes in the Federalist Papers,
#
so that ambition counteracts ambition. That's one of the fundamental views. So people can
#
cancel each other out. And out of that, something good will emerge because people know that they
#
will have to get along. They will have to make these compromises. Now, the constitution framers
#
knew all this. Now, despite that, to start with the view that people will be good because this
#
country is now run by Indians, it will be run for Indians, I think is a touching thought.
#
And I can see where it's coming from. In that atmosphere, we've just won freedom after years
#
of subjugation. You can think that, yeah, we will now be the best versions of ourselves that we can
#
be. But politicians are not like that. And people are not like that. You and I are not always good
#
to other people. We are sometimes good. We are sometimes not good. We sometimes give somebody
#
money at a traffic junction. Sometimes we don't. There may not always be reason that is guiding
#
our actions. Sometimes it's just looking out for ourselves. Sometimes it's something else.
#
We are inconsistent beings as human beings. We try to be better, but we are fundamentally
#
inconsistent. So it was surprising that this view was taken. And I think what the double whammy was
#
was what you said about centralization is that this view that man will be good, this view was
#
supplemented by this understanding that there will be a large state. And we want a state that
#
is not going to oppress people's liberties, but guarantee it. So I think this double whammy that
#
you have a large state and you think that this state will be the best version of itself that it
#
can, is what creates this constitution which has its liberal bits, but is essentially very
#
statist and conservative. When we talk of contingency, one obvious contingency that I've
#
spoken of often in the past is that, look, the country was falling apart. There are riots
#
everywhere. The lines on a map that we know aren't actually yet formed. Everything is still happening.
#
So the urge to centralize power will obviously be there. That is one contingency. But another
#
one that I got far better insight on from your book is the contingency of time and politics,
#
which forces them, instead of starting anew and framing something from scratch,
#
of just taking the Government of India Act 1935 and saying that this will be the broad structure
#
and we will base everything on this and essentially like copy pasting almost two-thirds of that,
#
I think, for the draft constitution. For the first draft, ultimately it was a little less than
#
one-third. Yeah, for the first draft and, you know, kind of beginning with that and therefore
#
automatically because that is designed by a colonial state to rule the people and, you know,
#
to protect the state from the people and not the other way around, you kind of end up with that.
#
And also there is all the politics happening with the Muslim League weighing and, you know,
#
people are sort of trying to avoid partition at the same time. All kinds of things are going on.
#
So give me a sort of a sense of, in a sense, a mahal of the time because the important thing
#
to note is that, like you stated, like I keep saying, you cannot judge these people on hindsight.
#
They are in that cauldron where so many things are happening, you know, around them. Give me
#
a sense of what's happening inside the cauldron and what are all the different imperatives and
#
what are the directions that they've been driven in? So, it's December 9th, 1946, the first day
#
that the Constituent Assembly is meeting in the Central Hall of Parliament. It's a heady occasion
#
and before Rajendra Prasad gets elected, they get Sachidananda Sinha, who's the oldest member
#
of the Constituent Assembly, to make the inaugural speech. And this inaugural speech
#
that is made is essentially one that is quite revealing of how the Constituent Assembly sees
#
its job. It sees its job as taking the best of constitutions that have already been prevalent
#
in Europe for a couple of centuries and making it work from India. It is littered with literary
#
quotes from several authors, all in English, and has a great sense that now this is India's
#
time to be on the world stage and the way it is going to be on the world stage is like everyone
#
else is on the world stage, with a classic Anglo-American model of a constitution.
#
This is the vision that is set out by Sachidananda Sinha on the 9th of December 1946.
#
The man that's chosen to execute the vision is Benegal Narsingh Rao. He is the constitutional
#
advisor, a fine man of great erudition and learning. He has been a High Court judge,
#
he was an ICS officer and he had been given the task of harmonizing the Government of India Act
#
1935, which was a kind of constitutional statute because it kind of was setting out what government
#
in India is going to be like and the division of powers between the Union and the provinces.
#
He has to harmonize that statute with 1500 odd other laws that exist in the country.
#
So Rao is chosen to do this task. He has great knowledge and networks abroad so that he will
#
give us the best constitution that we can have that gives us this glorious place in the pantheon
#
of nations in the world. Now how does Rao go about this task? This is something that actually my
#
experience in Vidhi also made amply clear is that everyone wants a base draft to begin commenting.
#
It's producing that base draft that is hard. But Rao already had a base draft. The base
#
draft was the Government of India Act, which was a statute for government formation.
#
And let's be clear on one aspect. The Government of India Act has a lot of criticism because it
#
doesn't have fundamental rights and so on. With the basic impulse of the colonial government
#
while maintaining law and order was key was also to ensure a largely liberal state. I mean,
#
it was not a state that was essentially looking to stamp its authority at every nook and corner.
#
It wanted to have the optics of ensuring a basic degree of liberalism in the colonies in keeping
#
with the white man's burden of civilizing the natives. So the Government of India Act essentially
#
set out what the British thought was the foundation of self-government in India. So you had for the
#
first time elected legislative assemblies for six provinces and then it became eight or nine
#
provinces. I forget the total number of provinces. And then you had government at the center which
#
had a governor general and you had a range of provisions on how the center and states are going
#
to work with each other. So the Government of India Act exists. Rao takes the Government of
#
India Act as the first draft. He goes around the world on a tour. He goes to Ireland. He meets
#
Eamon de Valere. He goes to the US, has discussions with Justice Frankfurter, several people in
#
Washington, DC. He studies the constitution of Japan. He looks at Malaysia, Switzerland. He's
#
looked at all kinds of constitutions and he produces a questionnaire. He produces a questionnaire,
#
which is circulated to all members of the constituent assembly, which is kind of the
#
fundamental questions on what kind of government India should have. So there's a question, for
#
example, on should India have a presidential form of government like the US? B, cantons and a
#
federation like Switzerland? C, constitutional monarchy like the UK? So there is like a menu
#
of choices that is presented to every member of the constituent assembly. And it seems that
#
this menu itself is derived from the standard playbook of A, what the Government of India
#
Act has and B, what other countries in the world have. And it seems that the members of
#
the constituent assembly have to basically take their choices and they can provide some reasons
#
should they want to. So it is because of the fact that there is already a draft present
#
that the constituent assembly goes to that draft. And that's also because of the contingency of
#
time. We want the constitution quickly. India is independent. The Government of India Act and the
#
Indian Independence Act is still governing the nation. We want something to essentially take its
#
place. And so you want to do something quickly. So these are the two reasons as to why we go to
#
the Government of India Act. As far as partition is concerned, yes, partition does have a heavy
#
influence on the minds of the constituent assembly in two ways. The first is that law and order
#
becomes a primary concern. So even if their liberal impulses might have gone towards more
#
rights for individuals, those get tempered in favor of creating a larger and larger law and
#
order state. The second is that partition ensures that we can throw the cabinet mission plan out of
#
the window. The cabinet mission plan, if you remember, had this complicated scheme of federation
#
where there were going to be provinces. The provinces would be in groups and groups would
#
ultimately lead to the union government. The union government would have very few powers, foreign
#
affairs, defense communications. Most of them would be at provincial and group level. So India
#
would look much more bottom up. And this was a concession being made to the Muslim League.
#
But the moment partition gets announced, the cabinet missions plan of federation gets thrown
#
out. And there is almost an immediate reversion into what we call quasi-fire federal, but which
#
is essentially a unitary government with some federal characteristics. And that's what partition
#
makes us do. But I also don't want to overstate the importance of partition for the constitution
#
we have. I think the essential impulses shared largely across the board in the constituent
#
assembly. There were some exceptions like Meenu Masani and the libertarians, very few,
#
and Hasrat Mohani and some hard-nosed communists who were there. But largely the impulses that
#
were shared was that we want a constitution that is based on an Anglo-American model because that
#
is what a liberal constitution of the time looks like. Now we have certain needs in India for a
#
state which will be the guarantor of liberty because there is this sense that Indians look
#
at the state as the Maibab Sarkar. So we want the state now to guarantee liberty. So we are now going
#
to invest more powers in the state, particularly when it comes to law and order and when it comes
#
to economic planning. So these are the two kinds of changes in that sense that we bring about,
#
a much stronger state with more police powers than the other constitutions that we are surveying,
#
and a state that has an economic ideology, which is again a novel idea. But we think that we need
#
that because the state has to be the guarantor of your economic well-being. So I think this is what
#
the cauldron looks like. And Ambedkar is the person to essentially shepherd this, or if you
#
want to use the cauldron example, we will coral this fire into something that is meaningful and
#
doesn't burn the place down. Though he does say later that I don't like the constitution,
#
we must burn it out. And just on that point, actually, what he was saying about Chandrabhan
#
Prasadji was actually very, very meaningful because there's a kind of interesting inversion
#
that happens with Ambedkar in the fifties when he's, of course, talking about this large state
#
and how it needs to guarantee liberty, but very quickly he switches. He's become law minister,
#
but he's quickly disillusioned by what this state is doing and that it's really not driving
#
the reform that it should. He resides over the Hindu code bill and how it was watered down over
#
a period of time, and the state is not driving the kind of social reform that it could. And he,
#
in a sense, and particularly his conversion to Buddhism and his sort of move to society and the
#
community becomes quite Gandhian. This is a kind of classic Gandhian act, right, as in you kind of
#
giving up and in this public spectacle, as in you are now embracing a new religion. I mean,
#
this is exactly the opposite of what Ambedkar would have been 20 years back. And that's actually
#
the side of a great intellectual, someone who's willing to change his views over time. So I think
#
there's a lot of interesting things at play in the cauldron in the late forties and early fifties.
#
In a sense, I think there is one fundamental reality, which, you know, both Gandhi and
#
Ambedkar recognized. So they tackled it in different ways, which was when, you know,
#
Ambedkar spoke of villages as a den of localism, et cetera, et cetera, or when he said the
#
constitution is just the topsoil. There is a recognition there or constitutional values are
#
just the topsoil. There is a recognition there that society is deeply liberal and we need to
#
do something about it. And the circa 1947 to 50 Ambedkar's way was, let's put these powers in
#
the constitution. Let's try to change it from the top down. Whereas Gandhi's whole thing was,
#
let's try to change it from the bottom up. And perhaps, you know, there is a crowding out
#
of the effort towards liberalism after the constitution comes into being, because many
#
people seem to think that we've done the job with this constitution and you know, social change from
#
the grassroots is just not such an urgent need. And today with hindsight, we can look back and
#
say that, you know, that was a liberal failure. The other thing that sort of strikes me and again,
#
there's a human aspect to it, which fascinates me. Like when the Government of India comes out,
#
after it comes out, Nehru in his presidential speech at the Lucknow session of the Congress in
#
1936, calls the act a new charter of slavery. You know, in the same session, Rajendra Prasad
#
denounces the act as one that, quote, in no way represents a will of the nation is designed to
#
facilitate and perpetuate the domination and exploitation of the people of India, stop quote.
#
And Madan Mohan Malaviya says, quote, not only does the Government of India act not give us
#
freedom, it takes away what little freedom we have, stop quote. And all these quotes are from
#
your book, obviously. And later on, you find when our draft constitution is presented, there are
#
similar reactions coming from within us. You know, Hassat Mohani describes it as a Pandora's box.
#
Damodar Seth says that, you know, instead of a new ideal constitution, what we've got is an
#
intelligent framed copy, some others along with him. And, you know, they move resolutions and
#
whatever. Later on, time Somnath Lahiri says it's written from the point of view of a police
#
constable. So clearly, all of these people are seeing it clearly. But there is also a sense that,
#
you know, very tragically and poignantly, some of these main figures who were protesting the
#
GOI Act of 1935 are not protesting those same features in this constitution, because somehow
#
they made the assumption that the problem was getting rid of the British, they were oppressing
#
us, this was a tool. Now that we are in charge, it is okay, it is no longer a tool for oppression,
#
though, of course, it remained a tool for oppression. So what is your sense on these
#
sort of human tragedies? Because too often a mistake that people make is a look back on history,
#
a look back on history. And historical figures are, it's like, you know, they are a particular
#
thing, they are fixed in space and time. But these are human beings struggling with various problems,
#
they are responding to their own incentives. There's that famous saying about, you know,
#
where we stand depends on where we sit. And these guys are sitting in a very different place right
#
now. So what is sort of your sense of all of that, that is happening and the human failings and the
#
way they are going back and forth across positions through all of this? I actually think that the
#
transition between the views that the framers had about the Government of India Act and how
#
they are about the Constitution is quite remarkable, because some of that transition is expected.
#
Because the fact is that different times call for different reactions. And at that point of time,
#
it was the freedom movement, we were asking for Poornaswaraj, we got some crumbs of Poornaswaraj
#
or crumbs of Noswaraj at all. So obviously, there was going to be virulent protests,
#
you wouldn't think what would happen 10 years later, they are not soothsayers.
#
Okay, so I can totally understand why they denounced the Government of India Act at that
#
time. It was simply not what we were looking for. Now, when it comes to the Constitution itself,
#
the fact is that we have made two key changes from the Government of India Act, which we think
#
are going to work. One is that we have provided for universal adult suffrage. And I think this
#
is big and we must credit the framers of the Constitution that there was no discussion on
#
franchise being restricted on grounds of property or gender or any of those things,
#
which is quite remarkable. And the second is that we've also provided for fundamental rights,
#
which is something that the Government of India Act didn't have, which the courts,
#
actually British courts, somehow brought in incrementally. So we made these two changes,
#
and we've of course got this heady feeling of optimism that now we are going to do right by
#
our countrymen and countrywomen. And so they think that, okay, I mean, those criticisms of
#
the Government of India Act don't stand as much. While in that sense, it's understandable,
#
the fact of the reason why I say it's remarkable is that there is a fundamental tension in what
#
has been drafted. And this tension is as follows, is that we want, as Ambedkar has said, that we
#
want the individual to be the unit on which the Constitution is based. And so we've created these
#
fundamental rights, the standard liberal fare everywhere. But we also have this very ambitious
#
program of economic planning, which we have taken to the level of putting it in the Constitution
#
itself. Now, mind you, this is actually, as I said, a fairly original step because Constitutions are
#
about setting political structures. They're not really about setting economic structures,
#
because there's a recognition that economic structures could change over time in terms of
#
what you want and what you think is for the greater good of mankind. But the Constitution
#
marks a clear departure from that because at that point of time, the dominant sentiment is that a
#
socialist state with centralized planning is the way forward. Now, fundamentally, that impulse,
#
while intended well, is an illiberal impulse. It comes through most clearly within two years
#
of the Constitution in the Zabindari Abolition Act cases. Because you've got a Constitution which
#
has got the right to property on the one hand, which is giving us a fundamental right to every
#
individual. But at the same time, the same parliament which has drafted the Constitution
#
is now passing Zabindari, and state governments actually, are passing Zabindari abolition
#
legislations everywhere, which is directly and frontally assaulting the right to property.
#
Now, this is a fundamental tension. And somewhere maybe our thinking about the middle path makes
#
us believe that there is always some straddling of the two extremes that is possible. But
#
conceptually, this tension remains. And I think that is what I find remarkable, that you cannot
#
transpose something onto a structure that is fundamentally not liberal or vice versa.
#
So, if you wanted economic planning and you thought that that was the way forward,
#
then perhaps your fundamental rights chapter should have been different. If you genuinely
#
felt that, you know, we want community over individual, then essentially that's what you
#
should have done. Or if you felt that fundamental rights were so critical, then maybe the balance
#
would have been struck a little bit this way. I'm not saying that you have to take only one
#
extreme and stick to it. But I feel that there ought to have been some better resolution
#
of this conceptual tension that existed. But I don't think there was. And I think one of the
#
reasons why there wasn't is because the job of drafting the Constitution was left to the lawyers.
#
So, it became a kind of technocratic exercise, whereas these big questions which would be
#
answered by politicians, the politicians were busy running the country, there was partition,
#
there was Kashmir, there were all kinds of issues that they had to deal with. Nehru was Prime
#
Minister, Patel was Home Minister, Azad was Education Minister, and everybody was essentially
#
running government. So, the task of drafting the Constitution was left to the lawyers. So,
#
you get this kind of wordsmithing that happens, which is how you try to resolve this tension.
#
Oh, directive principles are not my dig. And, you know, you have this kind of language. But
#
that's why that is a tension that existed conceptually. And over time has been resolved
#
by ensuring that the directive principles are basically essentially now shibboleth.
#
So, what was the evolution of the Constitution like from the period that,
#
you know, Rao sends out the questionnaire, people respond to that. Then you have the
#
Constituent Assembly, you have the First Draft Constitution and so on all the way to the Final
#
Constitution. Give me a sense of the sort of negotiations and arguments that are happening
#
because even here there are sort of all kinds of arguments and disagreements about, you know,
#
the design of the state itself. Yeah. So, Rao first, as I said, circulates the questionnaire.
#
On the basis of the questionnaire, he has a first draft. This draft is in place in 1947, around
#
around July to August 1947, he has this draft. So, obviously, a lot of the work has happened
#
beforehand. Now, once this draft is in place, there are several committees that have been
#
set up of the Constituent Assembly. There is a committee that is looking at powers of the
#
Union Government, in the Union Powers Committee. There's a committee that's looking at the power
#
of provincial governments. There's a committee on fundamental rights. There is a committee on
#
tribal and excluded areas. So, there are several committees, Financial Powers Committee and so on.
#
Now, all these committees are coming up with reports. Now, these reports have to be translated
#
into draft text. So, for that, there is a committee that is set up called the Drafting Committee.
#
Now, Amit Kaur is the main chairperson of this drafting committee and there are seven people,
#
most of whom are lawyers. In the beginning, they were all lawyers. Then one died and was
#
replaced by T. T. Krishnamachari, who was a well-known economist. And then you have this
#
drafting committee that essentially has this task of putting together these reports and editing and
#
revising Rao's text to make it the second draft of the constitution. This is what they do. They've
#
done this towards the end of 1947. And then there is a draft version of the constitution that is
#
circulated to all members of the Constituent Assembly. Then there are debates in the
#
Constituent Assembly in 1948, where every member pipes in on various issues. I'll deal with this
#
process first. And then the drafting committee takes all those suggestions, works on it for a
#
year, little more than a year. Then in 1949, comes up with a final draft, which again the
#
members comment on. Some changes are made, most changes are rejected. And then on 26th of November,
#
1949, we finally adopt and enact the constitution, which comes into existence into force on 26th of
#
January, because it's going to be celebrated as Republic Day, because it was earlier celebrated
#
as Poornaswaraj Day. So that is why we wait for those two months and we celebrate 26th January as
#
the day on which the constitution comes into force. So this is as far as the process is concerned.
#
As far as the substantive views are concerned, as I said earlier, once you have a first draft,
#
people are only going to tinker at the edges. So there is no substantial change in terms of,
#
let's not have a government that is top down, let's have a government that is bottom up,
#
let's have more powers of federation, let's not think about directive principles as non-binding,
#
let's have them as binding principles. So I don't think there are
#
conceptually first order questions that are discussed at this stage.
#
So most of the changes are changes in relation to particular articles of the constitution. So,
#
for example, the longest debate in the constituent assembly is on the question of language.
#
And this vexed question of English, Hindi, vernacular, what is this formula going to be?
#
That's a very long debate where we ultimately end up with a hedge,
#
you say that English is the official language. Hindi will also be used. In 15 years, this will
#
be reviewed and states will be allowed to do their own thing. So you have this kind of hedge
#
where you, and this is a kind of pattern that you see in a lot of these vexed questions,
#
that you leave it to parliament to decide. There are a lot of questions which are left to parliament
#
by law. So fundamental changes are not made because there is a view, consistent view across
#
the board largely, that India needs a large state that is based on separation of powers.
#
So we follow the British model where there is an executive that is wholly within the legislature,
#
the leader of the majority party becomes the legislature, becomes the prime minister,
#
and there is a judiciary that is independent. Here we make a distinction because it's independent
#
both in structure as well as in practice, unlike the UK where it is at that point of time a committee
#
of the House of Lords is actually the judicial week. So this is the structure that we have and
#
I feel that while it's the safe option, so if you have a bunch of lawyers, the lawyers will take an
#
option of this, it's tried and tested, it's got its precedents, you're not doing something radically
#
new. But there are some questions which you think, not just in hindsight, but maybe even
#
at that point of time you perhaps could ask, do we need a totem president? Why do we need that?
#
Why do we need such a huge, the largest presidential estate anywhere in the world,
#
if this person is not going to have any powers and is only going to perform a ceremonial role?
#
Do we really need that? I don't know. That's certainly a question that comes up. I mean,
#
again, if you're looking at this idea of the idea of the Prime Minister being the leader of
#
the majority party and we obviously have this culture of a maibab sarkar where you're
#
essentially looking at some kind of vestige of feudal rule, then perhaps maybe a presidential
#
system is more suited to who we are. But some of these fundamental questions don't really get asked
#
as much. And I think that's because we are in a hurry. We need to get the best document we can.
#
We have the example of Pakistan, which doesn't get a constitution for about 10 years and the
#
army comes in and there's all kinds of examples. So we are always like, we don't want to be that.
#
And so we get the best of what we can in three years time. And it was remarkable feat that they
#
did it in three years. And I think it's time for every generation to see whether that what they
#
did in three years continues to work for them or not. Yeah. And some of it is truly remarkable
#
like what you pointed out about universal adult suffrage, which we can take for granted,
#
but it was completely radical. And in other nations, you know, the fight for it took decades
#
and we just got it right away. And that's amazing. Now you've described the process through which we
#
arrived at this and some of the tensions and some of the arguments. And you know, when you then speak
#
about early in your book, you describe about why it is a colonial, why you're calling it a colonial
#
constitution, you give two reasons. One of course is how much of it borrows from the government of
#
India Act 1935, you know, two thirds of the first draft, around one third of the final
#
constitution itself. But more than that, the basic spirit that it takes your second,
#
you know, reasoning is a conceptual sense where you say, quote, but the Indian constitution is
#
colonial in a more conceptual sense. It sets up a government that towers over the citizen,
#
much like colonial governments tend to do, stop quote. Various examples of that. We've discussed
#
the dilution of the fundamental rights. I in fact had an excellent episode with Shruti Rajgopalan
#
about the right of property alone, about what happened to that through the ages. You know,
#
I've written plenty about how the right to free speech is so badly sort of diluted. In your book,
#
you have, you've spoken about preventive detention, you know, which, I mean, when the
#
Roller Tact happened, which, you know, where the British brought in preventive detention,
#
we were rightly up in arms against it. And yet, you know, Ambedkar was actually the swing vote
#
for it, as you point out, when the debate was happening and that's why we got it.
#
And the salt tax, you know, Gandhi's whole Dundee march was, hey, the salt tax is
#
unjust, but it kind of remained. In fact, I think a few years back, I wrote a column about how it's,
#
it was, this was before GST about how now it's greater than ever, much greater than what Gandhi
#
protested against. I'm not sure how much it is today with GST coming into play.
#
It was a salt cess that we had at the Indian salt service with headquarters in Jaipur.
#
With Indian salt service, 11 officers headquartered in Jaipur administering the salt cess.
#
So give me a broader sense of the ways in which the constitution was colonial in this sense,
#
you know, the sense fine, the borrowing sense fine, we got that. But in this particular sense,
#
because for many people, partly because it is so large and unwieldy a document, unlike the
#
American constitution, which is concise and just so brilliantly pithy, the largeness of our
#
constitution also makes it a little bit like Ambedkar Gandhi that you can look inside and
#
find whatever the hell you want. So you'll find many beautiful things in our constitution,
#
but you'll also find a lot that is just an artifact that was already an artifact by that
#
time and should never have been there. So give me a sense of all the ways in which it is conceptual
#
and the way that it functions and the way that it, you know, designs a state.
#
I'll give you three reasons as to why it's colonial breaking down the reason that I've
#
given in the book. The first is why is it so long? You know, we used to be told in our
#
civics textbooks that we have the longest constitution in the world. I never knew
#
whether to laugh or to cry or feel proud or to feel sad. It basically meant that we had
#
more articles to bug up at that point in time. That's what it entailed. But it was somewhere
#
said in a way that we should feel proud, right? That was the way in which it was said. We have
#
the longest constitution in the world. We are the largest democracy in the world. You know,
#
there is a kind of underlying pride with which we say these things. But why is it long? And what
#
does it have to do with being colonial? I think there's a very clear reason and I give this
#
example in some of the talks that I've done on this. But why is the constitution so long?
#
You took the example of salt earlier and when salt was being discussed and that we should have a
#
provision saying that there should be no salt tax in India, someone said it was a sentimental
#
provision. Someone else said rightly so that salt is a particular item. Constitutions don't
#
discuss particular items. Fair enough. But when it came to another item, jute, not only was it
#
discussed, but there is a provision in the constitution from the original constitution,
#
which continues till today called Article 273. What does it say? It says that when jute is
#
exported from the country, the customs duty that we get on that export will be shared
#
as grants in aid with the three states of West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar. Okay. Now,
#
this is, I come from West Bengal and of course, jute was an important item then.
#
But is it important enough to be in the constitution? I mean, surely what is good
#
for salt, which is the singular emblem of our freedom movement should also be good for jute.
#
There is also another item of commerce people will work it out. But there is a reason why it's
#
not left for people to work out. And that's because there is a fundamental distrust of what
#
a people who are not accustomed to democracy will do, which is why you have law to negotiate
#
that for you. So this is in my view, nothing but a perpetuation of the colonial sentiment
#
that the natives cannot be trusted. Now you can't say natives cannot be trusted. You say that India
#
is not ready for democracy yet. So because what essentially are you doing? You're essentially
#
saying that the state of West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha will not be able to negotiate successfully
#
with each other and the union to share these proceeds. So let me write it down in the
#
constitution. So what you're essentially doing is distrusting elected representatives. And that is
#
a distrust of democracy. And that, in my view, is clearly a colonial holdover that you don't
#
think that the people can sort it out. And this is a view that continues in various forms to the
#
present day, that I trust the union government more than the state. I trust state more than my
#
local counselor. This kind of sentiment still exists. So that's the first reason that I think
#
there is, while we were setting up a democratic state, there is still a fundamental distrust of
#
the people. And ultimately, this is something that Gandhian philosophy and thought allows,
#
because this was the genius of Gandhi, where he took over from the moderates and the extremists
#
and the early Congress. He allowed the creation of a movement where the people were mobilized,
#
but didn't really participate. They participated in the freedom movement for sure, but not in the
#
way in which the state was being structured or created. And that was the genius of Gandhi,
#
that it was a mass movement, but the people still remained. And when it came to the constitution,
#
people still remained subjects in some sense and not citizens.
#
The second reason as to why it's colonial is because we perpetuated colonial institutions.
#
And there's a lot of writing on this, that for purely practical reasons, we continued the police
#
service. We continued the Indian administrative service. We renamed all of it, of course, from
#
the imperial police service. But we continued that. And not only did we continue it, we also
#
continued it without reforming it in any way. There were no new incentives for policemen to
#
behave differently. The Indian Police Act 1861 still continued. There was no retraining of
#
policemen done. Of course, we didn't have that many resources. So, it was not as if there was
#
significant investment of resources that was made. So, it was almost as if overnight these people
#
who were brutalizing Indians is now going to start serving Indians, right? So, that's the second
#
reason that it's sort of a institutional reform was not something that we thought about very
#
seriously. Again, part of that heady optimism of that time. And I think that was the second.
#
And the third, which is the fundamental point of what does it mean to have a state that's towering
#
over the citizen? I think that was a deliberate design choice that was made by the framers of
#
the assembly that at this point of time, if too much power devolves to the citizen, then what you
#
have is essentially citizens who are not ready for democracy. God knows what they will select.
#
So, there is, I talk about the constitution of the Hindustan Free State, which was a constitution
#
that was drafted by the Hindu Mahasabha. And there were two interesting provisions there,
#
which were provisions for referendum and recall. So, you can have referendum on key issues and you
#
can recall elected participants which had made a comeback during the Andha Hazare movement,
#
which was one of the key demands of the Andha Hazare movement that you have the right to recall.
#
But these were summarily dismissed. There was no question of including them in the constitution
#
because, again, coming back to the same thought that your people are not yet ready for democracy
#
and if they are, then this will happen at that time. And the state towering over the citizen
#
is the reason as to why you have what you mentioned, the preventive detention laws.
#
And this actually strikes me as shocking. And I think anyone who even talks about fundamental
#
rights as a single achievement of the constitution has a hard time explaining what a provision
#
legitimizing preventive detention is doing there, right? Because it's right in the heart of the
#
fundamental rights chapter of article 22. And Ambedkar voted in favor of it as in Madhav Rao
#
only came, Munshi voted against it as Mahavir Tyagi famously said that it's because they are
#
lawyers and have never been to jail and Munshi had been to jail. That is why they continue to
#
vote in favor of it. But the point is this, Ambedkar thought that one,
#
we need a state that guarantees our liberty, preventive detention is going to happen anyway.
#
So if it happens, might as well regulate the state rather than let it happen anyway. Perhaps
#
it's a reasonable thought, but you think that at some point of time when you're drafting a
#
constitution, because a constitutional moment doesn't happen every day. So when you get a
#
constitutional moment, does it, you think that some kind of idealism will prevail and you will
#
say you will have a simple provision, preventive detention shall not be permitted, full stop,
#
or a provision that there shall be free speech, full stop. We didn't have a provision like this,
#
not as if this is without precedent. We had untouchability, the untouchability shall be
#
abolished. So we knew how to draft provisions like this. So maybe some part of that idealism
#
could also have filtered through when it came to matters around preventive detention,
#
but it did because we wanted law and order. And that is why I think that this idea that
#
man is vile and it's only our future generations that have failed us cannot explain things
#
exclusively. It's also because some of this has sanctioned in the constitution itself. So
#
not a single government in independent India has touched the law and sedition. Not a single
#
government in independent India has done anything about preventive detention. And we don't need to
#
see this as we tend to do today through Modi tinted glasses. This is about the BGP versus
#
the Congress. This is about the state and the citizen. And this is the point that I've been
#
trying to make in the book because the real impulse for writing this book came as I write
#
in the epilogue during the first wave of COVID. There was this photograph of 50 migrant laborers
#
crouched on the side of the road in Bareilly and they were sitting down on their haunches
#
and some state officials were spraying them with disinfectant. For me, that photograph really
#
captured what the Indian state was about. The state was still towering above with the chemical
#
spray and the citizens were still sitting below as if they were subjects waiting for some
#
manufacture. And I think that that is, to put it very plainly, a state that the successive
#
governments have inherited but the constitution has created. I often say that India has three
#
problems today in my view and not everyone may agree with the first of those. And the first of
#
those is the party in power right now. And of course I oppose them and other people may support
#
them and that's subjective. But the second and the third I think are pretty undeniable and
#
at least the conditions are whether you worry about them may or may not be. And one condition
#
is the oppressive state. Exactly what you described that for all these decades we've had a state that
#
has ruled us rather than served us under every single party. And Shruti Rajgopalan has a great
#
talk on YouTube which I'll link from the show notes where she says that right from Nehru onwards,
#
every prime minister who wanted to do something unconstitutional
#
amended the constitution and made it constitutional first. So to the extent that I think there are
#
more than a hundred amendments, to the extent that there's even this cartoon where somebody
#
goes to the parliament bookshop and he asks for the constitution and the person says,
#
it's a bookshop sir, we don't have periodicals. It reminds me of what Acharya Kriplani had also said
#
because Acharya Kriplani had lived almost till a hundred and someone had remarked saying that
#
Acharya Sahib, you have a very good constitution. He said, what constitution? It's only amendments.
#
It's almost like a constitution of theses, like you have the ship of theses.
#
But these are the same constitution anymore. And that was actually seen as one of its
#
signal virtues as an Ambedkar kept saying that yes, we have a long constitution,
#
but we've also made amending power very easy. Now, this is a compromise that I actually find
#
as a double-edged sword. I mean, it does have something going for it in the sense that future
#
generations can make of them what you will. But I would have thought that a more sensible design
#
choice would have been a shorter constitution with something very fundamental to who we think
#
we are as a people, leave the rest to legislation and make this hard to amend. This is what I would
#
think is a way of drafting an accessible constitution that truly speaks to the nation. But the moment
#
we saw this not just as a constitution that is speaking to the nation as a charter of values,
#
but also as a detailed delineation of structures of government, I mean, then it becomes a
#
constitution plus statute rolled into one. And that's what I think we have.
#
Sanyam Bhutani Yeah. And to complete my thought,
#
the third of the problems which is not relevant to our conversation at all today is our fractured
#
society and et cetera, et cetera. But that's not relevant. Now, the question I want to ask is that
#
let us say that we begin with the G.O.I Act of 1935, but you want to, you know, move away from
#
it in certain ways. The way in which I would like to move away from it, from where I sit and where
#
I stand, is that I would like there to be more liberty. So basically the state gets much less
#
oppressive. And, you know, you have safeguards that protect the citizen from the state and not
#
the other way around. But instead, there is a third direction that the Indian state moves in,
#
which is in the direction of sort of redefining liberties to include positive liberties. You know,
#
Isaiah Berlin had this, you know, negative liberties and positive liberties just to kind
#
of simplify it for my listeners who may not have heard of the concept. Negative rights basically
#
are rights where somebody can not do something to you. So someone can not take your life,
#
not infringe your right to free speech, not take your property, which is why they're called
#
negative rights. You are protected from those. And positive rights are when someone has to give
#
you something, someone has to give you food, someone has to give you a job, someone has to
#
give you broadband. And it's dangerous to even think of them as rights, they're more like
#
entitlements. And the problem is that when you muddy the language and you bring them all together,
#
to fulfill a positive right, you have to infringe a negative right. If you want to give somebody
#
free broadband, you have to get that money from somewhere and therefore you're using coercion and
#
your monopoly on violence. So just, you know, for the listener's sake, since I was using
#
jargon. And in our constitution, thankfully, the fundamental rights are all sort of negative rights,
#
more or less. And all the positive rights like khaana do, ye karo, wo karo, all that is in the
#
directive principles, which eventually no one really takes seriously and no one cares about
#
what is in there. Now, right from the start of the whole framing process, there was a sense that the
#
state will intervene to actually offer many of these positive rights because the argument,
#
like in your words, you've written, contrary to the widely accepted liberal understanding that
#
non-intervention by the state would mean the perpetuation of liberty, Rao proposed the
#
opposite. Liberty would only be meaningful when the state actively intervened to secure a decent
#
life for all, stop quote. And at one level, it seems to make sense. Like, what are you going to
#
do with the right to free speech if you don't have food on your plate? But I would argue that
#
while they were thinking correctly of the ends, they got the means all wrong. The way to get there
#
is through freedom. That is the only way, in fact, to get there as history has taught us.
#
But those lessons weren't, you know, as clear at that point in time, at that moment in time.
#
So what is your sense of this? That the one significant way in which we departed from the
#
1935 Government of India Act, in my naive reading, so please correct me if I'm wrong,
#
is that we became much more paternalistic in this sense that number one, we tried to build,
#
you know, different aspects of a welfare state when we were really too poor to be able to actually,
#
you know, carry it out. And number two, we tried to change society from the top down because of all
#
the ills of society. And because of this fatal concede that we can sit here and we can direct
#
what society will be and it will change immediately, which with hindsight was folly because politics
#
is today caught up with society and it is what it is and the real work of change had to happen
#
at the grassroots and we utterly failed. Yeah, so I agree with both of these things.
#
I think the second one actually is a holdover of colonial thought that, you know, we can sit
#
in Delhi and we can change the way in which our villages function because we have this enlightened
#
bureaucracy which knows everything. I think this is exactly the idea of an impartial technocratic
#
administrator who can sit and solve the problems of the country. We inherited that and we continued
#
it. And that is, I would say, a continuation of what was before. The welfare state was certainly
#
a break from the past. And there is no doubt about the fact that this was the first time that the
#
state was taking on the responsibilities of securing a better life for citizens. And this
#
is a noble goal and a goal that the state ought to have sought. But again, where I find actually the
#
muddying of the waters is that we have a lot of rhetoric in the Constituent Assembly about how
#
important health and education are to the future of the Indian nation. And I think they got that
#
diagnosis perfectly right. But if it was so important, why was the discussion around health
#
and education, a discussion about whether to make these rights justiciable or not? That seems to be
#
like a very lawyerly and technical discussion to have. And if we think that our life expectancy
#
currently, which it was at that point of time, was about 28 for women and 31 for men, I mean,
#
yeah, very low, very low. Maybe I'm getting the numbers slightly wrong, but it's around that
#
region. It's around there. Given that it was around there, shouldn't the questions that we
#
be asking are, even at the level of a constitution, that how are we going to resource better health
#
care in our country, right? If getting life expectancy up is a serious goal, and if this
#
is what we think is critical to the future welfare of our nation, why don't we have a
#
whole chapter on health care in our constitution? Why don't we have a whole chapter on education,
#
whether you want the state to do it or you want someone else to do it? That's a different matter.
#
But why don't you deal with these questions with the attention that you yourself think
#
that it deserves? Why is it relegated to a question on whether someone should be allowed to go to
#
court if they have not got it? I mean, that seems to be an extremely narrow pigeonholing of a very
#
large and critical problem. And I think that this happens because the language that we are speaking
#
at that point of time, though our thoughts have gone towards a welfare state and what a post-colonial
#
order looks like, the language that we are speaking is still that of a colonial administrator. So
#
Sandeep Toh Dasgupta has this very nice essay in Odin Bhatia's book, which is how the constitution
#
is drafted from the point of view of an anxious administrator. And I think he's right on that
#
because the fact is that the language that you see is careful, guarded, full of caveats. You know,
#
where we are talking about education, we want everyone to be educated. We think we don't have
#
the resources. So what do we do? We say that everyone shall have the right to have education
#
and the state shall provide it in 10 years time. The state shall provide free and compulsory
#
education to all within 10 years. This is a directive principle that we set ourselves in
#
1950. Now the question is, if it is that important, surely, we can think more as to how will we get
#
there. And I think that is also a discussion that the constituent assembly, either as the
#
constituent assembly or as the first parliament, should be having. And just because these questions
#
are not so-called constitutional, it's not a reason to not be having them. Because what is
#
constitutional not is defined by us. We don't have to be followers in this respect. So I think
#
that that's so we're continuing to speak the language of the colonial administrator. And
#
this is where I think that a thesis like my friend Madhav's thesis that the constitution is India's
#
founding movement is fundamentally wrong. Because I think that that gives the impression that the
#
constitution has come out of the ether out of nowhere and has created this magnificent country.
#
Maybe he took our, we were classmates in school and maybe he took us in college and maybe he took
#
our history teachers lesson too seriously that India as a nation began in 1947. Because of
#
constitution, as you see, it's, I would say in large respect, it's a continuity constitution.
#
It continues what was there before, make some changes here and there and continues it. Maybe
#
it's a good thing. It's a reasonable choice to have been made. But as Sandeep says, which I think
#
is closer to the truth, that it is neither a break nor a continuity. It's somewhere in between. It's
#
a break in some places. It continues some things in some places. But what it's not is that it's
#
most certainly not the founding movement of India. I mean, in a factual way it is. I mean, in the
#
sense that it's a founding movement of a sovereign democratic republic. Sure. But that's not the way
#
in which it is made in the title. It meant that it somehow constituted the country and constituted
#
the people. And I don't think it has done that. Because if it were to be that, then I would think
#
that there had to be far more in the constitution around issues that mattered to the Indian people
#
at that point of time, which the constituent assembly themselves recognized, primarily of
#
which were health and education. And there would be far less on things that didn't matter, that is
#
differences between finance bills and money bills and how appropriation bills will be presented in
#
the house, which are all stuff that is really jargon of the kind that could be delegated to
#
some statute. I mean, I agree with you on the fact that the constitution should have never have
#
mentioned salt or jute because they are too particular and you want to leave them to the
#
messy democratic processes. And I would actually say the same for education. Like I think if the
#
constitution said something about education at the time, it would have been empty virtue signaling.
#
It did not have the means to actually deliver any of it. And the only way to deliver it was to enable
#
a free society in which people can move towards that themselves. I mean, we were too poor at
#
that time to do any kind of welfarism and we failed at whatever top down interventions we
#
tried to do. Yeah, so I think there are two ways that I would answer this. First is that I fully
#
agree with the premise that the only way to getting certain outcomes is by ensuring that we
#
have the freedoms to get there. And we may not have it tomorrow, we may not have it overnight,
#
but we will ultimately get there if we set the structures for it. Absolutely. But my other point
#
is to question as to what is a constitution for, because I believe as I've written in the book,
#
that it's not constitutions that make nations, but nations that make constitutions. And we were
#
making a constitution for ourselves. So if we felt at that point of time that education was
#
the most important thing and we had to achieve it as of yesterday, then I would like to see
#
a chapter dedicated to education in terms of how progressively over time we will ensure that there
#
are resources to allow us to fund this education system. Now, whether it is a question of it might
#
ultimately have become a chapter on taxation, because it's ultimately a question of how you're
#
going to get those resources in place. But I would have liked to see some thought in terms of
#
the how we are going to get there, whether it is just by keeping us free, or if you think it's not
#
by keeping us free, but the state is going to do something about it, what will it do? How will it
#
do it? Now, these are not things that you traditionally think of as constitutional,
#
right? But I would think that if this was so important, and if we were marking a decisive
#
break from the past, and if we were some kind of founding movement of a new Indian republic,
#
then these kinds of new constitutional ideas should have made the cut.
#
I think, I mean, I agree with you that, you know, nations make constitutions. But on that specific,
#
I define it a little differently. I'd say the job of any constitution, the very basis is to protect
#
the people from the state and to act as a safeguard for that, and also to lay down the
#
conditions for prosperity. And the conditions for prosperity, I think, did not, should not have
#
involved specific thinking on specific subjects, but merely getting the constitutional values
#
right. And we didn't get the fundamental constitutional value right of freedom.
#
Yeah, I think certainly on freedom, and I think there is a key reason for that, is that we were
#
also thinking about this dynamic entirely from the perspective in which Western theorists,
#
whether it is Bill, primarily Bill actually saw it, which is the individual vis-a-vis the state.
#
And I think while that's correct, and there's nothing wrong with looking at it like that,
#
there was an important third component which we missed, which was that of the community.
#
And I think the community does play a very critical role in society in India. And I think that
#
as part of any constitutional thinking, we should have had a much more central focus
#
on the idea of community. It comes in in places. You can see this in the Freedom of Religion article
#
where there are some freedoms that are given to individuals and some freedoms that are given to
#
groups. So there are, obviously you will say, someone will say that caste reservations,
#
caste-based reservations is also community coming in. So the community comes in certain ways, but I
#
think that this relationship between the individual and the community is not a relationship
#
that has been fully explored in the constitutional framework. And I think that we see shades of that
#
quite often, whether you're talking about your khaap panchayats, whether you're talking about
#
reservations, whether you're talking about entering Shabribala. I mean, the state is kind
#
of very much a third player in this. It's very much the individual and the community. And I think
#
this is a relationship that needed a little bit more thought, especially because you had Gandhi who
#
was hammering on about the fact that you don't want the state, you only want local communities,
#
and Ambedkar saying that communities are oppressive. So I think I would have perhaps,
#
if we were, as you said, if we were going to make a break from the G.O.I Act of 1935, then I think
#
the idea of community needs to be taken much more seriously. I feel that group rights and individual
#
rights are always in conflict. And the negotiation between individuals and communities is something
#
that can happen only at a social level without a constitution or a state getting involved.
#
And the state's only role is really to protect the individual from the caprices of community.
#
So you want to protect the individual from the khaap panchayat. And as far as a khaap panchayat,
#
as a democratically elected unit of governance is concerned, fine, that makes sense, as local
#
as possible, but always while protecting individual rights, which to me is really the bedrock.
#
But so here's my, tell me about the other visions of constitutions. You know, you've mentioned a
#
couple of them in this. What were the other visions of constitutionalism? You know, one of them, of
#
course, was from the Hindu Mahasabha, which you alluded to briefly. So give me a little bit about
#
how those visions were sort of evolving and coming up and what were they like? And, you know, the
#
Hindu Mahasabha one, you said, was also a colonial constitution.
#
Yeah, absolutely. I think there was only one real alternative vision to what a constitution could
#
look like, and that was one that was propounded by Gandhi. And like with many things that were
#
Gandhi and Gandhi was both the biggest proponent and the biggest opponent of his own vision,
#
right? I'll get to that in a second. But the Hindu Mahasabha did come up with a constitution
#
called the Constitution of the Hindustan Free State, as I write in my book.
#
It's not a different constitution from the ultimate constitution of India. They knew that
#
they were not doing this as a practical document to run the country. So they could put in a few
#
more things there, which were perhaps not immediately achievable, right? Like health,
#
education, the facets of a welfare state. There was a whole litany of rights that they provide
#
for with a very similar structure of government to what the constitution ultimately says.
#
What was interesting to me for the Hindu Mahasabha's constitution is that they declared
#
that India shall be a secular state with no state religion. It said that there will,
#
so that means there is no possibility of a constitutional Hindu Rashtra in that constitution.
#
Second is that they said that the state shall not discriminate between any religion.
#
So there could be no first class and second class citizenship amongst Hindus and Muslims.
#
So I think that these were key that they did do that. And they were speaking a very different,
#
reasonable language. Because at the same time, you'll remember that Savarkar, under whose
#
presidency the Hindu Mahasabha did come up with the constitution of the Hindustan free state,
#
had written the essentials of Hindutva, when he was saying that only a person who has his
#
pitra bhoomi and punya bhoomi between the Indas and the Indian Ocean is a Hindu and India belongs
#
to Hindus. So you'd wonder that isn't this a contradiction of epic proportions that here
#
you are saying that India belongs to Hindus, excludes Muslims, Christians and anyone who has
#
their pitra bhoomi and punya bhoomi outside. But at the same time, when it comes to the constitution,
#
you're seeing a different tune. Not only saying that there will be no discrimination,
#
but also saying that there shall be no state religion and India shall be secular. Something
#
that the constitution of India doesn't say. Right? I mean, it's an interesting thought
#
experiment that if we had the constitution of the Hindustan free state, would it be a violation that
#
the prime minister of India is going to do a Pran Prathistha ceremony in Ayodhya? Maybe it
#
would have been a violation of Savarkar's constitution, but it's certainly not a violation
#
of the constitution of India. So I think that's an interesting thought experiment there. But the
#
fact remains that the Hindu Mahasabha did this, which is a kind of trope that you see with the
#
Sangh Parivar throughout independent India under Vajpayee, certainly also under Modi,
#
is that the language when it comes to the constitution is always a reasonable mainstream
#
language. Right? The prime minister also worships the constitution. He also says that he has great
#
respect for it. There have been no frontal attacks on the constitution. The amendments
#
to the constitution that this government has brought in have been amendments relating to
#
the GST, economically backward caste reservations, not anything that you would think at least openly
#
and overtly brings about any form of the Hindu Rashtra. Article 370 is a slight exception.
#
It's kind of a particular unique case, which we can get into, but is a different issue altogether.
#
Because Hindutva as a doctrine can sit side by side with the constitution of the Hindustan
#
free state because it's a doctrine that operates in society. And society operates at a different
#
plane from constitutional law. And I think this is how the Hindu Mahasabha was seeing it at that
#
time. This is how the BJP sees it now as well. And I think it's important so that we don't miss
#
the wood for the trees. There's a lot of talk that the constitution is in danger,
#
the constitution is in danger. And I'll stick my neck out to say that the constitution is not
#
in danger. And I think that if you want to look at protecting the guardrails of our democracy,
#
as you rightly said, we have to protect individuals from greater intrusion from the state,
#
however and whenever it happens. I think that's got to be the focus. So the institutions have
#
got to be our focus, not so much the constitution. So I find writing like this, missing the wood for
#
the trees a little bit. So that's the Hindu Mahasabha constitution. It's not really an
#
alternative. It's kind of similar, but it's got these interesting features which perhaps are
#
not the ones we would intuitively think exist in a constitution drafted by the Hindu Mahasabha.
#
The only real alternative constitution that exists is the Gandhian one. Why is it an alternative? I
#
think two reasons. It kind of goes against the traditional liberal conception of rights.
#
It says that basically duties are fundamental and channeling Krishna in the Mahabharata,
#
he says the true source of rights is duty. So if you follow your duty, rights will ensue. So we
#
can disregard this liberal consensus that rights and human rights, rights because of who we exist,
#
are the fundamental basis for constitution. The fundamental basis should be duty.
#
And the second is that an almost militant espousal of local self-government that India should be
#
congregation of village republics, individuals should elect their panchayat, panchayat should
#
elect the taluka leaders, talukas district, district straight and state, the union with
#
very few powers. So it was like bottom up and not top down. It was not fully worked out,
#
particularly on economic matters. As I pointed out, how will this work? How will trade between
#
villages work if everyone has different rules? There's horribly inefficient systems that you're
#
going to set up. So it needed to be worked out a little bit better, but I think it was left at
#
that level of ideology and principle. Sriman Narayan Agarwal who later becomes the governor
#
of Gujarat does come up with a Gandhian constitution for free India. Gandhi writes the foreword for
#
this constitution, but subtly distances himself from that and saying that it's a constitution
#
that bears my name, but doesn't mean that I agree with each of these. And why is it that Gandhi says
#
it's not as if Gandhi is being duplicitous. Gandhi believes every word of what Agarwal has written
#
that India needs a bottom up democracy. India needs a democracy that is based on the idea of
#
rights, but he realizes that India is not ready for it. And for him, the constitution is a
#
practical document that is meant to generate consensus. And the only way Jinnah and Nehru
#
will see eye to eye together with all the other political leaders is that if we have a tried and
#
tested constitutional model, and a tried and tested constitutional model is one that exists
#
in Western countries, which both Nehru and Jinnah as lawyers are very familiar with.
#
So he decides to quietly give this up. He says that India in its own time will find its own
#
constitution. And he says that now I've turned my attention to society. So he embarks on a
#
constructive program for moral uplift of individuals because he says that that's what
#
really is going to found a nation. But I think that without getting too caught up in the details
#
of the Gandhian constitution, I think there are two broad trajectories for us to think about
#
75 years later. The first is what he called village republics, what we call decentralization.
#
The 14th finance commission gave this devolution where it increased the share of states from 32%
#
to 42%, greater power to states. We see that with the 73rd and 74th amendment creating a third tier.
#
But we really haven't got there yet. So how do we try and ensure some meaningful
#
decentralization that takes power closer to the people? I think that's one upshot of Gandhian
#
thought that requires serious consideration today, not just by constitutional theorists,
#
by economists, political theorists, political scientists. And the second, as far as this
#
question of duty is concerned, this is an idea that keeps coming back in political discourse,
#
whether it's Indira Gandhi, the 42nd amendment, or it's the Prime Minister Modi. Everyone keeps
#
talking about the idea of duty because there is a deep kind of roots that this idea has
#
in Indic thought, whether you're talking about dharma as the fundamental, more abstract notion
#
of what is right conduct or duty or about karta viya, which is kind of more in a transactional
#
sense, what your duties are. But these are thoughts that keep recurring in political
#
discourse. And I think the upshot of Gandhian thought on duty is that can we think about a
#
rights framework that can coexist with the idea of duties? And if so, what does it look like?
#
I don't have the answer to this, but I think we have poopooed this idea of duty too much.
#
And the greatest disservice to this idea was done by Indira Gandhi, who brought in fundamental
#
duties as part of the most undemocratic 42nd amendment to the constitution in the emergency.
#
So I think that's also kind of made it a concept that is again one on paper. But I do think that
#
we need to think about duties in a way as to what are the duties that as citizens we owe each other,
#
whether that's in the constitution or not is a second order question. But what are those duties
#
that we owe to each other? Because I don't think it would come as a surprise and we are recording
#
this in Delhi that the civic duties that we owe each other, particularly in this city,
#
negligible, if not the rest of the country. So at the end of the day, if India is going to
#
grow on the strength of individual enterprise and community will, then we have to know what
#
it is that individuals owe each other. I think from a point of view of personal
#
morality and interpersonal behavior, duties are super important and I think of them all the time.
#
From a point of view of duties actually being part of the constitution,
#
I think it is errant and dangerous nonsense. I think it's not a coincidence that our two most
#
autocratic leaders are the two people who've spoken the most about it. And you know, of course,
#
Gandhi in his constitution also speaks about it and also at one point when he speaks of
#
his vision of economic organization is also quite alarming to me. You write, quote,
#
there were also rules of economic organization, self-sustaining villages with Khadi as a primary
#
industry supported by other cottage industries like soap and matchmaking, a supplement to
#
nationalized industries with constructive and nonviolent labor unions, of cultivation of civic
#
virtue by keeping one's villages clean and of orienting education towards creating model
#
villagers and citizens, top quote. And it feels to me that again, the multitude saying that,
#
you know, absolutely great political strategist and tactician and thinker and an absolute legend
#
in many ways. But this is utterly daft to me. And I remember I did a couple of episodes on Gandhi
#
with Ram Guha and I quoted from him Swaraj where Gandhi rails against doctors and railways and so
#
on. And I said, what's going on here? He doesn't seem to understand the world at all. But that one
#
thing, ahimsa, nonviolent resistance, he gets completely right and changes the world. How does
#
he get that one thing right and nothing else practically? And Ram's revealing answer was that
#
that is a one thing he has done. He actually has experience of it. He has lived it. He's had skin
#
in the game. The other stuff, you know, not Ram's words, my words. And that's kind of the
#
sense I got with him. So it just felt that at some level he also must have known that let the
#
actual hardcore practical people who've, you know, lived in this world sort of figure it out.
#
Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's essentially Gandhi sets himself up as providing a counterpoint
#
to Western civilization, right? So in that sense, when he's talking about whether he's talking about
#
Swadeshi or he's talking about ahimsa or he's talking about Satyagraha, as in what he's
#
essentially doing is that he's trying to provide an alternative model to how the West sees
#
civilization. And so when it comes to economic organization, as in this is something that,
#
as he rightly said, he may have tried some little experiment in Tolstoy farm in South Africa,
#
which worked very well because there were 20 people there who were kind of some voluntarily,
#
some corralled into doing this. But the fact remains that he has no idea as to how to do
#
this at scale. But because this is a counterpoint to Western civilization and it has to provide an
#
alternative that looks authentic, that looks original, that looks Indian. I mean, there is
#
this, there is this alternative that is provided. And so how do we make sense of it? As Ram rightly
#
said that, you know, he hasn't done this, but also today as an, I think how we try to make sense of
#
what he's saying is that we try and not take the letter of it. It makes no sense whatsoever to ever
#
even think of any economic organization of this kind. But I think the idea really is, and this is
#
how I choose to see it, that how do we empower individuals to be enterprising? I think this is
#
ultimately what, how I see this Gandhian economic thought as relevant today. How can they do things
#
that they think that they are good at, which will be good for themselves and will be good for the
#
rest of society without excessive intervention of the state? This is how I see its relevance today.
#
Yeah. And that's actually a profound point that we were talking about the Overton window earlier.
#
And in a sense, Gandhi is perhaps moving the Overton window of Indicness and Westernness,
#
you know, and just providing the stark counterpoints. At least you can begin to
#
think in other directions. And on the fundamental question of decentralization, he is, and how
#
change must happen bottom up is a hundred percent right. I mean, we know that from hindsight and
#
so here's, I'll take you back to a question that you said your constitutional law professor asked
#
you, which is that why is it that people between 1947 and 1950 get to decide the rules of the game
#
by which we must live forever hence? And it's, you know, we discussed Subhashish earlier, one of the
#
points which he makes really well in his book is about how all our constitutions are contingent
#
on the time they came about. So the American constitution, their preoccupations at that time
#
and their experiences drive them to make that constitution, which people like me love so much
#
and consider a model. And again, here we've discussed in detail what the contingencies were
#
and the Indian constitution ended up so overly centralized and flawed in so many ways. And I
#
would agree with you that it is a colonial constitution. And is it that we must always
#
depend on an accident of history, ki constitution kab bana, for the rules of the game to be changed?
#
Or are there other ways of thinking about it? You can't also endlessly just petition for
#
amendments all the time. You know, what are the rules by which a society lives?
#
You know, and at some level, I think the rules by which a society lives will
#
always come up through spontaneous order and through, you know, the evolution of culture
#
and society itself. And what a good constitution should do is just protect individual rights and
#
let the rest happen within the political process of, you know, bargaining and negotiation and so
#
on and so forth. But how do we think about constitutions? Like one bogey that is sometimes
#
raised and even voices on the Hindutva side have mentioned it that, hey, we have a crappy
#
constitution, we should change it. Now, I agree with them that the constitution has many flaws.
#
I would not like them to change it. You know, I can, some of the voices of today, especially
#
those in government are so strident in different ways that it horrifies me to think of what could
#
come about. So how do we just think of this whole thing? Yeah. So this is the fundamental
#
argument of my book that the constitution is colonial, but that doesn't mean that we have a
#
new one tomorrow. I mean, it's the two can sit side by side without any hint of irony.
#
And how we think about, how I think about constitutions is that one, it must provide
#
a fundamental set of values that we can agree on at this time. So if there are things that
#
seem antiquated, seem like it don't make sense, then we need to get rid of them. And if there are
#
other things that have come in and have become so central to our existence today, then I think it's
#
time to put it in. So it has to speak to us as a nation and as a people. The second is that it
#
must provide some degree of stability, because if it doesn't provide that degree of stability,
#
then why have a constitution? Just have another law which says all this and then go ahead with it.
#
So I would say that these are the two virtues of, of kind of, I would call the first one identity
#
and I would call the second one stability as to who we are as a country and where we want to be.
#
Now, taking this as the, as the kind of anchor,
#
usually there is a moment in historical time, as you said, where you get a constitutional moment.
#
Typically, there are two kinds of these moments that have happened. One is that when a nation
#
wins freedom and the other is that when there is an overnight revolution. I mean, I draw the
#
two as distinct because India is a unique case where the nation wins freedom, but not in an
#
overnight revolution, right? So it's happened over a long period of time, which is why,
#
tend not to get a radical break from the past, because usually these overnight freedom
#
constitutions, you have all this heady stuff of the oath of the tennis court in Paris where you're
#
liberty, ality, fraternity, and then you have the Russian revolution, which is obviously
#
a completely different kind of constitution that it has fought, but it requires revolutionary moments
#
of that kind to, to create decisive breaks from the past. Or you have a moment where the country
#
has won independence after a long and hard won freedom struggle, and then it has chosen
#
a constitutional form that it, that it feels it's true to it. And this is true for most African and
#
Asian constitutions in the, in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, because actually the
#
number of constitutions, I'm getting this number a little bit wrong here and there, is that there
#
were about 56 constitutions in the world in 1945 and 160 constitutions in 1975. And so this was the
#
glory days of constitution making. And if you see what happened in that time, and this is not just
#
India, but across the board, largely African and Asian constitutions copied the form of government
#
that existed in the, in the mothership. So we had a kind of British form of government. If you see
#
a lot of countries in the, in the French colonies, in the Algeria, for example, as Algeria,
#
despite having its revolutionary war with France, creates a French system of presidency.
#
But where they differ, and these are three places where they differ, is one in the role of religion.
#
A lot of these constitutions put religion front and center in their constitutional framework.
#
Pakistan does that. Malaysia does that. A lot of countries do that. India does not do that.
#
Second is this idea of a political party. You'd be surprised by the number of constitutions that
#
put a political party in the constitution itself. So, so for example, Algeria again,
#
the Front National is seen as the political party that runs Algeria. The Front National will
#
choose various members who will then, then there will be elections. So there is this idea of a
#
political party. And then there are obviously some of the African republics which, which name
#
particular people like Kenneth Kounda is named in the constitution as the first premier of Zambia.
#
I forget why they call it president or prime minister, but, and henceforth there will be
#
a presidential system. So you have these kind of interesting rifts of the way in which constitutions
#
are traditionally formed. But the fundamental point in, in this wave of, of constitution making
#
is that the constitutions typically of post-colonial states continue following the
#
colonial language in large part. Okay. And how do we change that? I think change happens over time.
#
It's, if there is another constitutional movement, yes, sure. As in we can change that,
#
but can we manufacture such a constitutional movement? I would say no. Right. There are
#
examples where this has happened, like France, for example, France has had what five republics
#
and each republic has, has had a new constitution. But I think society has to be ready for it,
#
for something that is fundamentally different from what we had before. Where we are in India today,
#
as in whether we like it or not, we are in phase one of some kind of decolonization. I see this as
#
the unfinished business of partition, because I think a lot of this sentiment of decolonization
#
was papered over because of Gandhi and the Congress party, which became kind of a big tent
#
accommodating views rather than let various views have their, have a field day. So I think some of
#
these views are coming out into the open and what passes off as decolonization, and this is true
#
across the board, is in the first phase, it's symbols, right? You change roads and you,
#
you know, change names and you use stuff like that. I mean, there's nothing wrong in that.
#
It's something that that happens. We should just think that that is what decolonization is.
#
The second stage, and I think that we are seeing kind of the beginnings of that
#
is when we are actually changing laws. So the three criminal laws which have been changed,
#
and these have been seen as changes to decolonize the IPC, the criminal procedure
#
code, which was not a colonial statute and the Indian evidence act. Now the impulse is fine.
#
The impulse is that these were colonial statutes that were meant to essentially
#
incarcerate Indians. And so we want to do away with that impulse, fair impulse, because if you
#
see the evidence act, the basis of the evidence act is that the natives can't be trusted. So we
#
can have, we'll have all these elaborate rules of evidence to make sure that they are speaking the
#
truth. But what have we done in these three laws? I think that we have essentially doubled down
#
on what a colonial administrator would do. There are 11 provisions which have the death penalty
#
in the IPC. We have created 15 provisions which have the death penalty in this new BNS. So my
#
sense is that this is something that Macaulay would have felt proud of. Because Macaulay said
#
that it will be the proudest day in English administration where the native government
#
itself chooses English institutions and English modes of thought. And we are doing that and calling
#
it decolonization. Yeah. And I think this is also a rite of passage. I think somewhere we feel,
#
because of the impulse, that it is decolonization. But what we are doing, we are not even, because
#
as Franz Fahden said, colonialism is a total project, right? It's kind of seeped into your
#
minds and heads, and all of ours as well. I mean, the very fact that we are having this,
#
perhaps the only language we could have this so fluently, this conversation so fluently,
#
is English. It's also perhaps a testament as to how total this is. I'll kind of disagree.
#
English is an Indian language now. I would not call it colonial in any way.
#
Yeah, we've Indianized it. And the point remains that we are calling it decolonization,
#
where it is actually not. So that's kind of the second phase. And I think we are in the second
#
phase. And the purpose for writing this book was essentially that can decolonization mean something
#
that is genuinely meaningful? And for me, what would be truly decolonial is when you have a
#
different dynamic between the state and the citizen. Now, that for me would be moving beyond
#
colonial language and moving to a language that truly empowers a citizen as a citizen. Now,
#
I don't think any government in independent India would want to do that, which is why I find all
#
this talk about the constitution going. I actually find it politically quite silly because the
#
constitution, I mean, if I were advising the government on this issue, I would say that we
#
should keep it because it actually suits governments very well. I mean, why would you want to change
#
something like this? It gives them so much power.
#
It gives them so much power and the playbook is set. Why would you want to change that into something
#
unless you want more power? So the point is that the idea behind the book is essentially to see
#
as to whether decolonization can mean something that changes this dynamic between the citizen
#
and the state. And more importantly, by provoking people through both the title and the cover and
#
by some of the contents of the book, hopefully make people have a view on the constitution.
#
Whether they agree with me or not, I mean, that's irrelevant. But the point is, it's important that
#
people have a view on it because the moment, as I said, coming back to what we discussed earlier,
#
the moment it's a holy book of any kind, it means that it's kind of wisdom that is you have
#
inherited and you're not going to think about it anymore. And that means that usually it's
#
kind of a document that doesn't remain alive and relevant. And I want it to be alive and relevant
#
and wanted to keep changing and evolving with the time.
#
Wise words. And I think your book is an extremely important contribution to this discourse around
#
the constitution and, you know, more power to you. And I'm really confident that in the long run it
#
will be seen for what it is. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm glad to hear that because as has been said,
#
because we've read so much Gandhi in this, as you know, first they will laugh at you and ridicule
#
you and then they will support you and then they will join you and follow you. And I think that
#
this is my version of a quote. I got that completely wrong. But you get the general
#
drift of it. And I think the greatest example of that actually is Ambedkar. And you see the
#
struggle that Ambedkar has in his lifetime where he is seen as a mid-part politician. He's not given
#
the time of day by Gandhi and the Congress. He's seen as someone who has to be accommodated,
#
and really not someone who in his lifetime gets his due as a real free-thinking intellectual.
#
I mean, again, you may agree or disagree with his views, but I think there can be no two views
#
about the fact that he is a genuine intellectual and it comes across in his exchanges with Gandhi
#
as well. Here is Ambedkar, a kind of angry, raging intellectual who's concerned about consistency
#
and coherence and Gandhi, who is essentially a crafty correspondent, who's trying to ensure
#
that he's not moving the needle too much, saying a little bit, but yet not saying it.
#
So you can see that in his exchanges, but Ambedkar is someone who doesn't get his due
#
in his lifetime. But I think it's compensated more than he could have ever imagined,
#
perhaps after his death. So I think time has its own way. Not that my book is anywhere close to
#
anything that Ambedkar has ever written, but time has its own way of rewarding people and giving
#
them their due. And I remain confident that we all will get our due. A magnificent note to end on,
#
but not without the customary last question I ask all my guests, which is for me and my listeners,
#
recommend books, films, music, which mean a lot to you. You love them so much,
#
you want to share them with the world. Yeah, so there are several. And as far as books are concerned,
#
I think it's extremely critical that we all read Hind Swaraj. And I think we read Hind Swaraj
#
because it is a fantastic example of what Gandhian thought is about. You will disagree wholly with
#
many bits, but this is what original thinking can look like. Side by side, we all need, I think what
#
should be mandatory reading in our schools is annihilation of caste. As upper caste Hindu,
#
this is caste is an issue that in our schools we had no idea about. It is a reality that I certainly
#
didn't know of. And I think annihilation of caste, which is a powerful account of how caste has played
#
a role in not only the lives of Ambedkar, but lives of millions of our countrymen and women
#
is extremely critical. That's one. So these are two books, book suggestions are top of my head
#
just because we are having this discussion on these issues. As far as films are concerned,
#
because we talked about Algeria, there is a fantastic film called Of Gods and Men. You
#
may have seen this about a group of Christian missionaries in Algeria during the revolution
#
who secretly support the movement. I think it's a fantastic film about what resistance
#
in the face of adversity can look like. This is one of my true favorites and I think something
#
that we all need to, we all would do well to see. And given we started the road on the Bengali
#
language and Bengali language films, I think a hidden gem from Satyajit Ray is Devi,
#
which often hasn't got his due because it came at the same time as Jalsahar.
#
And Jalsahar of course is a fantastic movie on the end of feudalism, which is well worth watching.
#
But Devi I think speaks to the current moment as well as of abiding themes of patriarchy,
#
of the role of religion, particularly relevant in today's time. And I think this is something that
#
I would recommend to everybody. As far as music, I mean, I'm basically a person who listens to
#
anything and everything that I find. As far as Indian bands are concerned, I really like
#
Advaita. Advaita and as far as in the neighborhood, if I want to do concentric circles and go outside,
#
I'm a big fan. I grew up with Junoon and big fan of what they've done and which they continue
#
to do in some shape or form as in not Junoon itself, but with Coke Studio Pakistan, which
#
I think is just the most fantastic thing that has ever happened in the world of music.
#
And I really liked the AI remastered version of the new Beatles song. And I don't know whether
#
you had a chance to hear it. This is actually interesting in terms of what AI can or cannot do.
#
John Lennon had written and sung these words, but no one could extract that from the background
#
music. But with the help of AI, it's not that AI has sung the song or has done anything,
#
but with the help of AI, they've now been able to put together a version of the song,
#
which has just come out late last year. And if you want to, if you're a Beatles fan, like I am,
#
that's something that's well worth listening to.
#
You know, one day you and I can have another conversation when either of us needs to be present.
#
So AI is on the board. Quick question. Do you think AI will completely transform law?
#
Quick answer, yes. Long answer is that it should transform law. It's already started transforming
#
it in many ways. So for example, due diligence, basic contractual checks, which a lot of folks
#
at law firms do, should be, will be, is being done and will be done better by AI assisted tools.
#
One, we already see several AI assisted tools being used in judgment writing. And I think
#
that this is going to continue. I'll stick my neck out and say that within 10 years,
#
simple cases like motor accident claims, tribunal cases of accident compensation, and so on,
#
will fundamentally be decided by AI based programs. Maybe a human judge will sign off on it,
#
but ultimately it will be decided by AI based programs. Maybe the last vestige of the humans
#
will be the constitution and constitutional law. Maybe that's where we will resist till we can. AI
#
coming in and making decisions for us. That's what I think will happen,
#
but who knows? The world is an interesting place. The world is indeed an interesting place. Thank
#
you for making it more interesting for me today. This was a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed.
#
Thanks, Amit. As a lifelong listener of your show, it's a real pleasure and delight
#
to be on it and look forward to the seen and the unseen continuing for long into the future.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline
#
and pick up the Colonial Constitution by Orgo Shengupto. Also check out the show notes,
#
enter Abit Holes at will. You can follow Orgo on Twitter at Orgo underscore justify.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes
#
of the seen and the unseen at seenunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of the seen and the unseen? If so, would you like to support the
#
production of the show? You can go over to seenunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
