EP- 52 | Savarkar's bravery & untold stories of India’s forgotten revolutionaries by Sanjeev Sanyal

when a member of their Community assassinated gandhiji What followed was also wrong and it's never talked about which is this massive rioting against the maharashtrian Brahman Community saw workers brother Narayan was dragged out of his house and stoned to death the revolutionaries remember are modernists after Independence the revolutionaries were deliberately pushed out of the National Power structure the single most important event that led to Indian freedom is the naval Revolt it is unnecessarily foisted on the uh Indian Muslim most of them are descendants of Indians not of turkey Invaders mughals did try to make their way back and Babar is absolutely clear why he came to India he came for the gold he says so himself Dyer was actually given a sarupa in in the Golden Temple now that is bad in itself but when you go there you realize that the jallianwala bagh and the golden temple are 300 meters apart idea of khalistani movement interestingly even today comes from exactly those same gurudwaras that had been infiltrated with Hawkinson 100 years ago the BBC program that was recently done very controversial one what is interestingly that much of this is actually done by people of Indian ethnic origin India is a rising power and so many of the deep State and corporate and geostrategic interests um will want to trip us Namaste Jain welcome to another edition of ani podcast with Smitha prakash today my guest is noted historian and Economist Sanjeev sanyal Sanjeev is very active on social media and he's a hot favorite at litfest where he talks about Indian history its biases which he says are nehruvian Colonial and Marxist in nature his critics say that he placed a majoritarian biases but there is no doubting his scholarship he's the recipient of the Eisenhower Fellowship named young Global Leader by the world economic forum and adjunct fellow at The Institute of policy studies at the nus Singapore fellow at the Royal geographical Society London visiting scholar at the Oxford University and because Sanjeev sanyal is member of the economic advisory Council to the prime minister of India and help prepare six editions of the economic Survey of India there will be a few questions on the state of the Indian economy but first about his book revolutionaries the other story of how India won its freedom Sanjeev thank you so much for coming on the podcast you've done a whole lot of TV interviews about your book um you know I had on the podcast Jay said Deepak and Vikram sampath who spoke about how Indian history was one-sided now most of us the only source of history as such was that what we read in school textbooks and now all of you are coming out a whole bunch of you are coming out authors um telling us that our history narrative narration which was there in our textbooks was one-sided was colored and you're coming out with these stories making us rethink that you know why weren't we told about all this earlier why was our history so colored so biased so first of all thank you very much Smitha for having me on your show um why did I write the book uh well it's a multiple uh factors yeah obviously one part of it of course as many people have guessed many of the characters on the book are directly related to me so I had some interest in those characters I knew some of them incidentally many of them lived into the 1980s but I think the real thrust of why I went into this is somehow the story of India's Freedom struggle never quite added up and yes you did hear you know there was a you know netaji did this and bhagat Singh did that kind of thing the odd um anecdote but you always got the impression that never quite added up to anything so at some point in time I began to investigate it myself I'm a curious sort of Chap and a completely different story began to emerge out of that um as I said it's coincidental that I am also related to some of these people and they told me anecdotes but I never quite made sense of them till I really read this began researching this book so um you do mention about the sanyal family you put photographs also in the book um and like they said you say that they spoke to you many of us but not when your children you know like grown-ups telling you that oh we did this oh we did that and this is what your uncle was don't pursue it further but something must have motivated you that no I've got to you know go dig deeper into this because it's so well researched you've gone to libraries you've actually gone to those locations you've been to the jail cells some of the things that you write about the torture in the jails and all it's very it's very moving it's very disturbing even and the number of things uh you know like the plots that you talk about uh in fact there are many times where somebody came late you know they were supposed to escape and then I wonder if if only we had cell phones in those times sending location okay this is where I'm going to be and just have pick me up and I will escape in so many things that happened that went wrong wrong so tell me when did you decide that okay these distortions were there uh somewhere there are gaps as you say when did you decide okay I'm going to pursue this so I didn't consciously think about this start with do you remember that before I began researching this I was already writing books so I had already written a bunch of books and at some point in time just out of curiosity I was also reading some of the uh these characters I some of these incidents are mentioned even in uh ocean of churn for example not in detail but I mentioned them along the way so at some point I had gathered enough material that a picture began to emerge for example um I began to get a bandage even sachindra sanyas by autobiography into English it's not yet been published it will come out hopefully end of this year but in the very preface of that he says I'm the reason I'm writing this book because I feel that uh a few chapters of Indian history uh will otherwise not be truthfully written so there is this premonition he already has that the story of the Revolutionary somehow uh you know swept under the carpet and or Mr presented and he felt that he had to write his own testimony and so when I read that it felt like oh my God uh he's almost speaking to me uh saying that you you know you need to go out there and write our story uh and you you've written about both sides of your family yes uh in a part of the freedom struggle tell us about that so um both sides of my mother's and father's family were in the freedom struggle both of them uh related to the uh revolutionary the armed struggle part of the freedom struggle so my father's family they're Bengali but they had settled in Varanasi uh in the late 18th century there's still a neighborhood there called Bengali Tola and they were very famous Vedic Scholars and over time they intermarried with a wider community of sanyas and lahiris and others who settled in that area you may even have heard of Lahiri Masha who gave modern kriya yoga it's modern form he is a great great great grand Uncle of mine so so they were they were living there and what they did was interestingly they ran a Vedic school and an attached akara and as I tell you in the book this network of akadas across India really became the driving force of the initial and some of the I.E the Revolutionary movement so uh just a small explainer to uh guests who liver our listeners who live abroad what is in Akada and uh how how what was the connection with anushilan so akadas are essentially gymnasiums you can call them but they are quasi-religious gymnasium so they're not secular places you hang out there and just do weights they were they have existed since ancient times in India these networks were very important to resistance to foreign invasions in the past whether it's the Turks the mughals the Europeans and so on and they had been basically defanged in the course of the 19th century by the British um and sort of taken away from the Quasi religious military role and increasingly sort of secularized into uh sort of the gymnasiums of sports clubs what srirobindo does is he he just he he understands that this is what's happening this is the this is the turn of the 19th or 20th century first decade of the night of the 20th century and he says that let's convert or sort of revive this network and use it to fight the British and so akadas are called different names in different parts of the country north India it's uh it's called akara but for example in the southern tip of India it's called akaladi or an Assam it's called so there is a network of these across India and has already always existed uh young men Sometimes women as well went into three zakaras and you know they still exist in in more traditional parts of our cities and and Villages more like an artistic form in many places right like yeah but it was not history directly the artistic thing it was a real place to learn real martial arts for War and the reason we despite these uh hundreds of years of foreign occupation there was always some resistance going on had a lot to do with these akadas okay and the connection with anushilan samiti anushul and samiti basically is this is the name by which by the way the revolutionaries call themselves and why do they call themselves a strange name because Anisha and samithi literally means the discipline committee that's because this is all this is actually a network of these akharas where these young men Sometimes women as well would basically meet each other and these revolutionary ideas would spread so this is what the Revolutionary movement called itself anushilan samiti and of course my family were involved in this akharas both so this is my father's family as I said in the Varanasi they're running Bengali Tula which means it's basically a Bengali school they're still a Bengali Tola into college there set up by my family and attached to that there were these akharas which they also ran so this is one branch of the family and this Branch included people like Sachin the Nathaniel of course Very famously but many of his cousins Brothers the whole family were involved in this movement and some of them are mentioned in the book yeah some of them are hint too I I actually didn't mention everybody because then it would begin sounding too much like a family history um so that's my father's family and they were then thrown out of Varanasi and all their properties were confiscated around about 1927 by the British by the British as a result of the um the kakori conspiracy sent off to kalapani for the second time to Cellular jail to Cellular jail but um what happens is that my branch of the family ends up in uh what is now prior garage but then and of course there is a link to um what happens then uh in allahabad as well it becomes a hub of uh revolutionary activity can you also talk about the the that it was so traumatic that nobody ever from the sanyal family lived in Varanasi again or something like that to them no it was not so much dramatic we've just thrown out so we didn't have anywhere to go back to so nothing okay but it that whole process when he was sent to Cellular jail was difficult absolutely difficult because everybody's just uprooted to throw down and then different people made their way another Branch went off to gorakhpur by the way so and so on and so in some sense uh that family then sort of dispersed this one part I'm going to come to this which I had taken out and you know it he says nonetheless sanyal's main concern was to find I'm reading it out uh nonetheless sanyal's main concern was to find a way to free the remaining political prisoners from yes so then he goes and he says he met with Madan mohal malviya gave him a patient hearing but didn't offer any concrete he gets disappointed sanyal gets disappointed then he goes to meet jawala nehru in gorakhpur after hearing him out nehru commented quote at a time when we are planning to go to jail you want us to help others come out of prison this comment stunned sanyal and then he goes to Lala he met la la offers unconditional support so here was your ancestor who is going Pillar To Post trying to get people out of cellular jail because he had experienced it whereas the others who were the moderate so-called moderates they hadn't experienced that trauma absolutely so Sachin sanyal basically he you know he's my grand Uncle not my grandfather he comes back from cellular jail he is then one of the things he wants to do is to free all those people back that he's left behind by the way he describes how he felt somewhat guilty of being actually freed yeah the survivor's gift yeah so survivor's guilt and he comes back and he's trying to explain to people that look Cellular's jail is not like any other jail they are literally torturing people on a daily basis to break them they're working them to Deaths they are electrocuting them they're just behaving atrociously with them this is not like being sent off to the luxury wing of 90 jail or something like that where you have books and books and you can listen to parrots yes and you know or play badminton and other things this is a serious Place uh where you get tortured on a daily basis and then he suddenly realizes that nobody quite gets this that you know cellular jail is is a totally different uh ball game as a prison and so he's trying in that passage he's trying to basically incite some sort of a movement to try and free all these other people uh but nobody seems to listening to it finally in 1920 goes to the nagpur session and where he is able to yeah uh sort of uh make a call for freeing some of them and not particularly successfully because I think savarkar it takes several more years for savarkar to be allowed to return to the mainland many more years before he's actually freed yeah and so on so that savarkar uh what you write about savarkar is also very moving the torture that he faced and all I mean so many have written about uh you know what about savarkar's life but every time I read something it it's a new facet to the man anyway we spoke about your dad's side of the family let's go to the mom's side of the family now so my mom's side of the family my mother's father's family interestingly their sort of uh they were the the surname is chakravarti and my great great grandfather uh was a gentleman called mohini Mohan chakravarti Mohan chakravarti is a revolt against the British was actually to set up a cotton mill and in in this is following East Pakistan this is now in Bangladesh uh in a place called kushtia uh it was it was at one stage one of the largest Mills uh cotton Mills in Asia called mohini Mills how is it a rebellion it was a rebellion because he actually set it up um as a part of the uh attempt to create indigenous Industries uh following the 1905 uh uh swadeshi andolan now why I want to make this point is quite interesting is you see the word swadeshi has ended up being utilized as uh later on by gandhiji to as some sort of a return to the past to a pre-modern uh Utopia but the original idea of sudeshi was actually to be modern rapid modernization and so there were many uh Indians but specifically bengalis who went out there and began to sort of attempt to create new modern uh Indian Enterprises so mohini Mills was an attempt to do exactly that and he was very very successful it's a different matter it fell on the wrong side of the border and then so this is another interpretation of certain Concepts yes that that had a very linear explanation as far like you said about swadeshi that it was we were told in our history texts in schools was that it was this go back to the Simplicity of wearing unstitched cloth and weaving your own uh cloth but it wasn't that absolutely no it's exactly the opposite opposite because the original proponents of this line of thought by the way they all linked to the Revolutionary movement because the revolutionaries remember are modernists uh they are not attempting to go back to uh feudal India and the old ability or whatever it is they're entirely about moving forward to a Democratic Republic and they're all about modernizing a savarkar or SRI aurobindo or you Sachin Sanya they're all modernizers and so this too is a form of rebellion and then there is also my mother's mother's family which is even more closely linked to this whole thing is my great grandfather nalin akshasanyal and his brother anadi kanta sanyal they were members of the anushul and samiti and then specifically because my mother's mother's family ah they were okay so this chakravarti and sanyal yes and they're not related they just have the same surname okay uh and he they came from Nadia by the way um so uh there is a there's a village there still called so they came from that Village and the village boys and they they were academically good so ended up in Kolkata and uh [Music] got involved in an attempt to take out the Kolkata intelligence the police intelligence service led by a gentleman called tegart and so they carried out a bunch of assassinations and anadi kanta got captured he was beaten to death in wrongpool jail and then died from his injuries uh nalinaksha of course carried on for some time being a part of bhagatin's uh juganthar group and then later on he would be brought into the Congress by c ardas um but he always had this sort of uh linkages through to the revolutionaries and that's why he eventually also became very close to netaji because netaji also had that sort of tilt so the the book has a whole lot of this thing you know these conversations and these linkages that you talk about um in an era where they were communication was so hard it was so hard because there were no cell phones and there were no telephones um so of course uh all that was in there and then the intelligence network of the British absolutely you talk about how you know everything there were informers collaborators who who just informed the breadth and then those guys were sent off to Cellular jail it was like oh okay they're going if they were lucky they were otherwise hang the front dead hanged and shot dead yeah that part is very disturbing to know that there were these collaborators and I can sense uh you know reading it that there's come another book coming on these collaborators so tell me about that when you were researching it did you did it come as a shock to you it came as a shock to me when I was reading it but when you were researching it it didn't come as a shock I mean as I said I grew up in an environment where some of this stuff was always murmured around so uh and so you know I would be told that so and so person may be a great guy now but this is his real history so that kind of thing so you know I had I always had that kind of murmurings around me but what I have done here is as politely as possible mentioned a few of them do remember that many of them and their descendants are still leading uh lights of our current Elite so I didn't want to unnecessarily provoke that as and and sort of take the conversation too far in that direction and they become controversial for a different reason uh but you know fact of the matter is that after Independence the revolutionaries were deliberately uh pushed out of the national uh past structures narratives and everything so I have to come back to what you're saying what you're saying is that the revolutionaries their contribution was erased and the collaborators they are still part of the elite in India now absolutely okay elaborate please so what the interesting thing is India becomes independent uh it becomes independent because of a number of uh sort of efforts it included various branches of the Congress Congress was not just a monolithic party even the revolutionaries were inside the Congress in many places and of course the Revolutionary movement there are many other movements as well but at the time of Independence however the revolutionaries first of all did not have any senior leaders all the senior leaders had been killed or had died for very variety of reasons or gone missing as in the case of netaji in addition to that remember what happens to them the two provinces that provided the most revolutionaries Punjab and Bengal actually get partitioned uh Lahore very important Hub of revolutionary activity Dhaka and East Bengal so all these revolutionaries far from thinking about grabbing par in Delhi are you know sadly homeless so they're rushing around their properties are being taken the women are being raped their houses are being burned down so they have completely different concerns and then one branch of the uh congress party ultimately consolidates power which is the nehruvian branch and in the 1950s they I have to say and this this is not just about you know the human uh sort of uh thing about trying to increase the importance of your own contributions uh the neruvians go out of their way to actually Wipe Out the memory of other branches of resistance to the British particularly the revolutionaries so for example the cellular jail was almost entirely pulled down it's or the bits that you see today are just two radials the rest was pulled down and even these two radials were almost pulled down uh just in order to remove all systematically remove all places of importance and memorials to the revolutionaries but why they were not in they were not uh they were dead gone no but the movement was still there it involved hundreds of thousands of people I mean do remember the revolutionaries were capable of winning elections inside the Congress in the 1930s against the gandhians the gandhians were of course this moderate extremist bit yeah that's been going on for a long time yeah or so they could have uh the problem that they faced was they had no unifying force so they got scattered across from the left to the right uh the Communists on the left to the RSS on the right and and many many branches of the Congress themselves so what happens is that the nehruvian branch of the uh Congress essentially comes to power and they need allies and who are their allies are the existing power structure made up of the collaborators they so suddenly the same people say uh the Imperial Police Service officers who were ordering firings against uh Freedom Fighters suddenly they are the people who actually get promoted up when the British leave in fact in many cases the British don't even leave so it's up to 1950 they become part of the Civil Service you meet they were part of the Civil Service in many cases to start with the Imperial Civil Service was mostly made up of Indians by by the 1930s and 1940s yeah uh same as the Imperial Police Service that ordered firing in Mumbai uh during the naval Revolt uh were mostly Indians uh and and all the contractors and others who were part of the uh British establishment they actually were beneficiaries when the British left because they all got promoted up yeah and you talk about that you put pictures also of that Naval reward not many people know I incidentally um trivia but I was born there in Navy nagar and and nobody tells you nobody tells you that the single most important event that led to Indian freedom is the naval Revolt of 1946 there is a very small memorial to it and it's only 19 in 2022 that the Navy actually celebrated it uh with a flotilla with a float in Republic Day yeah so what happens is that the collaborator class do you remember that the at Independence they are panicking because in every other country like in Indonesia and other countries they are usually evicted out of the power structure naturally they were the people who were drained the swamp yeah drain the swamp but in India what happens in the name of continuity and maybe one can say there was some need for continuity but what happens is they are allowed to continue and in fact they get promoted because as I said as the British leave and and also the British don't always leave uh till 1958 the naval Chief is British that's why even after Independence um the Navy Navy flag continue to have the cross-ups in charge so these things continue so those past structures continue and of course they have already they are they are incumbents in many ways and they they know English uh the the so they have also the links with uh outside world as well so as you say there was no truth commission there was no incommission there's nothing so these guys continue in fact they go out of their way to push out people who are um not from the ilk so the intellectual class the first two generations of intellectual class in India or the elite other than some people may from the nehruvian Congress to be fair the nehruvian Congress had contributed to the to the freedom struggle but other than them the the the hangars are around just shift from collaborating with the British to collaborating with the new nehruvian Elite but the nehruvian elite is of course just one branch of the Congress it's very small so the rest of the elite actually come is drawn from the new Elite is actually drawn from this collaborator class have the Garden Way fizzled out or do you use no they're all they were they are still around in many ways they are they are still around uh it it requires uh just uh very little scratch the surface scratch the surface a little bit of Googling will tell you the ancestry of many of these people so it's okay uh so uh we leave that for your next book Sanji but you know you were talking about how the revolutionaries kind of melted away uh because their properties went away with the partition you know there's not much of documentation about the trauma that happened with the East Pakistan there's a lot about the West Punjab and the East Punjab Division and the trauma that happened there but not much of literature which is there or popular films and things made on that but there was that too you talked about how they had uh you know the trauma the the in your epilogue you know I read about the PTSD part uh post-traumatic stress disorder many of them had and there was this one part where which I'm just going to read out some parts of it where you talked about um the Maharashtra and brahmana Community yes was assassinated then it Unleashed a wave of mob violence against the Brahmin Community across Maharashtra estimates vary but thousands of homes and businesses were burnt down and hundreds were killed you know when I read this uh Sanjeev I asked several friends of mine and all did you know this many of them are married to maharashtrians many of them you know have I come from Bombay we've lived among nobody knew about it it's not because they were ill-informed or anything it's just that it wasn't there in the school text so then it's also also what happens just with Partition family they'll tell you partition families tend to say very little about the moment of partition because it's such a major trauma too they very often don't tell their children what they went through very clearly or very passingly they will mention it because they want to wipe it out of them yes so the same thing happened with the Maharashtra and brahmins another community that provided a lot of revolutionaries incidentally yeah uh and um when a member of their Community assassinated gandhiji and I'm not condoning any way that was the right thing it was a wrong thing to have done but What followed was also wrong and it's never talked about which is this massive rioting against the Maharashtra and Brahman community where um as I said hundreds were killed thousands of homes businesses Etc were burnt down um some workers brother Narayan was dragged out of his house and stoned to death I mean eventually died it was a congress mob it was and this is why it is important he says that uh a large mob of congress party workers turned up at the home of Narayan Rao savarkar dragged him out in the streets they beat and stoned him mercilessly before leaving him in a pool of blood and then he said and then you write about how they went looking for vinayak savarkar at his house in the other this is dead by others also but it's it's still you know disturbing where he was staying with his wife yamuna and son vishwas on the first floor as the mob stormed into the ground floor they were delayed long enough by a couple of supporters to allow the police to arrive this likely saved the family from meeting the same fate as Narayan Rao and then you write about PTSD and having suffered years of torture in prison and then partitioned many former revolutionaries suffer from what we today call post-traumatic stress disorder and then you write about now I want you to I mean this was of course that he was so severely tortured in cellular jail that he almost lost his mind uh he talks about repeated electrocutions and when those electrocutions were happening he was thinking about Leela yes so I'll tell you the story now tell me the story about Leela because it is heartbreaking was the expert bomb maker in the first generation of the anushul and samiti and after the alipur bum case um 1909 1910 he sent off to kalapani now as I told you cellular jail wasn't just any old jail it was designed to break people and there were hundreds of these revolutionaries and they were systematically put Through Torture mental and physical now after several years they obviously Alaska that's Health broke down and he was severely ill at some point in time running high fever and he simply refused to run the oil mill which was one of the ways they would force physical labor on them and so the jail Warden and his accomplices you know said no he's just putting on an act uh which is odd you could always tell if somebody is running high fever anyway so they drag him off and they begin to electrocute him the time to a chair and they are electrocuting him and he's screaming and the rest of the jail can hear him screaming and by the way this is deliberate because he's being made an example of right so it's not like the the British want to hide this they want the rest of the prisoners to hear and and he keeps through the electrocution he keeps collapsing so they wait for him to revive and again put him through this and eventually he loses his mind from after days and days of going through electrocution he loses his mind the other prisoners by the way go on hunger strike and so on and so finally when the news of all of this begins to leak out the British authorities decide okay we let him off but he's lost his mind so they send him off to um to Madras now Chennai to a mental Asylum to uh recover but it takes many many years to recover now why while he's doing all of this do remember what is happening what is keeping him sane the image of Lila so who is Leela Leela was his college sweetheart who is the daughter of bipinpal another very famous leader so he's the pal of the Lal Bal and was his classmate and they were engaged to get married when he was arrested on the alipur jail case and so throughout all this torture he sees this drifting image of Leela in front of him and that's what sort of keep that's the only thing that keeps him going through these years of uh first torture in jail then this electrocution this this period of mental instability and all of that and so he comes out after many many years when he recovers enough and goes looking for Leela and of course he finds that which year are we talking about we are talking now most Independence no no they are still well in the independence maybe okay maybe in the early 1920s so he goes off looking for uh Lila and Lila of course had waited for him for many years but he had gone off to Cellular jail no Communications she was unaware of all the tortures he went through she was unaware what happened to him afterwards and so after waiting for many years she then decided maybe she had died or whatever and she had married somebody else and was living in Bombay now Mumbai so um Alaska that is obviously you know sad but what can he do so he sort of drifts back and he you know he still rejoins the Revolutionary movement after all of this gets arrested does various things and then at the time of Independence uh and partition he's living in his village in East Bengal in East Pakistan and he becomes a refugee so when he sort of becomes a refugee and he moves to uh now Independent India somebody tells him that Leela is now a widow and is paralyzed from waist down so he hunts her down in Bombay and finds a takes him with her to a Sam silchar where his family or he sets up his home new home and marries her and then looks after her till she dies wow So eventually he did marry her what a love story right I mean absolutely and you could not have made this up yeah I mean if if I did this in a movie it it people think it's just not believable but this is a true story I know so I you know in the beginning of the book uh when you mention him and you said that more about their love later so I was like where is this going to come in and then it comes right at the epilogue it was very touching uh there's also the story of Bina Das tell us about that before I go to kamaka tomorrow Bina Das was uh one of the daughters of uh Benny madhav Das but who was by the way the teacher of netaji uh and one of the reasons you went in the nationalistic uh sort of Stream So now bidad incidentally used to practice uh shooting in what is now Hindustan Park area in Bali in Kolkata with my great grand mom that's Daniel's wife and they is to shoot regularly and and then once this comment tell me for women to go for well I doubt that was common enough but I do remember these are not common people they are clearly they're they're they are both uh sanyal and binadasa's father were both linked to the revolutionaries they were not and and you know so they they were they were probably routinely handling various kinds of guns and bombs that's what I was going to ask you know how did it work for these women that the reason I'm asking stories because of that that like you know I mean my mom will say what time are you coming back what time are you going but these women were going about you know well I can tell you my great grandfather was was not quite uh uh ordinary person I mean he was himself involved in in uh you know various revolutionary activities that they wanted their women also they didn't put their women in uh you know at the back of the room and say confidently since I knew my great-grandmother okay who we used to call mamuni she was quite a formidable lady she was I was like five foot nothing but uh uh possibly the only person was afraid of she was quite uh quite a character so so it's not completely out of character that she was out there practicing shooting with binadas but anyway Bina Das then goes off on uh on on graduation day uh in Calcutta University uh uh he she pulls out this revolver and shoots five bullets at the governor of Bengal and Mrs but she's arrested of course and sent off to jail for nine years um my great-grandmom of course would claim that if she had been the one shooting it she would not have missed now that is of course Very troubling idea because if that had happened I may not have existed either yeah that's true yeah that's true I'm gonna read out this one portion uh when we talk about The Gather rights you know you say this that the whole episode you talk about the komakato marrow and you know bringing the the uh Grand sahib on the you know he carried it on his head and things and you said that the whole episode send shock waves you know because of what happened then I'm not going to go into the details about that what that kamaka tomorrow incident is you can people can Google it and read it if you have not read it before you write about this and you say that the whole episode sent shock waves uh across India and the diaspora in Canada a group of gadarites decided to kill those they suspected of working for British intelligence one by one their bodies were found this included Arjun Singh uh then there's Bela Singh uh then you talk about Uma singer gadarite pulled out a gun and shot him dead meba was immediately arrested condemned to death Bella would survive a couple of more assassination attempts in Canada uh before being killed in Punjab later tell me about this whole gadarites and what happened then and their links uh you know the links of what happened in that period to the origins of the kalistanis in Canada so all this while we were talking about the revolutionaries within India but do remember the revolutionaries were spread all over all over the world they had links to foreign governments like the Germans the Turks the Japanese to other Freedom movements like those of the Irish and they were operating in places like uh the west coast of Canada and the U.S California and British Columbia and in in British Columbia and uh and Canada uh they functioned through a network of gurudwara's like in India they are functioning through a network of akadas in North America they were functioning through a network of gurudwaras where they were a group of nationalist Sikhs Punjabi is more generally but specifically Sikhs who were sort of pushing for Indian Freedom they were providing financing they were personally willing to pick up arms and move to India and doing all kinds of things were going on and remember the context as well a significant proportion of those fighting in the first world war for the British cause in Europe were Sikhs so this was not a just you know another just yet another community that was involved in all of this so there was this simmering tension and the and of course the British intelligence yet again was fully aware that you know this was a dangerous thing from their perspective so what they did is interesting they got hold of a secret agent called Hopkinson and Hopkinson began to infiltrate these gurudwaras in British Columbia and he was given a huge amount of resources to essentially find out loyalist Sikhs particularly those who were willing to use these resources giving to create first a wedge between the Hindu community and and and and the more hardcore seek community and so if till that point in time the hindusik community was basically indistinguishable it was more a spectrum than than clearly separate and so you see that begin to happen in um in the UK but more importantly in Canada and so of course the gadarites were aware that this was going on and so they began to shoot out shoot the these informers and British agents in in the midst and there are these gun fights in the gurudwaras ultimately what happens is that Bella Singh who was one of the collaborators he panics and he shoots a bunch of uh gatherites inside a gurudwara in British Columbia and he's captured the British cannot hang him and punish him because he is one of theirs so they do a short trial and everybody knows that Bella Singh is going to be released at the end of the show trial so the court happens and Hopkinson turns up to give testimony on his behalf while he is about to do this another Sikh gather right pulls out a revolver and shoots him dead and then he also attempts to kill bilas it doesn't manage anyway meva Singh is captured he's hanged sadly nobody remembers me was saying in India but he was you know he basically in my view should be celebrated he died in Punjab much later no maybe he was hanged he was hanged he was hanged belasing the collaborator collaborator he Bela Singh however found that it was too dangerous to be for him to be in Canada because there were all these guthrites Sikhs hunting for him he decides then that it's actually better for him to go back to Punjab which is actually safer where he can sort of disappear in the Woodwork among the general population but even there he's hunted down by the revolutionaries and killed um but what happens as a result of this is that there is this um this group of uh British loyalists Sikhs who slowly take control of the gurudwara's uh uh with British support both in Canada and in the UK and this idea of kalistani movement interestingly even today uh comes from exactly those same gurudwaras that had been infiltrated with Hopkinson 100 years ago so this is the source of your Palestine movement so in case you're wondering why on Earth would Canada be the center of kalistani movement of you know of all places on Earth well this is the reason now also the UK as well same reason so there's a historical contextual yes connection between these absolutely and but didn't the gurdwaras didn't the people then want to weed away these uh elements in their gurdwaras no so this tussle continued as I said this is a brutal tussle but in the end I mean this this uh this tussle Still Remains and it's still there at your book release event in New Delhi uh the home minister said that and I quote this India's independence is a collective result of efforts but one-sided narrative uh was imposed on the masses through education Legends and writing of history and he also said we have to extract history from the streams of extremists versus moderates and make it realistic what is realistic uh Sanjeev because the there are many who are saying that there's a lot of rewriting which is happening and it is pandering to a narrative now it's a populist narrative so my view is that look let the facts all come out everybody is allowed an opinion but you you're not allowed your own facts whatever I've written in my book are very easily verifiable I've given resources its references at the back you can check those out or you can go and do your own research you will find that they are completely and solidly backed by facts I mean you can quibble about the things on the edges but the broad narrative that I have put together in this book is and on other books as well has never been overturned by anybody so my view is I am not saying that the peaceful movement led by Mahatma Gandhi had no role in our freedom struggle that is not the case I have therefore not called this book the alternative story I've called it the other Story by which I'm saying that look yes there was a non-violent movement but there was this other armed struggle as well which was an important part of our history we should know about it and all these amazing people who gave their lives fighting for uh our our freedoms so you know um what happens is that these the new interpretations which are coming out are digging up things which nobody remembers or it was deliberately done which you mentioned Jay said Deepak mentions Vikram sampath and many other historians the new age historians they are saying that it was deliberately done what happens also is that religious identities come into Clash over these historic narratives now I can give you if it could be about the mughals it could be about tipu Sultan and now when elections come then it's it's resurrected again so was there a deliberate attempt that let's not let's put Band-Aid over all this because it's just going to cause well it you know putting Band-Aid doesn't help what was the history was history this is what the facts are lying about them doesn't help at all I mean just to give you an example there is no evidence that tipu Sultan was fighting for Indian independence I mean he was going quite happy to write letters to the Turkish Sultan asking for help so he's asking for you know help from all kinds of foreign groups and the people he was fighting were not only the British he was fighting the nizam he was fighting the marathas he was fighting the traven core more than adequate evidence um that he was doing atrocities against fellow Indians very little evidence that he was fighting for Indian independence so if your purpose is to look for Muslim Patriots then let me put some others why not Khan right here's a man who gave his his part of the Hindustan Republican Association uh and was hanged for the kakuri case so the problem here is that if you really want to dig in you'll find all kinds of other things as well but this peculiar skewed narrative it doesn't really help because it doesn't convince anyone even a mild scratching of the surface of History shows you that these narratives are false it's like when they talk about mughals he said you nobody celebrates darashiko whereas not just that I mean we start with these utter absurdity of trying to celebrate Babar was Indian because he died here and did not take our money and go away well he actually wanted to he couldn't find his way back to Central Asia he was rude road was blocked and for many generations after that the mughals did try to make their way back by the way an expedition was led even by aurangzeb when he was a prince to try and make their way back to Bukhara so and that they didn't come here to loot and plunder they came here to make this to civilize us or something but this is absurd you read tizuki Barbary I or Babar Nama in Persian and Babar is absolutely clear why he came to India he came for the gold he says so himself so you see what happens here is that two things one is this is false and it doesn't cut any eyes secondly what you have done here it and is that you have then painted the idea that the their Muslim identity overrides everything else and that somehow Indian Muslims of today must somehow identify with Babar because he was a Muslim now this is a very dangerous line of thoughts let me explain why this is exactly the mistake that Mahatma Gandhi did during the khilafat movement what was he doing he was basically asking Muslims to join the freedom struggle not on the basis of their freedom but on the basis of their isions Islamic Turkish uh Khalif Turkish Sultan who was also considered the Khalif so the point I'm making is that this this is a very slippery slope and I think it is unnecessarily foisted on the uh Indian Muslim I don't know who but most of them are descendants of Indians not of uh turkey Invaders but it's it's something that Pakistan did right when they were doing their history so they have done it so they have done this absurd thing you know they name their missiles after Gori and uh and so on now this is crazy because read your own history your own great great great grandfather grandmother were killed raped Etc by these people um so why are you celebrating this is a you know bizarre form of Stockholm syndrome um these are there's also this talk that because of these new narratives which are coming that Indian Academia is confused uh conflicted uh is the architecture of Indian Academia so weak that it can't take on these multiple narratives now well there was a longish period when uh it well there was sort of a ethnic cleansing of alternative narratives in Indian Academia interesting uh so and by the way this has happened around the world the world I mean the amount of ideological diversity even in Western universities is just uh you know ridiculous but you still have the odd a thinker who may not confirm conform uh and uh but in India it was absolute complete cleansing and this started from the 1950s you saw you know in the economics field for example you had the likes of BR shanoi I just pushed out because he didn't he wanted more marketing yeah you wanted to bring in this somewhat uh entirely socialist kind of thing so and you see that also in the history writing uh RC majumdar is pushed out uh from being the chairman of the writer of the official history his books were not available for a long long time yes so you know this this was done in a neat and clean way and since there were nobody in Academia over a period of time they completely cleaned it out the only way you will get alternative narratives now is from outside of Academia of course now new people may emerge over time but the you know I I and uh Vikram and Sai Etc always criticized you know but you are not a trained historian well if I was subjected to that training I would have been brainwashed basically what you're objecting to is that I didn't get subjected to the same amount of brainwashing that's maybe why I'm able to write outside outside of the official narratives but a massive system of brainwashing in the name of sort of historiography and uh and of course patronage systems in terms of papers and seminars and doctorates Etc was that Machinery was created that Machinery by and large is to a large extent still alive but what is happening is that outside of that controlled environment other narratives are popping up so now that we're talking about your other hats and how it's held against you so let's get on to that you're a numbers person yes so how did you why did you abandon that have you abandoned that no your regular job is that yes so tell me give me some Gan now on this Bank collapse which has happened how safe is Indian money especially of the startups and how can India prevent this kind of a thing happening here what's happening with the Silicon Valley Bank I'm presuming that's what you mean and and the other smaller Banks as we speak in the US um this is precisely what we were warning the world about including the us so you go back to the covet period and you will see a leading economists including some who have won Nobel prizes like stiglitz and Krugman and of course many NRI economists based in the west telling us go out there and spread helicopter money monetary and fiscal expansion it does not matter and so on and you will remember that many of us who were in government and myself personally we were continuously saying bad idea this is not a demand side shock to start with this is a supply side shock and pushing in all this uh fiscal and monetary uh sort of resources in in this massive burst is going to create bubbles so what has happened is first of all many you know many uh developing countries have gone under Pakistan or Egypt or Sri Lanka and so on but even developed countries I've ended up with massive debts and also this Rush of liquidity in then created all this dislocation in the uh in the in the Silicon Valley Bank as one example of it what happened they got a lot of money that they didn't know what to do with this so they put them I can't believe they did it very frankly they stuffed them into long uh bonds now anybody who has even done the first undergraduate class of any bond mats in their Finance you know in finance uh when they're doing their Finance course will know that uh any increases in interest rates will lead the bonds to crash and the longer the bonds the worse that crash is going to be I mean if they were forced to do something with that money maybe put it at very short-term bonds or whatever of short-term uh instruments of some sort so instead they put them in these 10-year treasuries and inevitably when interest rates went back though the prices of those bonds collapsed and there essentially they went bankrupt yeah now this is you know this is uh really toddler level uh mistake and I can't believe this happened but do remember that we were being advised to do this here in India and in some ways this is in a slightly different way is what we actually did do uh following the uh the financial crisis of 2007-8 uh we had gone out there and done this massive amount of lending and it had created bubbles um and it had led to all kinds of npas in our system which uh you know I was part of the team that went through it in 17 18 19 cleaning it up so what I'm trying to say here is that we were being advised to do things would would have inevitably led to exactly the things you are now seeing in the US and in Europe and other countries and the UK all of them now have extremely constrained fiscal uh systems they don't know what to do because they've already committed so much resources massively uh over indebted inflation that is not in control they're trying to control it by tightening monetary policy but their banking system now cannot certainly take this tightening so yeah you know one of the important lessons here is never lose track of macroeconomic stability and you know in the in it's it and and the true test of economic character is being able to hold it together when you are under severe stress and I think we passed that test the true test why didn't the ratings agencies why did they give them a ratings and stuff like that the bank this is a common problem and this happened because of two reasons uh the first reason is often more uh uh sort of played up is that their incentive structure is to give everybody a very high rating because then you know the person who gets rated pays so you want to give them the best rating possible and so there's an incentive structure problem and there is a lot of debate about the agency problem incentive structures Etc but my view this is only one part of the problem the other part of the problem a more severe problem is that even if you sorted out all these Agency problems it wouldn't do anything is that frankly the future is unknowable so therefore what you need to do is to create buffers in the system in various ways and really look through their to their uh through their uh balance sheets and stress test them over and over again and that that is unfortunately not done very much so it's not the case just that the you know that the rating agencies are have an incentive problem many cases they genuinely don't know what's happening and so but that's their job that's their job but they don't do a good job of it and I have written extensively on why unfortunately we end up using taking these ratings way too seriously and hardwiring it into a policy so now what happens in these situations is suddenly everybody's ratings go down so you have to force Capital onto it in the banking system that causes further tightening and so on and so forth so instead the ratings now become Pro cyclical so just when you need more capital is when you are having these ratings downgrades and even Banks which are otherwise fine will suddenly find that they have to tighten things up and when the whole system does this you actually cause the problem to worsen and it's in some ways negating what the FED is trying to do is putting liquidity in could it happen in India too well anything can happen but we have put in a lot a lot of trouble to try and create all those buffers over the years uh we you know we created the insolvency in bankruptcy court we we took the trouble of taking very large companies through that through the insolvency process we reinstated creditor rights uh much of this was painful in the year 1718 you will remember or even 19. you will remember there was a time you came to India that was the time you came to India and one of the first things I did was to look through uh the dirty dozen of these large corporations that have run up huge debts um and of course to do some by the way the term dirty doesn't uh was my application to the yeah to this I remember reading about it yeah yes so there were so the problem was of course that are uh back in 2015-16 our banks were stuffed with all this npas and the problem was that everybody said now oh my God what we're going to do with it uh we have this new insolvency in bankruptcy code and uh but you know it's never been tested so one of the conventional ideas of that time was okay there's a lot of this stuff that thousands of these npas you know tens of thousands of crores of uh uh bad loans Etc what are you going to do about it and the conventional wisdom was let's take a few relatively small cases through the system test it out and then we'll try the bigger cases now my view on this was look the complicatedness of a case is uncorrelated to its size okay okay you can have a very large bankruptcy but maybe a relatively simple case so rather than uh take a a small case through it why not take the biggest cases through it because we did some analysis in uh in the finance ministry and we discovered 50 cases accounted for two-thirds of the problem in fact one a dozen cases accounted for between 25 and 30 percent of the problem so resolve this first so yeah so my argument was look surely no matter how bad this insolvency and bankruptcy system is and how untested it is surely it could deal with 12 cases right so he then focused on just those 12 cases which as I said we dubbed as the dirty dozen and these those were then then those cases did go through the um you know there was this one uh seminar this a reform agenda for 2047. yes in that you said that in the olden days of the Planning Commission the government was telling what the private sector should do was telling the private sector what to do but and I quote you said that's not how we think about policy making anymore and then you said that the role of the government is to provide leadership where necessary infrastructure were essential now is that the is that the goal that the Prime Minister has laid out till 2047 uh what is how are you guys working is this what it is minimum government uh yes so this is essentially a restating of the minimum government maximum governance point which is that it isn't the business of the government to run everything and unlike in the past you know wise men sitting in uh Planning Commission telling everybody how they should live their lives the job of the government is to provide the playing ground but it is not to be for the most part a player it can provide the playing Ground it can create Regulators you can call them the umpires or referees it can prepare the ground it can maybe even sell the TV rights or whatever it is but actually playing of the match the government by and large in most cases does not have a role and that is a principle that we have by and large uh uh you know used uh uh in in the last 30 years of reforms that has basically been what we have done so since 1991 to now what has really been when we said reform and we said liberalization we meant roughly the same thing the reason is that the last 30 years of Reform was about removing the Indian state from the things it should not be doing and to a large extent this is now done I mean there are the odd things this but you know the principle of privatization for example is not a matter of debate I mean it's now a matter of the Tactical Act of actually selling criticism comes with that right I mean yes everybody agrees privatization necessary Road sports we need right but then comes that accusation that when you're privatizing when you're asking the private sector to build your roads and boats there's crony capitalism which is happening no so therefore the point is you auction these things and do it and as uh transparent away as you have to and of course uh you know asking the state itself to do it does not remove uh rent seeking so that is you know rent seeking is a problem whether you do it by the state or Not by the state uh that's uh you know but there's the old card which used to say that when uh when panditji bit the navratnas there was no there was no I think you may want to read a little bit about something called the Mundra Scandal which happened in 55 which was exposed interestingly by his son-in-laws Gandhi and the then Finance Minister ttk had to resign so it is not the case that there wasn't corruption there was corruption right from the beginning in fact this is in an economic case there was corruption and uh even in defense deals the Jeep Scandal happened in 1948. so there was plenty of corruption about and it was much debated at that time but coming back to your point the last 30 years of reforms was about withdrawing the Indian state from the things it should not do the next 25 years still 2047. should be about getting the Indian state to do the things it should do and there are a whole bunch of things we need to do reforms in in order to do that first most important thing we need to do is legal system reform it's not a part of the executive but certainly Judiciary is an important part of the Indian state enforcement of contract delivery of justice is an important role that the Indian State needs to do but having 40 million cases stuck in the pipeline is not the way it's getting done so we have to this is a reform that has to happen of course you know there are in any kind of Reform there'll be all kinds of Dimensions about a tussle between the government and Judiciary and all these things will also happen but it's got to be done it's got to be done and the people of this country have got to demand it um yes they should also keep track of that the government does not you know politicize it and all that that too but you cannot now avoid it okay this reform of the Judiciary System whether it happens from inside happens because the government happens because of public pressure or some combination of the three or in par and you know preferably in part that all these three are in Partnership that would be perfect but some sort of Reform of the judicial system has to happen Okay number one number two we also now need to do something about reforming the administrative system and the bureaucracy uh here too um you know every government around the world needs an administrative system a bureaucracy and so on to to basically run the country yeah the the general administration of the country so saying that over get rid of the bureaucracy eventually doesn't work every country has some sort of a bureaucracy the problem is that the Indian bureaucracy was created under Colonial rule and its purpose was not Service delivery but control right naturally there were small Elite ruling the country and now what happens is that we become independent this uh bureaucracy however becomes very useful as also the tool for a socialist system of economic planning and uh and running the government so we go from one control system to an even more control system where it needs licenses and permits and all kinds of other things so the bureaucracy actually rather become weaker actually becomes even more powerful now 1991 comes along and since 1991 the what has happened is that this there has been a roll back of the state so the rollback of the powers of bureaucracy but the reducing of the powers of the bureaucracies doesn't mean the bureaucracy has been reformed it's just given less Powers I mean you don't need to go to a gazetted officer anymore to get all kinds of things signed so he has been withdrawn or she has been withdrawn but they have not been reformed yeah so what you now need to do is to go through administrative reforms to get get the bureaucracy to think to be to be designed not for control but for delivery of service police reforms included police reforms are also part of this part of this okay generally getting the Machinery to be service oriented I.E today there's no point in complaining that the bureaucracy is not delivering but it's not designed to do this and no in no individual uh you know the major individual you know is Officer or IPS officer is particularly good and forward-looking Etc but that can't be the basis of this no yeah see we are all trying to improve the individuals not the system over the system does not does not uh so you know you you as an overhaul that absolutely you take how does a district get run it gets run by a district magistrate or District collector yeah average District registry is 33 years old 34 years old very Junior person has no experience in ever running anything Sunday's made the virtual king of that District yeah uh he or she is there for two years that absolutely has no chance of even finding out half the things that need to be done and inevitably he or she has made uh chairman of every third Committee in that district and they probably don't even haven't had chance to even attend one meeting or chair one meeting of whatever that subject is so we need to for example make the district magistrator more senior role allow people to be there for longer periods of time and take this as this this is The Cutting Edge of administration right so there are many many things that need to be done okay so judicial reforms admin reforms that I mean I can keep going okay but these two reforms are absolutely critical getting the Indian state to deliver uh uh um the things it's supposed to do justice and then of course Administration which includes of course Municipal Administration other police policing and other things you know uh you're very active on social media uh sanchief so couple of questions which I have which came up you know which I've seen you respond also um this whole thing that you know these reforms will be carried out or these changes are being carried out because of electoral autocracy there's this term which is being banded I love a lot where it says that because the BJP has the numbers they are they are thrusting this down the throats of people with it there is no consensus in the country about these things so all democracy is supposed to be through majorities no um as long as a certain class had the majority in Parliament not necessarily majority of population voting for them and a majority in Parliament even if it was in Coalition they thought it was democracy when they get voted out for a variety of reasons this Elite now sadly finds that democracy isn't uh such a useful thing after all so and by the way it's not only in India many places in the world what's happening is that the idea of liberal democracy is that self-certified liberals mean right so whenever the self-certified Liberals don't win then it becomes some you have to create these oxymorons like electoral autocracy I mean it's just completely absurd things and the idea itself is absurd so you know this is this is by the way is part of a much more systematic thing that we are seeing worldwide and I've written about this by the way I've written working papers articles about this how we are seeing systematically uh a narrative built against India whether it's by V Dem or eiu or Freedom House all of them by the way funded by nebulous private Charities such as the Roses open Society Etc and they have the same narrative filtering through systematically so this is also part of a a a global power game in which we are you know we have no choice but to participate but we have to be out there and keep questioning all these um Power we have to participate like why why because you see we cannot ignore these things so let me explain this many of these uh indices like you know the ones that I just mentioned these institutions publish a whole bunch of things you know index on global Freedom index on Democracy academic freedom and so on and uh you will see India is always rated as low as possible so you know you have 140 countries really annoying yeah 140 countries ranked on Democracy India's 108 yeah yeah or we are rated in academic freedom below Afghanistan and Pakistan I mean just imagine so there's obviously not even a pretense of being objective about this whole matter so I began writing about this uh uh for some some time now and the response is also quite funny uh the V Dems director basically comes and doesn't doesn't respond to any of my criticisms instead says no no our things must be right because we use high maths and a supercomputer to work this out so why do you need a supercomputer all you did was took opinions of 25 people that's it I mean a survey of 25 people to decide on how the world should be ranked you've got to be kidding me so this is the level of operations that is happening but all this while we never call them out and a lot of people's viewers oh you know ignore them you can't ignore them I'll tell you why because you see many of these things yet slightly hardwired into real life things so for example or these indices by V Dam eiu Freedom House many others they eventually end up in something called World Banks World governance indicators now this in turn is 20 of the weightage at many of our Sovereign ratings and Sovereign ratings have an impact on on the trade advice on all kinds of things this is therefore a kind of power that is in a secondary way managing narratives is is used by these nebulous funders to essentially manage the world let's say and this is by the way being extended so don't please take this seriously there's something called ESG Norms you will see this everywhere from now on it's called environment social and governance uh norms and there is a very strong Lobby worldwide trying to in in put these norms and indicators and indices into investment decisions trade decisions and so they will be used against us why um well because it serves various purposes uh in terms of you see India is a rising power and we don't seem to be listening to um you know Western narratives or at least or the Deep States in many of these countries and so many of the deep State and corporate and uh geostrategic interests um will want to trip us uh on on and we should expect this to happen but I'm just telling you that do not be blind to what is a very well oiled machinery and this is not just happening in these perception indices by the way have you talked about perception and disease but I will be in the next few days also publishing a working paper and how this happens even and hard data so when you see the U.N population division uh calculating India's uh say um expected uh uh uh you know expected uh life uh um life expectancy life expectancy at Birth um or uh ILO is calculating uh female labor participation or who is creating a global standard for stunting and then it gets into all these Global hunger index and all of this yeah and of course freedoms no freedoms and all that perception so all those perception ones there is there's a lot of debate there's also Professor babonus who's also been raising this I've been raising it for years so there's at least some uh some understanding some pushback that these these opinion based stuff is dodgy okay but now but the hard data ones are also dodgy okay and I'm as I said I'm going to publish a paper very very shortly I've been writing about it in newspapers and otherwise but I'm publishing a working paper very shortly where I will show you even this hard data is systematically tinted and one of the sad facts is that our own data agencies are uh are participating in it by not applying their minds to many of these Global um sort of standards and so on there's no pushback from our own data agency so one of the things I'm trying to do is to get there be a much greater uh Consciousness in the government and in non-government data agencies in India that when you apply Global standards sometimes they are good sometimes they are not so good sometimes they're appropriate so it's not always that inappropriate but we seem to all there seems to be something very odd that of the many many of these indices which I went through you never find there being an error on the upside the error is always to the downside okay now how can that be possible yeah yeah so I think there has to be some investigation into the matter now some part of it may be uh simply you know not some Grand conspiracy just that that that sectoral interest in that sector wants to exaggerate how big that problem is in that sector because they then get grants vote from the government or private sector or International grants by exaggerating the problem so that is one part of the problem certainly because I found that in many of these cases the people in that sector are aware of this but what but they don't seem to be there doesn't seem to be any great interest in correcting the error so you know uh Sanjeev I was uh talking about you know the many hats you wear now you came back to India in 2017 and there were many like you who you know came in 2014 and 2017 to be part of uh Mr modi's agenda or the bjp's agenda for India in the uh next decade or whatever they had their plans it reminded me a lot about when Rajiv Gandhi came to power he invited a whole bunch of young people saying come and be part of the India story Pakistani say that that happened when Benazir Bhutto came to power she also got a whole you know all these educated Elites of pakistanis who were working in England who were working in uh in the U.S saying come be part of the Pakistan story um did that inspire you in some way when um Mr Modi came to power that yeah you want to be here you want to be in India what was it that made you leave a relatively cushy job and come to India so let me say that India has a longest tradition of this by the way so they have at least in the space of economists so let me just stick to that part you saw for example Manmohan Singh is also part of that yes phenomena then you had a generation that happened around about the liberalization time a little bit before when you had monkeys and others who came so there was also that and then later on you had briefly raghuram Rajan for example back but yeah so there were there has been uh history at least in the field of Economics of uh Indians living outside of India or leaving their jobs coming back and and carrying on here and being quite successful I mean one month and prime minister but some of them didn't stay and some of them went back like arvind subramaniam um Raghu went back as well so there's a you know mixed bag but the idea of people coming and participating in the India story uh is uh is a is a well-established one well before me uh in my personal case of course uh you know I've been very much uh aligned to a particular um way of thinking about the um India its economy and so on and of course the term right wing is bandied about and and I understand that it doesn't always exactly translate into the Indian context but for the for the lack of conservatives maybe maybe or nationalist or whatever you may want to call it anyway you know what I mean yeah so there is a group of thoughts which I subscribe to which aligns with uh certainly what Prime Minister Modi is trying to do and so I had actually met him even before he became prime minister when he was in Gujarat and of course when he he comes to power um I was uh you know I was very very happy and then at some point in time uh you know I I have the I had the opportunity of joining this uh uh Finance Minister jaitley's team and then I served under him as principal economic advisor then Finance Minister nirmala Rahman after him and then a year ago I then shifted to become Prime Minister modi's economic member of his Economic Council so that's been my journey I have to say it's been absolutely fabulous um I don't know what the others think about it maybe they have to put up with somewhat idiosyncratic character but uh um I have had a great time you know I always like to know about the author not just about the book what leads you to write about Indian history you're an economist you you have a day job which is so exhausting because you're working on a you know on transforming the Indian economy um what is it that you do that inspires you what is it that you do to relax to give you ideas what what makes you what you are so I am believer in the what is in in basketball is called the full court press so that play the whole thing you know you know so I don't believe I don't have any silos on my head um you're not center right center left Center no that's an ideological Point silos in basketball yeah no that's a no no I play the whole thing so okay you you play forward back continuously it's a it maybe people find it more exhausting uh but in my head there are no silos there is no Silo between history geography economics Urban Design or any other space in life because these are actually pedagogical separations yeah monuments also so many times I've seen you've I mean you've taken pictures in your book it's yeah I've even published reports on uh yeah what we should do with management and so on so uh in my head there is no separation between these two in fact in real life there isn't any separation between these two um and so I think the fact that these subjects are taught separately uh that is just uh you know convenience of the academic system the real world does not uh function in silos at all and I don't see why they we should in real in the real world have these silos if if you have the processing power to deal with different things and you find them interesting do it but the perception about uh about uh the right wing if I mean I'm using that term I know nobody likes it or the right and left but the perception about the right wing is you look they're not happy people they don't know how to relax they don't know so they they're you know very sanskari they will eat only vegetarian food they will not they're not urbanists you're an urbanist absolutely right so the entire idea you know that you are breaking that stereotypes uh well as far as um vegetarian food is concerned let me say that I am on record to say that uh I am a great lover of crustaceans okay as is well known but that's again stereotype no Bengali okay yeah so you know people uh so I I think people have these stereotypes so there's no particular reason to have them um you know I have also written books like life over two beers and you know what do I relax cricket cricket no not Cricket not Cricket no I you know I cannot understand how people watch test Cricket this is really like watching paint dry if you want if you want to say that absolutely if you want to around on The Lawns for five days choose croquet okay we've got the most boring thing ever yeah the same thing as test Cricket if you want to make it interesting get rid of the pads and the helmets maybe I'll watch it otherwise please flat sport you want to watch yeah so I like martial arts I I am a black belt in Taekwondo I you know I like watching a mixed martial arts boxing uh you trained in martial arts yeah I'm a black belt in Taekwondo now that's something that your ancestors would love right Shooters and then now you have yeah so yes absolutely both both and Sachin sanyal were very much uh you know so very much so much for punjabis who think that bengalis are more into art and culture and have nothing to do with uh with martial arts and all and here you are so it's it's The Stereotype right so Bengali at least you know the stereotype bengalis have a punjabis they're not into culture but agriculture agriculture but that's not true a Punjabi music and poetry has a very long and Rich history yeah so the same thing is true of Bengal you know 100 years ago interestingly bengalis were known for being entrepreneurs today nobody thinks of that as being the case yeah my own family as I told you my mother's family were entrepreneur so so there is a there are there you know you travel a lot I've seen in your book that you you weren't just um you didn't just go uh into a library and do your research you went to all those places and you want to partake in the culture of the place like absolutely you've gone and you've you've tasted Cuisine uh somebody takes you to a restaurant in a place which you imbibe yes so it's not so much clear in this book but my earlier is even more so that I go to those places and I talk about what happened but even here I go to Raj bihari the bosses restaurant in in uh Tokyo and tasted the his recipe for example of chicken curry so my view here is that you need to be able to engage in it now there is also a personal angle to this I actually don't like writing where people don't realize this no after so many books no I actually dislike writing I actually like researching them I thoroughly enjoy researching all these books you go to places you do cool stuff yeah so I enjoyed that part of the thing and then humanize those people so much you know there it's not dry characters in your business yes and then you talk like you said about the curry yeah so I go and eat because by the way earned is living running a restaurant so so you know and his and his and his chicken curry is still uh his recipe is still being used in Tokyo so people interest you right it's not just it's not just people try interesting yeah people interest me but I think what interests me is actually the act of researching all of this it because I said I don't have too many silos in my head so this is part of that I you know I like to immerse myself in the world in general so this is part of that immersion process so when I'm researching it it makes no sense going and spending all your time in the library uh and by the way if you just do that you'd actually miss many many important things like for example it may say in the in the Memoirs let's say that I went into and so place and went down this Lane and turned left now somebody who just read it in in a book will not understand that turning left is important because if you go there you'll see that if we turn right something totally different would have happened yeah but there is no way you would be able to tell that if you just read it so you have to go to that place immerse yourself into it and as I said it's part of what I do anyway as a you know so I you know I went to and and some of it I enjoy myself doing like the cellular jail thing uh till you went and saw those rooms yes that just to say that they were tortured yeah you can't tell you have to go there these are tiny rooms smaller than this room yeah uh cold brick walls and you know with just a door a barred uh door in front of you where by the way it's been designed in such a way that the prison guards can continuously watch you whereas you can't talk to anybody on either side so it has been designed for a particular kind of mental control and you know you can read all of you want about it unless you don't it you feel suffocated when you go not just that you don't also realize that you know a few weeks later uh Dyer was actually given a sarupa in uh in the Golden Temple now that is bad in itself but when you go there you realize that the jallianwala bag and the golden temple are 300 meters apart yeah you're literally going to the same location and you are being honored for carrying out genocide so I think it's very very important to go to the place otherwise that is again A Part which was the Band-Aid I keep coming back to that the collaborators and the Band-Aid that nobody talks about how he was given a sarupa about how they were collaborators then absolutely they are collaborators then and they are collaborators now I'm coming back to the book even though yeah but you can see that happening even in today so for example even this uh suspicious narrative that is continuously bandied about about India you know electoral autocracy and all of this yeah uh or for example the BBC uh program that was recently done very controversial one what is interestingly that much of this is actually done by people of Indian ethnic origin so this collaborator class is still there interestingly many of these people are direct descendants of those collaborators but point is that this class has always existed and we can't deny that you know few hundred thousand uh Brits ran a country of hundreds of millions of people it was only possible because of collaboration but today there's no monetary benefit that they would get no by doing that well first of all there is monetary benefit I mean after all uh you wouldn't need a billionaires to be funding this stuff otherwise would you um and then there are intelligence agencies or friendly countries some of them in our neighborhood there are corporate interests um and so on so I think you have I mean you know the entire episode relating to vaccines for example just happened three years ago um clearly driven by all kinds of corporate interests yes and it comes out later and then you say that they weren't exactly Cassandra's who were warning us about this uh the other thing that which I wanted to ask you you know which when you would we were talking with the book was about when you had written about how Marxist literature was kept in those uh jails and it was tell me about the influence of Marxism on the revolutionaries I'm coming back to the book though I was done with the book but I'm going to come back to it and the other thing was about the influence of Hinduism also because many people think that the revolutionaries were atheists and agnostic not at all not at all so not at all so first of all um a very large part of the of the Revolutionary movement is directly derived from not just Hinduism but a specific branch of it the shaktism many of them were very strong shaktas I.E worshipers or bhavani or Durga or Kali and so on many of the initiations into the Revolutionary movement happened with a you know a text in Gita or Veda or something in one hand a sword or a revolver in the other hand and oath was taken to Durga or bhavani or Kali so so Shakti Islam is a very important part of this when you listen to Vande mataram the first two stanzas are relatively secular about the motherland but the next three are clearly derived from shakta image imagery so the uh the the part of Vande mataram which not many people recite yes but you should you should listen to it in fact for this book I actually created for the the third and fourth stanzas I I got my younger son to create a video for it by the way yeah you can see it on online so good [Music] [Music] [Music] please [Music] I'm always [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] to remember this uh because this is the section that was sung by the revolutionaries to The Gallows and so Hinduism and more gen more specifically shaktism was a very major part of the ideological driving force of all of this and that comes in that anandmat movie absolutely and by the way they are also being inspired by for example shivaji who himself is inspired by bhavani so there is this very strong lineage of ideas and so on now somewhere in the 1920s interest arises in Marxism because remember till the point of the Russian Revolution nobody really has heard of Marxism in India it's really in the late 20s this something pops up um but in in the the revolution is living outside India are the first to find out about it many of them by the way have become refugees in Soviet Union because they have nowhere to run away so they end up in Tashkent and one of them MN Roy actually found these Communist Party of India and tashkin in the early 1920s but in India nobody knows much about this till the very late 1920s and one of the very first people to read about uh the Marxism in India is of course bhagat Singh but it is very important to remember that bhagat Singh Is Not the founder of the communist movement in India he's in fact himself a part of a explicitly nationalist movement uh he's hanged do remember for uh avenging the death of Lala lajpatra who would today be called Hindu nationalist his movement the Hindustan Republican Association and the Revolutionary movement from which he derives himself is led by somebody called sanyal who totally despises is Marxism and he writes that repeatedly in his book so he's a completely anti-marxist so in his uh tract which he lit wrote while in jail called why I'm an atheist bhagat Singh himself says that you know I am the only person in this system leftover who is who is kind of believes in Marxism and everybody else is uh is a nationalist and uh and so on so that is the uh uh that is how things were till the 1930s now what happens is that the communist movement begins to gather Pace in the 1930s uh there are many reasons for this some of it is Russian support but interestingly uh also reason was that the British actually supported the spread of marxist literature in Indian jails to the revolutionaries uh to in order to divide them from the nationalists so many revolutionaries went into jail as nationalists and came out as marxists and of course uh by the 1930s who controls the Communist party it's British communists and to some extent the Russian Communists there's some conflict between the two but British Communists double agents like uh rajini Palma it was half Indian half Swedish and many others and of course it turns out to be a great investment because of course the the Marxist uh the former revolutionaries now marxists uh communist side with the British during the second world war and so you have the Communist Party leaders calling um netaji as you know Running Dog of Tojo and you know criticizing him and so on so that is how it happens now what happens unfortunately is that Emin Roy the original founder of the CPI drifts off from the party and of course after Independence there is another problem that you know they had said all these bad things about people like netaji and they didn't really participate in the freedom so they adopt bhagat Singh as a sort of see our guy had also participated in in the freedom struggle but in fact bhagat Singh had nothing to do with the Communist Party of India um so they are retrospectively bringing him back and that is why you have this strange situation three people are hanged on the same day for the same crime bhagat Singh you only hear about bhagat Singh why because he has been resurrected by the marxists because he's the only person they could sort of say Aussie a Marxist guy also did something and so he then becomes like a founding father of marxist movement and deaf and also freedom fighter and is adopted and built out in subsequent decades um of course bhagat Singh is a remarkable person but he is subsequent not an icon of Marxism is what you're saying yeah he's not quite an icon of Marxism he was not a part of the Marxist movement he was part of a nationalist movement as I said he he ultimately gets hanged for avenging the death of a Hindu nationalist yeah the other two were hanging with him would today also be called Hindu nationalists so uh you know it's rather be rather difficult we're going to go into a Borough now about where Hindu nationalism and that's a whole different thing yes so anyway um for all of you do read this it's a very easy read doesn't take much time but very interestingly told story about so many Heroes that we should have known about thank you Sanji for being part of this podcast thank you so much for having me here thank you for watching or listening into this podcast do like or subscribe on whichever Channel you have seen this or heard this Namaste click here to watch the previous episodes [Music] foreign [Music]

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Id: LByRXS4H8j8

Length: 101min 3sec (6063 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023