Fareed Zakaria Interview Pt. 2 (Web Exclusive): Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

we're here with Fareed Zakaria talking about the Indian election it is exciting he's a transformative candidate Modi but and there is a big but and that but took place in 2002 right it's also the but is nearly the but is not just about what happened in 2002 it's that he comes from a very extreme hardline kind of Hindu nationalist background something called the RSS this was the organization one of whose members are shot Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 so it has a long past of having been fairly tough on minorities particularly the Muslim minority in India 2002 Modi was the head of the government of Gujarat one of the states in India there were riots and in those riots a thousand Muslims died and it was alleged that he is the head of the the government either encouraged or ignored the fact that the police were actually actively assisting in the kind of vigilante violence that ended up killing a thousand people and of course displacing tens of thousand his actual role seems to me a little bit less clear there are investigations that have cleared him from it the way the best I can tell of it it's like those politicians in the South and the United States during the civil rights movement where they knew what the police was going to do if they didn't actively you know so it's an it's a sin of omission where he didn't tell the police go out and and and kill anyone but he knew by not restraining them bad things might happen so it's it's a little murky but it's something he does have to get over if he is now prime minister of all you know 1.1 billion Indians right but it's a sin of omission with a thousand dead people at the end of it that's the problem and yet incredibly I was seeing that there were Muslims in India who voted for Modi anyway because they thought he would be stronger on the economy and at that point is that not the final example of elections are just about the economy he could have killed or been involved in killing your people you think well you know if the stock market goes up he is the best for the job well it also shows you how frustrated and aspirational Indians have become frustrated by the fact that they were growing at 8% a year and then it dropped a 5% I know this doesn't sound like in the United States to say we're only growing at 5% but India's of course a very poor country and so to go from 8% where you thought you were kind of entering the ranks of the China's of the world and all of a sudden for that whole thing to to collapse huge huge problem and again the Indian media as you showed is very lively very vigorous at all so they're constantly showing you you know this is what you could be living like this is there's a kind of Bollywood aspect to Indian news media which is insane it yeah but it does feed that kind of aspirational class I'm telling you they are one sentence away from just all collectively bursting into song but it's not just you know there are you know India has 15 languages only about 15% of India speaks English there are 18 all news channels in English in India 18 we have got like 3 in the United States you're welcome but this this that Modi and 2002 poses a problem for America diplomatically now because he was banned he had a visa revoked here so he's not technically allowed into the country other than on state visits I imagine well as it turns out technically because he's Prime Minister he can get what is it was called an a.1 visa which is a special category so he's gotta get he's got to get out of jail free pass pass well it's fantastic so if you want to visit if you want to visit Disneyworld just become Prime Minister and actly it's all you're exactly but but you're right for 10 years he couldn't come here as a private citizen even as the head of the state government because he was on this side the list though is very bizarre right it's a list of one person it is it has only ever been used to keep this one person out and and as often happens with American foreign policy it's more I kind of a incoherence an accident that produced it they set up this commission on religious intolerance the Commission was charged initially from outside of the United says they're like you worried about violence against Christians so they were like no no we're worried about violence against everybody the riots happen in Gujarat in 2002 and they're like you see we don't like violence against Muslims either they name him they've never named anyone else and Wow and you know there's been a lot of religious intolerance in the world in the last 10 years people have earned the right to be on that list well there are some very there should there should be some justifiably disappointed dictators going hey hey hey what do I have to do exactly well you look at Maliki the prime minister of Iraq you know our man I mean that government has been associated with death squads with reprisal killings and then of course you have Saudi Arabia Oh need i say more right that is that is the bet that is the perfect thing with Saudi righteousness and then the Saudi Arabia let's just let that hang in the air please well you know it has two great it's had two great exports over the last 30 years oil and religious intolerance you know that's right yeah it is is the landmass landmass version of an asterisk that country um but yeah so he has a huge huge mandate Modi what what is he expected to do with it all he talked about while running and he ran one of the most disciplined really brilliant campaigns was just all about development and good government development and Google people tried to get him into the you know the anti-muslim style for Hindu nationalists ufff he never bet he never went there his you know he would just keep talking about it he said one point I'm more interested in toilets than in temples yeah meaning I'm gonna build you know India famously does not have a lot of toilets if you and people have visited notice that you know some of that activity takes place outdoors and so this is a this is it you know but but that was really the whole message was about development and I think if you look at go draw his state he's been pretty good at that Gujarat has grown faster than China in the last ten years and this is a state of 60 million people so it's not trivial but I think you've hit there on the absolute key problem with the whole thing when you enter the toilets and temples because there was even a cartoon information public health information video in India trying to teach the importance of using toilets and it went viral and that I thought must must be the perfect distillation of the potential and the challenges in India for Modi and governing India ahead because injuries it currently has an economic disparity so vast that you've got fifty percent of people with a dangerous lack of access to toilets and the other half watching viral videos about that problem on their iPads we've got it desert spectacular wealth disparity there well and especially especially at the top so India has I forget it's one of the five or six countries in the world with the largest number of billionaires and yet you know the per capita income in India is I think still under two thousand and just to remind people the United States is more like fifty thousand so it's still a very poor country but with a whether the haves really in an extraordinary that the haves in India you know the top ten percent or five percent live like people doing Western Europe or and and then you have the bottom thirty or forty percent who is still living on essentially you know under three or four dollars a day it's very - huge disparity and his challenge is going to be to try to provide the kind of growth that China has been able to do which required you know often very very determined government policy which is tough to do in a democracy but that's the promise because you know China's development in some way is a model for no one because most dictatorships are not that competent I mean you know people often say wouldn't it be great to be it wouldn't be great to be able to have a Chinese salary yeah but how do you know you're gonna get the Chinese most people get you know Marco so Mobutu or some crazy African guy who wants to build a temple to himself yeah and if you could be guaranteed that you get the kind of Chinese style technocracy that'd be great what India represents is a democracy that might actually make development work and figure out a way to get growth so it's much more transportable right if the Indians with their crazy messy colorful democracy can somehow make the right choice of choices and get economic growth well then Indonesia can do it and Brazil can do it you know whereas the Chinese it's like well yeah maybe we should get the Chinese to run every country that's not a really a viable model for the world that the Chinese might like it okay so that's not not a viable model but that's probably where we're headed but that's what that's what we have everything everything about this election was fascinating to me not not even just the result or what that what the projections of that result it likely to be but the process itself was incredible eight hundred and fourteen million registered voters and the Indian Election Commission mandated that there had to be a polling station two kilometers from every place where people were living meaning that they were putting they were put in polling stations up on the side of mountains and and the results were tabulated because it was all done electronically faster and more authoritative Li than the elections here well that's me Ono hanging Chad exactly no butterfly ballots and in terms of fighting for access for people it's an antithesis do you look at the voting rights laws that are going on here they're putting putting politics laid on the side of mountains in Texas they will be proposing laws building mountains between voters and the polls it's there was something so inspirational about it today that is one of the things you know growing up in India there was so many crazy things it was it was a crazy socialist period when I was growing up particularly in the seventies or nationalizing Bank so so many things that you you felt sad about but this was the one piece of India that was always so inspirational that you know these poor illiterate people not only could vote but wanted to vote demanded to vote and understood the issues from their point of view and you know did it repeatedly and there's never been serious violence there's never been anyone who's contested the the results in other words the loser has always accepted them for a country again that's one of the poorest countries in the world still that is an inspiration it really is it's so exciting to me because the possibilities seem potentially limitless and that by the way maybe the British have something to do with the tradition of parliamentary democracy yes we did it we did it if we take if we take nothing else away from this evening I'll take that as a verbal thank you that in fact it was this we saw we did our first show we did we did a whole big section on the Indian idea and it went it was seen quite a lot in India and there was a bit of pushback in India with with people being angry saying the map over my shoulder was drawn wrong and to that I say I'm British that's impossible I got that's just the way the map is now just like I can't get it wrong it might it was probably the piece of Kashmiri at the part that s contested between India and Pakistan so when I got as a kid a my copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica which my parents had bought for me I can't remember I think my 14th birthday or something the page with the map of India was blacked out by the Indian censors so it's like you can't take a look at this you know it's it's just too horrific just see it's a I can't thank you enough VIN it is nothing that is not fascinating about about this whole election and I can't think of anyone better to talk to better than you thank you so I really appreciate great show you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 1,105,600

Rating: 4.8592353 out of 5

Keywords: Tags: last week tonight with john oliver, fareed zakaria, narendra modi, bjp, hbo

Id: IAR3cb1V_ss

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Sun May 18 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/solarswordsman]

This really was an excellent interview. Both of them clearly have a handle on the topic and any tangents that either of them explored were either hilarious or thoroughly interesting. This show really does continue to impress.