Shashi Tharoor on Nationalism and the Battle for India's Soul

and um it's great to hear um all of you i'm sure from tuning in from around the world for tonight's events and i'm very excited to be hosting this intelligence squared plus event uh with our guest tonight shoji there and shoshi is extremely well known as one of the most prominent public intellectuals in india and indeed at a global level he's a politician he's a writer he's a former diplomat uh and he has been a member of the indian parliament for the congress party since 2009. he was formerly under secretary general of the united nations and author of many many books both fiction and non-fiction uh they include wya mahindu and the new title that we're going to discuss tonight the struggle for india's soul and it's already been explained but just again you can link to buy a copy of that book and i'm sure after this conversation you're going to want to do that now tonight's event is going to run for an hour end to end for about the first half an hour or so i'm going to steal chairs privilege and be in conversation with shoshi and then in the second part we're going to be taking your questions so you can start right now with your questions by clicking on the q and a button just under the video screen and typing in your question and if you want your name and your location to be mentioned type that into the box and press send and if you want to send anonymous questions that's fine too as long as they're legal decent truthful and well intentioned as i'm sure all of you are so we are going to have a general discussion about the themes of the book and how they relate to the future of india and the rise of nationalism around the globe so let's get started shoshi it's a great pleasure to welcome you to this intelligent squared event thanks to that and the magic of the pandemic era technology which of course is something that we are both taking advantage of and in some ways have to regret let's hope we're moving out of that stale at that stage very good to be with you thank you great to be here great to have you here a struggle for india's soul so what defines india's soul she and why is there a struggle for it in the first place why is this an issue it's an issue because in many ways what we're seeing in indian politics today after 75 years of independence is a surprising conflict a conflict that i think many of us growing up in india in a certain time and indeed reading and writing and studying india would never have anticipated arising so lit as it were into our political existence because you know indian nationalism was something many of us took for granted there was of course anti-colonial nationalism in my case it ended a decade before i was born but the fact is that was about getting the foreigners out of india that was done and that then evolved into what one would call a civic nationalism uh because the nationalism that inspired our long struggle for independence had always been rooted in india's time-honored civilization traditions of inclusivity social justice religious tolerance desire to forge a society that allowed individuals to flourish irrespective of their religion their caste their language their place of birth and that was the nationalism we grew up with we saw no contradiction between celebrating our diversity and the variety of everything of religions and languages of regions of colors and so on in our country and at the same time proudly considering ourselves nationals suddenly this seemingly benign thought of nationalism which i suppose political scientists would call civic nationalism has been challenged by a new dominant narrative that has won two elections in a row and that challenges this basic idea of india and which seems to thrive on an exclusionary aggressive sectarian spirit based on a sort of cultural identity the idea that india is a hindu rajasthan so in this process the soul of india what is it that we celebrate when we call ourselves indian what do we feel when we announce our patriotism or our nationalism this is in question and the struggle is are we going to speak of and and or allegiance to an india which celebrates civic nationalism and diversity or are we now expected to adhere to a notion of india an idea of india anchored an ethno-religious identity nationalism which denounces the rest of us as being anti-national for not subscribing to that point of view that's the fundamental struggle that's going on for india's show all right trishi thanks for that let's get to some specifics that you mentioned in your book because i have to say it is a fascinating reading i enjoyed it very much and would encourage others to take it up and read it one of the distinctions that you make in the book not your own distinction i know one you cite from from others who you have to say probably don't agree with but nonetheless that is made is between the word and the term india now at a very literalistic level of course this doesn't seem to make sense because those who know in the native languages will know that just means india if you speak hindi that's that's what it is and india is the old british name which has come to describe the country and yet you argue that there is a distinction being made between these two and you don't like the distinction could you explain why that is right well well as you said that the constitution says india that is so the two are even constitutionally synonymous and every indian language refers to india as bharat including my mother tongue malayalam and yours i assume at some point bangla and so on i mean every indian language not just hindi uses the term parrot but having said that what many have taken the two terms as shorthand for is for the bharat representing something more timeless primordial authentic rooted in the national soil and india are somehow more deracinated elitist anglophone and emerging from a colonial construct i'm troubled by that because it then translates into contemporary india as urban anglophone elitism in one and uh rooted uh indian language speaking particularly hindi speaking far more sort of hindu notion of india in the other and i just think that those binaries are unnecessary and allied the fundamental way in which i believe india's soul embraces diversity and says that all of us belong to it in our own way so anyway that's that's the distinction that you sought it's not a distinction i welcome but it is indeed often resorted to by analysts well i want to prove a little while into some of the ways in which those divisions are becoming more evident in the india today and what they mean for the country's future let's just get a few specific examples i suspect that many of those who tuned in today either you know know india well or are interested in some sense but just to get a bit of a picture civil society is one of the areas where those observing india who have concerns about where things are going where things seem to have in some ways closed off or become more um constrained than they were previously universities the media these are what people talk about when they're looking as it were from a previously more liberal settlement to one that seems to have gone in a more monolithic direction could you give any examples of anything that you are worried about in in those areas oh my god we that's almost needed we've already got an hour so that's what what i want to get something concrete in other words into people's minds of things that you think that are happening that are different from what would have happened before and that you think that the world should be worried about so i think i think i think a recent example uh just before program really was the introduction of something called the citizenship amendment act now citizenship in india has never been linked to religion the entire idea was that anybody born anybody with a grandparent born in undivided india as defined by the government of india act 1935 under the british was eligible for citizenship now some of this got narrowed in that those who become uh citizens of pakistan or bangladesh had to go through various acid tests later to see if they could qualify but even they were eligible nonetheless religion was never mentioned neither in the constitution nor in any law made about it but for the first time the government introduced a citizenship amendment act to ostensibly to fast-track citizenship applications by refugees and migrants from our neighboring countries and specifically spelled out the religions that would be eligible for this fast tracking they went from hinduism christianity journalism buddhism sikhism and conspicuously omitted islam and what was striking about this was it was a way of saying to one particular community in india you are here on sufferance not by right you are not in the same category as all these others when pressed i i oppose this in parliament of course and when pressed by me the whole minister um took refuge in the argument that partition had taken place on religious grounds and that therefore muslims were excluded because countries had been created for them but that is actually equally horrifying because no indian government before the present one would ever have accepted the logic of partition the logic of partition rested on the presumption that religion is the determinant of nationhood for india's muslims in particular that became the rallying cry and so pakistan was created as a country for muslims but everybody else from mahatma gandhi to jawaharlal nehru to saddam patel to dr ambedkar to to a muslim leader like and many others said this is wrong our freedom struggle has been for everybody we will create a country for everybody and religion does not determine our indians that's been the the ruling creator that's been ethos and i would argue that's been true to india's inclusive soul for very many years and suddenly this act coming in in effect pointed a finger at one community and said you're just not here on the same basis as everybody else you don't belong in the same way that's why the indian edition of the book is called the battle of belonging that's i think what the message was in any case there's a concrete example it was made worse by the threat of the home minister to conduct a nationwide exercise in registering all citizens who would be obliged to provide documentary proof of their birth and you could be reasonably sure that the only ones whose inability to provide such documentation could have had severe consequences were indian muslims so you had this enormous backlash with protests breaking out throughout the country led by ordinary muslims for the most part not avering islam but rather their indian-ness and saying you don't have the right to tell us we're not indian and a lot of us came out in support of these protests which were ended only by the covet outbreak and the results of lockdown so an example there of how legislation is changing the secular nature of india in practice if not necessarily at least in a sensible statement there have been many interviews here in britain for instance with bjp ministers who have argued that this is something that can be justified under the constitution we talk about the constitution quite a bit i uh i know but in practice it has had an effect of changing the way in which different communities relate to indian-ness but one of the things that people so far have still wanted to say is that india still has at least one great advantage that many other countries which are turning towards a more authoritarian style of electoral government philippines united states in some ways it has one advantage which is the press there are still liberal voices that can be heard in both english language and um uh indian language uh press and media across the country i think of newspapers like the calcutta telegraph which you know i know and have written for on on occasion there are plenty of others too could we be confident that the long-standing tradition of a lively and varied media in india will continue to keep government honest we hope so but the performance of the so-called mainstream media has not been encouraging in this regard and i i say this with a lot of regret i i'm a son of a newspaper man that i'm myself somebody who's been writing for the indian media since my childhood and i i would i would hate to see the media go under but there's been an appalling level of conformity and even abject submission to the government on the part of the best known mastheads in india um and what was appalling about that is in fact the contrasting courage of digital websites which are really the last refuge now people like me who want to to to say things bluntly and be read and heard um because everywhere else um i'm sorry to say we're seeing we're seeing um that the press has either been cajoled or cuddled into um into conformity uh we're seeing by the way an assault on pretty much all institutions from universities to the to the judiciary to the uh independent election commission to the reserve bank of india i mean you name every institution and there has been an assault on it by a government quite determined to in to ensure that criticisms and actions autonomous of the government's missions um are restricted but but but the press ought to be calling the government's actions to account that's historically been the role of the press since the colonial era uh and yet it's seemingly been counted by the overweening power of the government uh combining i would say intimidation and cooperation uh which has ensured that the minimum of particular voices exist in the mainstream media you'll find the very occasional sort of op-ed by an individual not necessarily uh associated with the editorial stance of the newspaper and even those are few and far between in some of the newspapers uh there are one or two honorable examples um and so the result of this is that the de-institutionalization of indian governance is happening because if the media isn't able to call the spade a bloody shovel then unfortunately we we are no longer living in a full-fledged democracy well let's use that term democracy to dig a little bit deeper into the thesis of the book because just to prove that i have read it with some care on page 297 you say and it's a great statement indian democracy is a strength not a weakness okay very happy to accept that and it is notable that a country of that size and that diversity has managed to keep a cycle of electoral democracy going for so many decades but in that case isn't the obvious argument that could come from the government or their many supporters but look this is just democracy nobody forced anyone to vote for the bjp they have a majority in government as uh mandated by the constitution of india no different from mr trump getting elected in america people complained about him but he was elected fair and square he doesn't believe he was de-elected the second time that's a slightly different different question but in this particular case isn't what's happened now simply an example of indian democracy adapting but still remaining actually perfectly democratic yes and no because in fact there have actually been external critics who referred to india as increasingly resembling an elected autocracy i remember the late jai prakash narayan the famous socialist uh rebel and activist saying that indian democracy should not consist of the sheep electing their shepherd every five years who then essentially pushes them around as he sees fit um i i think it's fair to say that indian democracy wasn't like that but it's certainly worrying that it seems to be guided in that direction more and more by a government that seems to believe its democratic credentials rest only on an election victory and not on a need for accountability between elections that's what's particularly worrying i mean you've seen really many interesting arguments around the world that the health of of liberal democracies globally is is failing and that um and that many consolidated democracies are eroding you've seen this in hungary you've seen it in in in in in a number of other countries i don't want to be invidiously picking names but in the case of india what is worrying to me as an indian democrat and of course as a member of the opposition is precisely runner that we are looking at a situation in which the exercise of a a free vote is seen as the only sort of certificate of good housekeeping you need to claim to be a democracy and everything else that gives substance to the pillars of democracy um the the institutions which are the enduring pillars of any true democracy their independence integrity and professionalism which ought to ignore them from the political pressures of the day are themselves being chopped off literally uh uh at the at the knees okay results yes sorry so that's both an inspiring and eloquent defensive indian democracy but again just to push a little bit you know under the surfaces it was actually dr ambedkar who uh very early on said that indian democracy is very wide but also in some ways quite quite shallow and i find myself thinking actually of course about your own party in an earlier incarnation back in 1975 when mrs gundy declared a state of emergency which again you talk about to some extent in in the book just to remind those who who don't remember or you know are too young um for essentially two years democracy was suspended in india in a way that actually out does what's happening now you know the press was actually prevented it was censored and prevented from publishing uh what what it wanted to parliament suspended japan narayana who you mentioned was stuck in jail along with an awful lot of other people on the left including actually many of the people who became leaders of the bjp the nearest india has come to dictatorship in the post-independence era was its two or three years under the secular leader mrs gandhi wasn't that a sign that actually ambedkar was right that democracy has always been quite shallow in india and that the pian that you've given has always had a slightly shallow basis to it i think what america was talking about the social exclusion what he was saying essentially is you've got undemocratic society which has practiced caste discrimination particularly against the dallas community the so-called untouchables and on top of that you are actually imposing a democratic political structure so one man one vote but you have one man one value i'm actually almost literally quoting his own words that's what he meant he he wasn't i think challenging the kind of democratic institutionalization that i've been celebrating and seeking to defend he was talking about our society which of course was problematic mrs gandhi's emergency of which i had been a fairly severe critic uh i wasn't in the congress party at the time i was a graduate student but that apart um mrs gandhi's emergency was in aberration and to her credit she then called a free and fair election and lost it and surrendered office not something you see she probably called it because she thought she would win it which of course in this day it will talk she might do my point being that if you say aberration why isn't what we see now an aberration why won't things bounce back why isn't it for your party as the official opposition uh elected to parliament to essentially make the case to say look we have something better that people will vote for so very good point i mean first of all we hope it's an aberration we hope that the public will wake up to the travesties that are being conducted in their name by people who claim to have mandate to make the mistakes they're making uh you know you look at the economy which has gone from a disastrous demonetization of 86 of india's currency by value our right to the highest unemployment ever recorded since figures were recorded for employment all of these catastrophes have laid in their lower at a time when we ought to have been booming before kirby so the indian public surely uh is going to wake up and say why on earth would we vote for this government when we haven't got jobs we haven't got a decent life we were dying from kobe because it wasn't oxygen in the hospitals what are these people done for us that deserve re-election that's what we we certainly want to bring about and the opposition will campaign vigorously uh to remind people of all this but if the bjp still wins um and remember in india there's elections practically every six months because we have 29 states each of which has its own polls there are five states going to the ballot uh in february there'll be another two in november next year so in a sense there's a constant constant electoral process in india but if between those elections or despite those elections the government manages to not be accountable for all sorts of excesses from essentially supporting some of the independence of the institutions i've described to creating um uh for example an opaque fund uh for for allegedly monitoring kobit and and and and uh um other humanitarian charitable activities of the prime minister which is not audited by the controlling audit agenda of india and so on and so forth example after example of of new twists there's a creation of electoral bonds under which uh the wealthy people can finance political parties anonymously um but of course there is a serial number on the bond so the state bank of india knows who's bought the bonds and therefore it's no great accident that 95 or 98 of those ones have gone to the ruling party so you've got one thing after another that didn't happen before that wasn't part of indian democracy and that is increasingly twisting indian democracy into something that it should not be shashi thanks very much indeed just a reminder that i'm rana mitra i'm in conversation with shoshi tarou the major indian indian public intellectual and politician whose new book the struggle for india's soul is out now and thanks everyone who's watching i see the questions already coming in i'm going to be putting some of those to shoshi in just a few minutes time but do keep them coming in uh do use the button and make sure that you put in questions in the chat so that we can pass them on to him but not until we had a chance to discuss a few of the other fascinating ideas that have come up in your book uh let's talk a little bit about mahatma gandhi we talked about indira gandhi and the unrelated but also very important mahatma gandhi i think should come into our conversation i think you probably like me have read the great historian ram wonderful two volumes of deeply researched work on gandhi's life published in the last few years and yet of course gandhi himself has become a somewhat controversial figure in india today in a way that actually the leading figures of the government have made slightly ambivalent because they haven't rejected him but they have tried to appropriate him if that's the right word for the current hindutva bjp nationalist message which you might think was a rather difficult sort of thing to do and you write about this rather interesting phenomenon in in the book what do you make of it well i must say that i i i find it incredible because i knew something about the rss that slimes sung the movement from which mr moody and indeed the bulk of the uh the ruling party establishment uh have graduated as well they've all been through the rss many are still officially serving members of it the rss has historically preached against mahatma gandhi they had contempt for him when he was alive many rss chapters or shakha's distributed sweets to celebrate his assassination when he was killed they had contempt for his faith in non-violence the famous comment by then head of the rss that every hindu god carries weapons and that gandhi's uh himself was completely unhindered uh and and so on and so forth they certainly had a great deal of withering hostility towards gandhi for his desire to overcome hindu muslim differences even during the hatreds unleashed by partition and the fact that he his last fast was actually to get the government of india to give a more generous share of the exchequer to the newly created state of pakistan all of this created a tremendous tremendous amount of hostility to mahatma gandhi which everybody growing up very growing up in the rss has imbibed now mr modi comes to power and realizes that uh there's more to um to to sort of winning friends and influencing people around the world than spouting hindu nationalism that you need to have a a brand image he managed uh to sort of be the kind of prime minister who had a threshold shiva's trident in one hand and and showed himself clicking a mouse with the other as it were this technocratically friendly modern leader whom the west would embrace and for him it was very rapidly clear that discerning mahatma gandhi was a bad idea that he would actually gain from mahatma gandhi's global luster if he appropriated him and said but he wasn't particularly welcoming of the content to what mahatma gandhi preached and so what the bjp did was to appropriate mahatma gandhi as a symbol of their sanitation movement the swachh bharat or clean india campaign has adopted mahatma gandhi's glasses as their logo because mahatma gandhi famously said that sanitation is more important than independence and they've decided the sanitation is going to be the issue for which gandhi will be the the mascot nothing about non-violence nothing about truth nothing about hindu muslim unity or amity nothing about any of the causes for which he fought and lived and died mahatma gandhi got reduced to a figure emblematic of sanitation now they're taking it one step further and resurrecting what they say is mahatma gandhi's faith in hinduism he was indeed a very devout hindu absolutely no doubt about that but he interpreted his hinduism as one that was inclusive that was accepting of difference that it imbibed philosophies from from other faiths including buddhism and christianity and jainism and therefore his hinduism was very far removed from the so-called muscular and rather aggressive hinduism of the of today's ruling bjp and sanpariwar so it's quite paradoxical this appropriation mahatma gandhi but it shows i suppose that you can you can pretty much pick and choose anything you like out of anybody and drag him onto your side if you really want to debate silicate well it has to be said that gandhi has become an extraordinarily um diverse diversely interpreted figure in the last few years everyone from various people arguing that his early animus against africans in particular means that his entire body of thought should be discounted which takes to one end a marxist critique which argues that he was never actually the kind of liberator he claimed and now this sort of semi-appropriation under hindutva none of which might have been necessarily interpretations that he would have recognized him himself but of course we will not know but i would recommend everyone to read has fantastic two volume biography of him which uh is immensely revealing let me pick up one thread of what you said in that uh that answer she about the international influence of gandhi in terms of shaping india's image because i'm speaking to you today from britain which i should say of course is your place of birth in fact you returned to india having uh been born there and by the way there's a wonderful story at the beginning of your book about trying to shake off the necessity to get a british passport by default uh which you're entitled to but never uh never took up in an era where many people are trying to gain citizenship the idea of not picking it up and deliberately losing it was was rather interesting in some some ways um but let's speak from about britain britain right now particularly post-brexit defining itself as global britain is really spending a lot of time at least in governmental circles thinking about india it sees it as a new trade partner i mean whether mr modi sees it the same way as another matter but you know it's under discussion it sees it as a new security partner part of what it calls the d10 the group of ten democracies the g7 plus south korea japan india part of the quad of course this new military um uh pact not quite an alliance but a pact anyway between japan australia and the united states along with india in other words the rest of the world is looking at mr moby's india and unlike you it's saying well actually we can live with this this is something that actually suits our needs quite well and we're quite happy to turn these guys a democratic partner with whom we can do business are they wrong i i don't think they're entirely saying that right i mean there's a lot of what you what you said is accurate they reflect an accurate understanding of india's geostrategic importance particularly in light of the rather belligerent rise of the country you know so well china but when you think in terms of what makes india an attractive member of all of these partnerships it is the fact that it is a democracy and if it weren't it would actually lose its most fundamental credential for being part of these groups you can't be in the d10 if you're not really a d and you can't really be in the kinds of shall we say resistance to chinese expansionism brigade if you are yourself exhibiting the worst qualities of the chinese have been exhibiting to their minorities the uyghurs and so on now in the case of india we are certainly far far far away from being as bad as as uh the chinese when it comes to where the chinese have treated the uyghurs the tibetans and others so i'm not i'm not making the mistake of suggesting there is nothing to choose between the two but i am saying that there are increasing concerns and even alarm bells being raised about the fact that india's indian indian government's domestic behavior is not up to the standards that the world has long come to expect of india that when for example muslims are routinely demonized by people in positions of authority when shameful incidents occur for example of lynchings of are muslims being beaten and asked to sing the praises of jasmine even as they're dying i mean you have these these horrendous incidents happening which never seem to get condemned by those who are in power then other countries sit up and notice and they're certainly amongst the india's friends in the islamic world who are noticing and are expressing their concerns bangladesh is a very important neighbor for us one of the few that are genuinely friendly and you can't afford to antagonize them but you are doing so with some of the stories bangladeshis are reading about what's going on in india the great national assembly recently passed a hostile critical resolution about india's mistreatment of its muslims in the gulf countries where indians are actually finding themselves a home a job and a source of remittances can you afford to antagonize all of these countries and then when it comes to western world it was no real accident that mr modi shows up in america and vice president kamala harris instead of merely celebrating her ethnic affinity to the visiting prime minister because she is of indian origin her mother was indian uh instead lectures him on the importance of democracy now i think the messages are fairly clear everyone values india recognizes india's extremely special place in the world wants to be able to welcome and embrace india and is begging india for god's sake don't make it difficult for us to do so by your own behavior conduct and statements at home and i think that's actually a pretty reasonable proposition that indian officials ought to pay attention to thanks i see that questions are pouring in so i'm going to put one last one just to round off this part of the discussion for a brief question brief answer and um it is essentially about where we go next now the way i have seen this is something that has a half glass full or half glass empty interpretation which is that as actually in previous some eras of congress dominance a lot of the pushback against central government politics in india comes from the east and from the south your own southern homelands karnataka kerala tamil nadu and of course west bengal and you can look at west bengal which recently did not let the bjp actually win government in that uh state uh the ruling criminal congress separate from the congress party uh won again but there was a significant advance in bjp voting there so for those like you who want to push back do those parts of india that haven't yet become dominated by the bjp merely provide a kind of sign of things to come or are they actually the anvil for something that might be a different sort of politics later on well i've no doubt in my own mind that in fact the parts of the country where which have so far remained immune to the bjp's advances um are actually the parts of the country that will continue to resist the bjp which is increasingly um being seen and being reduced to being a hindi heartland party uh in fact it has only one state in the south karnataka and every indication is it is not going to be able to hold on to it beyond this one term um it is it is attempting to spread in the northeast but frankly facing many contradictions over the fact that is often relying on local partners but it increased its seats in bengal last time it increased its seats in bengal true but it has also failed to pull off the victory that it thought its efforts and its colossal expenditure would have justified and strikingly a number of the opportunists who had jumped ship from the ruling party the thriller moved to join the bjp for the elections have quietly turned tail and come back after the elections including some who won their seats under the bjp and are now regretting having joined that party so i think i think it is a hindi heartland party or it's particularly worrying rather and i mentioned this in a later part of the book is the fact that we have an unusual arrangement whereby the political constituencies in the lower house of parliament have been delimited in accordance with the proportions of the 1971 census in an arrangement through a constitutional amendment that will lapse in 2026. all indications are the bjp will not want to renew that amendment and will instead want to stack the debt to reflect the changes in population over the last five decades which have dramatically increased the population of those states that have failed to empower their women and curb uh population growth and those are precisely in the heartland states where the bgp thrives suddenly you will suddenly find a situation where the south bengal these states that are resisting the bjp are in effect disenfranchised uh in parliament because uh the hindi heartland suddenly as a result of shared demographics gets a two-thirds majority in the house and that's a very worrying thing that i've said flagged in the book which we'll have to watch out for so there are many many aspects of indian politics that we'll have to give a close eye on in the next few years i want to break in there just because it's time for us to get our huge audience from around the world to take part this conversation as well i know they're dying to get in shoshi so just a reminder for everyone a lot of people already done it but just to remind you underneath the video screen you'll see the tab that says q a if you'd like to ask ask a question type your question right into the box pop your name and your location if you'd like to or anonymize if you want and then click send please be patient there are a lot of questions to get through and do tweet as well if you can using the hashtag iq2 so do uh tweet and do send in questions right let's get to some of these questions show you guys a lot of things that people want to ask you uh we've got a general message from william mora who's saying greetings from venezuela just prove genuinely our very global uh today um and here's a question i think from a friend of both of us i have to say gosh but i'm gonna gonna cheat and put him in first here uh don ziegler from the economist magazine who we have to have because he's currently sitting in uzbekistan in tashkent and um he is asking on the question of institutions she would your criticism of the press also apply to the supreme court and just as in the u.s for those who don't know the the the makeup of the indian supreme court has become quite a politically controversial issue in india recently over to you well i'm sorry to say that it it now does a little bit i mean one difference of the us supreme court is that in the u.s supreme court you're appointed for life and in the indian supreme court you have to retire when you hit a particular age i think at 65 and therefore if judges are particularly either craven or independent time will take care of them as well eventually but there have been a number of of criticisms that the performance of the last few chief justices has reduced what used to be a fiercely independent ap export to an executive court sub-serving the government's agenda and i'm not saying this legal luminaries have written articles and learned essays making this argument and and the problem here is that if you have a supreme court that seems ever ready to oblige the government in a slew of cases i might add and then the chief justice of that court upon retirement accepts a nominated seat in the upper house from the same government he has obliged in his judgments without even a cooling-off period in between then you really do worry about whether the institution has become one that not just serves the interests of the executive but speaks its language uh and this is something you can't afford to have a supreme court that's indistinguishable from the executive the current uh supreme court chief justice has been getting a good press and we all hope it lasts although there are some cases before him that i think everyone um is anxious to see you know courageous responses to by the court uh but frankly it's it's the judiciary and the media the two institutions you've asked about rana that for many of us represent the only hope other than electoral victory for the opposition which of course is many years away um these are the institutions that absolutely need to stay alive and keep the flame of indian democracy alive well there's several questions that are coming i'm going to put them together if i may because they make up a sort of suite of questions on a similar area about the possibility of the government changing and obviously as an opposition politician at one level you're literally party pre but also you're at the center of the uh of the fight so let me put these sir here anonymous attendee uh says um yes that's right is there a realistic possibility that the bjp will be voted out of power center in the next general election uh i don't think this is mr modi secretly writing to us because then says given the economic underperformance divisive nature of the agenda but then says the hindutva doctrine seems to catch the masses given the shambolic nature of the opposition and then before you come back and tell us why that i'm sure that's not right um martin yield from manchester says what hope does congress offer people in rural india that the bjp um does not and then the final one that sort of comes under this heading robert g h from north london uh says has not indian democracy under the congress party and others failed witness the continuing profound and widespread poverty if so is not radical change needed hmm all right so uh that's a lot of questions uh let me just guess i'll get on to the rural one right away by saying that the congress party is the party that actually introduced the rural national rural employment guarantee scheme which was opposed attacked and derided by mr modi when he became prime minister in a famous speech saying that we will preserve the scheme as a monument to all the decades of your failure in the end he ended up relying on the scheme to bail him out when he was unable to improve the economy and generate any jobs it was the congress created scheme that guarantees a hundred days of played employment to at least one member of every rural family below the poverty line that actually won the day and that has kept people um from from living hand to mouth number one number two in rural india every one of mr modi's welfare schemes has been lifted lock stock in battle from the congress so the media isn't doing something the congress wouldn't do and number three the thing about the congress party in rural india is that it has always showed some would say an excessive respect for uh india's agricultural community the farmers in particular and landless labor uh no taxation on agriculture for example which is is an interesting challenge and and uh purchasing by government-owned corporations of crops at a minimum support price the bjp by passing three uh farm laws that essentially privatize uh the purchase and distribution of agriculture has in the views of many in the view of many farmers place rural incomes at the mercy of urban capitals and so they're up in arms against the bjp the entire farming belt across northern india is is hostile to it so on the question of what does the bjp offer rural india not very much by comparison with what the opposition stands for the congress party has also come up with a scheme called niai which is about a guaranteed minimum income to every four indians something like 20 to india's families it is a a very major giveaway and i'm sure some economists would consider it irresponsible and so on but the truth is that that's something that a congress victory would bring that the bjp will not be able to match on the related question of radical change well if you're a democrat you get radical change through the ballot box um if the questioner implied uh you know any sympathy for the morris or the naxalites who foolishly taken up the gun in some of our rural areas in a rather futile but deeply destructive efforts to bring about that kind of radical change i'm afraid i have no sympathy for that uh i think that ultimately ours is a country where change is best brought about through preservation and electoral victories and that brings me back to the original the first question you asked of the three which is of course the toughest one to answer is there any realistic prospect of the opposition unseating the bjp i'd like to think there is simply because the bjp's failures are so self-evident that it's difficult to pretend they aren't there i mean on the economy i mentioned already demonetization unemployment um every kind of economic collapse you can imagine has been visited upon us on the on the social fabric you have seen the rending aside the rending of the social fabric with with a terrible uh level of divisiveness and particularly insecurity for minorities that is deeply deeply worrying um those of us in india who do not judge people by how they raise their hands in worship but rather by the content of their character tomorrow for martin luther king and that unfortunately is another part of the bjp's gift to india and so i think that most people have already endured all of that and then the last straw in many parts of india was the mismanagement of kobit where poor families were even literally floating the corpses of their loved ones down the river ganges that they couldn't afford to pay for cremations and indeed the backlog for cremations in any case for so long it was unsustainable for many but that's the kind of situation that the government's mismanagement of the economy uh and of cobit has brought about and on top of that it has looked particularly effectless and inept on the border as china has nibbled away at the at the northern frontier so with all of this going on why on earth the bjp would get re-elected it's difficult to explain the usual defense is the tina factor there is no alternative i think it's incumbent upon the opposition to demonstrate convincingly and clearly that there is an alternative and it consists of decent people experienced people who actually believe in inclusive government in the recent past your name has been muted as a potential prime ministerial candidate for the congress party is that something of interest at all there's no politician that says it's not of interest but it's it's not realistic it's a good deal less realistic than turfing the bjp out of office the party i believe i mean i i belong to has a settled leadership um i do believe however that there should be an opposition coalition they should be unity across the opposition because people often forget when celebrating mr modi's electoral mandate that he won the first time with 31 percent of the vote and the second with 37 percent of the vote in a first-past-the-post system in which the vast majority of indian voters rejected him but their votes were fragmented across 45 regional local and other national parties so if we can construct a sensible uh national opposition coalition i genuinely believe uh we can we can defeat mr moody and at that point uh who uh heads or chairs it is something that the victims would have to decide right now i think what's at stick is really india's soul and that's what i want to fight for well let me bring in uh again a couple of questions on a similar issue which i think get to an important area that we've only just touched on briefly so a chance to have a quick answer on this one comes from the distinguished writer in india victoria schofield who says greetings from london and she says we all know the history of fractious in the pakistani relations do you think the current indian government is making more than the usual hostility to gain popularity amongst the bjp constituents in india and another one that comes from anonymous attendees i don't know why she or he is being anonymous because they start brilliant presentation thank you for your honesty maybe that's why can you comment on prime minister modi's use of the traditional hostility which exists with pakistan to gain domestic support so a couple of questions there on the relationship with pakistan and i just add and you remember this yoshi right at the beginning of his first term mr modi actually made some outreach to pakistan which was rather unusual and made people think that maybe he was gonna be a sort of nixon to china type person who'll be able to actually mend the relationship that doesn't seem to be where it's gone in recent years though right well there's a lot to be said on that i think in all fairness to mr moody he did somewhat whimsically and impulsively surprised the nation by dropping in uh uh in an unannounced unplanned visit to nawaz sharif in in in lahore i think it was um and quite unexpectedly because he was on his way back from kabul to delhi he called nawaz sharif on a courtesy call to wish him a happy birthday why did you pop by and celebrate it with me and my granddaughter is getting married the same day you're welcome at the wedding and movie said why not and and popped over and and then uh after that sort of feel-good experience followed up by when there was a bomb attack and a rather nasty terrorist attack on an indian air force base in a place called patunkot he then actually invited pakistani intelligence to inspect the site for itself to satisfy itself of the information that india provided because the pakistanis used to have a habit of denying every terrorist attack emanating from their soil even though it's pretty obvious where most of these attacks are are actually mounted from uh so to mr modi's skirt he made those two gestures which were undoubtedly uh rebuffed by pakistan and that the the visit to mr uh nawaz sharif in on the 25th of december was followed by an attack in the middle of january on but and subsequent other terrorist raids that were seen as having emanated from pakistan and you can't entirely blame mr moody from having um turned cold shall we say and abandoning any peaceful overchairs to pakistan thereafter however what is striking is that there was this rather ill time from the point of view of indian opposition but also tragic from the point of any patriotic indian attack on an army convoy in kashmir just before the 2019 general elections which killed 40 of our soldiers and that gave mr moody a chance to conduct a bombing raid across the border on what he described as a terrorist training camp and then essentially run to electoral victory by thumping his chest and saying i'm the guy who can deal with pakistan in its own terms so that's uh in many ways may have actually pulled off a win that didn't look so likely before that terrorist attack because he had really already created the disaster of demonetization unemployment was already rife and there were economic setbacks that could have led people to say uh you know we want to change again but this particular thing clips an election for him and the bjp then realized that this is a very good issue for them to hold on to so all of those who are asking whether he is deliberately stoking tensions of pakistan i would say that the initial error was not his indeed one could even go back further to his own inauguration in 2014 to which he invited all the prime ministers of the neighborhood including the pakistani and treated them very well so he he did start off wanting to make peace on the subcontinent but uh subsequently uh they have seen the electoral advantages of soaking a certain level of belligerent rhetoric uh towards the uh towards pakistan in particular which serves the twin purpose of demonizing an enemy and discrediting india's muslims by association so in many ways it's fed into a certain narrative of the government i'm just jumping in trust you because time is beginning to creep upon us but there's a couple more questions i definitely want to get in for quick questions and quick answers one is actually just to also answer a point that someone made in the chat the books that were mentioned about gandhi are the two volumes by ramachandra guha guha available through i think penguin books in india and elsewhere so if you haven't read those buy show shoes book but also please do buy those they're both excellent um the question that comes in from catherine in india in fact basic very good question but based on boiled down she asks in the more polite way that i'm going to do a lot of people said that in the 2019 election one point of difference was that the congress party's social media effort amongst the electorate was dire and the bjp whatever you say about them their hindi language social media engagement particularly with women voters was absolutely superb fair indictment not fair indictment you tell me i think in 2014 it is a fair end and the congress party was simply not there i mean i'm proud to say that until july 2013 i was india's most followed politician on twitter so i mean i actually had um stuck my neck out but the rest of my party had to follow the bjp particularly mr moby who's a man who took me in july 2013 rapidly realized this was an extremely useful tool for them uh because at that point they were the ones who felt the mainstream media were biased against them and they actually found uh an opportunity to use social media to to to turn the tables as it were on the mainstream received opinion uh having said that i'm not sure it's still true anymore and i would argue that even though social media is uh certainly liable to misuse uh to publishing extremist points of view to airing bigotry and so on i would say that now social media is a platform on which by and large the hindutva ecosystem around the bjp gets as good as it gives i think that there is now also there are strong liberal voices that are that are resisting some of it so i would not say that it's a completely uneven playing field on social media where the bjp is very good is on things like organizing whatsapp groups uh the the their version of history gets out in mediums and ordinary people's phones on on devices on apps like whatsapp which have completely and i think we haven't been able to match no that's true and there's me recommending penguin books which maybe is not the way of the the future one last question to get in here it's a big one but i'm going to ask you to uh give it your best shot in the most concise way as we come up to time but i think it is important one thing that a lot of outside observers would say about india today in terms of its international relationships is that in terms of two really important international engagements with the united states particularly under both trump and biden and with china the current indian government has taken stances that many people outside broadly think seem to make sense you know warmth towards the united states in a way that was less true in the cold war um and a certain amount of toughness towards china on border issues is there anything that you you know either as you or as a congress member would change in terms of india's current stance towards those two immensely important or the rather different relationships us and china you know foreign policy has always largely been a consensual subject in india in the sense that we have tended by and large to let our political differences uh sort of fade away at the water's edge uh in uh india's relations with the u.s has actually been bipartisan in both hands that is in america it didn't matter which party came to power or won the white house uh in india it didn't matter which party came to power we tended to work in the same direction towards strengthening indo-us relations china has been different and it's more a difference i think of of competence than of of substance uh india's uh both governments the congress government in the previous 10 years the modi government for the last seven taken the view that we can't afford to be part of a sort of containment strategy against china or to ally ourselves and overt hostility to china because we need them not least for trade they're our one of our largest uh trade partners i think we are forced to cross 100 billion dollars in trade this year already and we're only in october so china is important plus it's an external neighbor we'd have to live with them whether we like it or not it's not a country far away that we can afford to have a cold war with and so on so there's been that at the same time we're very conscious that china has been nibbling away at our frontiers in the north that china sees us in a much less friendly life than we see that we would like them to see us let's put it that way and that some of our nostalgic sentimentalism about traditional millennial ties with china are not particularly shared or appreciated on the other side so given all of that uh india has has been navigating a slightly complicated set of attitudes the modi government has really had a couple of major diplomatic setbacks on the frontier and bhutan the doklam frontier and now most recently last year the galwan valley the humiliation of 20 indian soldiers being killed by the chinese and the prime minister lying to the indian public and saying that no indian votes have been occupied all of that has been truly shocking and and dismayed but we stay united on the fundamental questions of national interests so i won't go beyond that except to say that we just hope that if we were handling these policies rather than the present government we might show a little more experience and competence and bring them into service on these matters concisely put in beautifully timed joshie thank you for that just a reminder if you've been enjoying yourself please do tell everyone by using hashtag iq2 to let people know what you think of this uh conversation and we're coming towards the end i'd like to thank our speaker shoshit and remind you again that his new book is the struggle for india's soul unless you're in india where it has a different title you're saying she if you're in india battle for the lord there you are so you can even buy it twice with two different uh titles thank you our audience from around the world whether you're in venezuela tashkent india or north london who knows which is the most remote of any of those depending where you start i suppose great to have you with us and many thanks to intelligence square for organizing this and now our han

Channel: Intelligence Squared

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Keywords: Intelligence squared, intelligence squared debates, shashi tharoor, shashi, modi, narendra modi, indian nationalism, indian politics, tharoor, politics, global politics, india

Id: jfyDpXeW-J8

Length: 58min 13sec (3493 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021