We can’t all be special because then the concept would lose all meaning. But the Chief Justice of India and the Prime Minister have done us a favour by encouraging each of us to ask: ‘What if I am?’
Perhaps because my birthday is approaching or maybe because I’ve been influenced by the Prime Minister and Chief Justice of India, I have begun to wonder what God thinks of me. I know what my friends think and, sadly, my critics don’t hide what they feel. But does God like me? Does he think I talk too much? Does he frown or wince when I interrupt? Indeed, is he pleased with the product he’s created? I rather like what he’s crafted. But does he? Or is he dismayed by the end result?
Much like the Chief Justice, I’ve prayed for favours and God has granted them. In my teens and twenties I’d do a deal with him – what is politely referred to as a mannat. I’d offer to give up sweets or alcohol or, even, stop telling lies if, in return, he’d guarantee a first at Senior Cambridge or a college honour I desperately sought. To be safe, I’d wait for him to deliver first. When he did – and to my delight it wasn’t that infrequently – I’d meticulously keep my side of the bargain.
Was that a sign of God’s favour? I don’t know but I’d hate to hear it wasn’t. I wish I could ask the Chief Justice. I’m sure he’d know. After all, he’s been a beneficiary too.
Of one thing I’m sure, I’m definitely my parents’ child. Mummy produced me. But both of them thought of me as a gift from God. My sisters felt they made that a little too obvious! At school my teachers strived ceaselessly to eradicate the thought. I don’t think they succeeded. Now, does that mean there’s something unique about my birth? Could I be the result of a special delivery? Not a Caesarean section but something created by more ethereal hands?
This time I’d value the Prime Minister’s advice. I feel he’d have the answer. He believes he was chosen, therefore, he’d know for sure if that’s also true of me.
Meanwhile I stare deep into the mirror each morning when I brush my teeth. Sometimes I feel I can see in the reflection a sign that someone is looking back at me. Am I being delusional? Or am I seeing things others cannot? Those eyes that are observing me can’t be mine. That half smile seems to know something I don’t. What are they telling me? Are they laughing? Mocking? Or are they admiring? And applauding? Lost in these thoughts I can brush my teeth forever!
Here again, I’d value a chat with the Chief Justice and Prime Minister. They’re clearly men of another world. They must have had similar experiences. They’d know how to interpret mine.
Alas, I don’t know how to approach them. You can’t just knock on their door and ask if they’d spare a moment to tell you if you’re special. Yet if I did I’m sure they’d have the answer. As Mummy used to say, it takes a special person to recognize another
But the blame for my predicament is surely theirs. They were the first to tell the world they were special. They did so frankly, boldly and publicly. It planted in my head the idea that might also be true of me. Until they declared they were different to normal people it had never occurred to me I might be too.
In fact, have you asked yourself if this could also be true of you? Why would God only make two or three special people? What if there were more? And, if there are, how do you know you’re not one of them?
Of course, we can’t all be special because then the concept would lose all meaning. But the Chief Justice and Prime Minister have done us a favour by encouraging each of us to ask: what if I am? If they can be, why can’t you and I?
Karan Thapar is a veteran journalist and interviewer. For The Wire, he hosts the show The Interview.
The only way for the NC-Congress alliance to ensure the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them that, no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government.
Kashmir has one chance to win back the autonomy that it had enjoyed under Article 370 of the constitution. With the first phase of voting for the assembly polls over, it is apparent thatits main political parties are throwing this chance away. The Bharatiya Janata Party strategists have known from the very beginning, thatthey will not get a single seat in Kashmir, and that solid support for the partyexists only in a part of Jammu. As a result, it does not have the faintest chance of winning an absolute majority of the Union Territory’s 90 assembly seats. Kashmiris therefore have a real chance – possibly their last – of winning back the autonomy they lost after Modi read down Article 370.
Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are fully aware of this. That is why, from the very beginning, theiraim has been to break the Kashmiri vote into pieces, use the BJP’s almost guaranteed 25-seat block of seats in Jammu to emerge as the largest single party, and claim the right to form the government of Jammu and Kashmir. Once the BJP has secured that right, it will seduce, buy, or coerce a sufficient number of independents and smaller parties in Kashmir, using the Public Safety Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and a host of ancillary laws, to seduce or compela sufficient number successful individuals and small parties tojoin it, till it has a majority in the J&K assembly.
If the BJP succeeds, it will havefive full years to destroyKashmiriyat – that unique, syncretic blend of Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism, that Sheikh Abdullah and the Maharaja had been determined to protect when they refused to accede to Pakistan but asked for the safeguards (eventually provided by Article 370 of the constitution) prior to signing the Instrument of Accession to India in 1947.
When, realising their folly, Kashmiris begin to rebel against their subjugation once more, Delhi’s crushingresponse will reignite armed militancy in the valley and bring various ‘Lashkars’ sponsored by Pakistan back into J&K. Kashmir will then sink back once more into the hell in which it had existed from 1990 till former prime minister, the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee went to Srinagar in 2003, andheld out a hand of reconciliation towards Pakistan, from that city.
The Kashmiri intelligentsia is fully aware of this, but has been made powerless to prevent it by the illiterate and irresponsible behaviour of Kashmir’s main parties, the Congress, and the National Conference.It should have been apparent to them from the moment the Supreme Court mandated a return to full statehood for Kashmir that if they wanted to protect J&K’s autonomy, they would have to fight the elections as a single coalition,with a single common platform – the release of all Kashmiris held without trial in jails all over India, and restoration of Kashmir’s cultural autonomy, i.e Kashmiriyat.
This required the NC and Congress to join hands with the People’s Democratic Party.Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the PDP, understood this from the very beginning but the Congress and the NC did not, and still have not understood the need for doing so. Indeed, the NC has continued to make her a major target of attack in Kashmir.
As for the Congress, Rahul Gandhi’s preference for being in the United States to lecture the Indian diaspora for 10 crucial days from the September 7-16 – after paying a single visit to a single constituency to campaign for a single candidate in Kashmir – and his refusal to go back there while the BJP ensures, step by step, the fragmentation of the Kashmiri vote, speaks volumes for his political naiveté andlack of awareness of the role he needs to play.
Neither of the Abdullahs has spoken out against the reign of terror that the BJP unleashed on Kashmir valley for four long months before it read down Article 370. Neither of them has protested against the prolonged imprisonment of every Kashmiri who has dared to speak out against the actions of the Delhi-imposed administration, during the president’s rule that followed.
Neither protested against the specious meaning that the Supreme Court attached to the word ‘temporary’ to vindicate the reading down of Article 370, when it had to have been was obvious to the judges that this referred only to the fact that it applied only to a part of the princely state of Kashmir that had acceded to India, and that the rest had still to be liberated from Pakistan’s illegal occupation.
It should have been apparent to them that the BJP, knowing that it could not win a single seat in Kashmir, would do its level best to split the Kashmiri vote into as many fragments as possible. It had already split the Peoples’ Conference by tempting, or coercing, assassinated leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s son Sajjad into joining them. It had also done this with businessman and former friend of Mufti Sayeed, Altaf Bukhari, by forcing him to choose between defection and jail.
The pathetic performance of both Omar and Sajjad in the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency – their combined vote did not even come close to that of Engineer Rashid – seems to have convinced the BJP’s strategists that releasing other Kashmiri radical leaders and allowing them to stand for election would split the Kashmiri vote into many more irreconcilable pieces, and severely dent the NC-Congress combine’s share of the vote.
The BJP coined this strategy only after witnessing the doubling of the number of votes cast in Baramulla, in comparison to 2014,and the fact that virtually all of the increase went to Engineer Rashid. But even there, it hedged its bets by releasing Rashid only after the first round of nominations had been completed. By the time he came out of jail, Rashid was able to nominate only 12 candidates to fight the assembly elections, against the 18 assembly segments of the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency where he had gained the largest number of votes.
This was a product of careful calculation. For if Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party won all the 12, seats neither the Congress, nor the NC wouldbe able form a government without its support. But, recognising that incarceration has endowed political activists with the halo of martyrdom, the BJP’s strategists have decided to release more political dissidents from jail, in ones and twos from otherparties and religious affiliations to scatter the Kashmiri votes more widely andprevent them from going to the Congress-NC alliance.
The only way for the Congress-NC alliance to ensure that the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them, that no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government of the state.
This will not be as hard as it looks, for far more difficult reconciliations have taken place in other countries. The most striking was the Lebanese peace agreement signed in Doha in 2008. On that occasion, the Christian leader, Michel Aoun, parted company with his more die-hard co-religionists and the American-backed Lebanese Sunnis, and agreed to Hezbollah’s demand to make it a part of the Lebanese cabinet, in proportion to its vote.
A similar, pre-election agreement between the three major parties, Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party and the Jamaat-i-Islami would enable a stable government to be formed in Jammu and Kashmir once the results are in.
How can the mere absence of such trainee doctors create such havoc in the government healthcare system?
There has long been a trend of attributing catchy quotes to Mark Twain and this is just one of them: “There are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Apparently Mark Twain himself attributed this one to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
No matter who said this first, the quote perfectly suits the arguments put forward by Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal on behalf of the Bengal government, during the recent court proceedings at the Supreme Court. In addition to being misleading, his statistics were wrong too.
What Sibal argued there, in essence, was that the cease-work by junior doctors in Bengal has created havoc in the state healthcare services. But how is that feasible? Out of hundreds of government healthcare centres – from health centres to rural hospitals and state general hospitals – only a few, approximately 26, are medical colleges and junior doctors (namely, interns, house-staff, post-graduate trainees, and senior residents) are posted in only those few medical colleges. In such institutions, junior doctors’ jobs, as trainees, is to assist the senior physicians in treating patients. So, how can the mere absence of such trainee doctors create such havoc in the government healthcare system?
Secondly, according to Sibal who represented the Bengal government, just because of this ongoing cease-work, six lakhs of poor patients were left unattended and untreated, approximately six and half lakhs of pathological tests were not done, more than 15,000 invasive cardiological procedures were postponed and so on. Where do these statistics come from?
Interestingly, the Bengal government said that more than 20 patients (23 or 24) died just because of this cease-work. Well, every death is unfortunate, but how did the government and Sibal confirm the reason behind these deaths?
As far as I know, the Bengal government did not submit any affidavit stating a list of names of the persons who died along with their causes of death. So we cannot check the veracity of this statement. A list of such names – provided , allegedly, by Swasthya Bhawan or the health department – were published in a newspaper which is closely linked with the ruling party. That list is startling. In that list of deaths caused by junior doctors, 40% of the patients had been in hospitals where junior doctors are not posted at all – let alone them ceasing work in protest. One death is marked as ‘died in an ambulance’. Is the implication therefore this, that junior doctors when working are meant to treat patients as their ambulance is in transit?
Now, a much simpler question arises. What were the Swasthya Bhavan authorities doing after having become aware of these deaths? As far as I know, Swasthya Bhavan authorities were in close connection with local authorities of all medical college hospitals during this period of cease-work. The hospitals had been confident that in spite of some problems due to shortage of manpower, services were largely running flawlessly. If that is true, and if so many persons died in spite of such assurances, then why did the Swasthya Bhavan authorities not issue show-cause notices to those medical college authorities – since such deaths reflect lack of service, even negligence? Were they simply counting the number of deaths so that they could submit an impressive number to the Supreme Court?
There was, however, one death that we all know of. That of the raped trainee doctor, while she was on duty at a government medical college. These lies and statistics are perhaps intended to hide this death.
The people of Bengal know the truth – and most of them are on the road demanding justice.
Bishan Basu is an oncologist in the West Bengal Health Services. Views are personal.
Instead of building a robust ideology that can challenge Hindutva – a task they have failed to carry out – many liberals are busy delegitimising social justice politics. Rahul Gandhi has become a target of attack for them because of his insistence on the need for caste enumeration
On July 31, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, in his Indian Express column ‘Caste Questions to Rahul Gandhi,’ derided the Leader of the Opposition for demanding a caste census in parliament.
According to Mehta, “Invocation of caste becomes a substitute for serious thinking and will not serve the cause of social justice or healthy institutions.” He begins his article by laying out the unacceptable aspects of caste injustice and dehumanisation that continue even today but then bemoans Gandhi’s caste census demand for leading us to the “suffocating cul-de-sac of caste”.
This line of argument by privileged liberals in India is not a surprise. The liberal tradition in India suffers from a severe credibility crisis because of its inability to show an alternative to counter the Hindutva assault on constitutional institutions and democratic foundations. Instead of building a robust ideology that can challenge Hindutva – a task they have failed to carry out – many liberals are busy delegitimising social justice politics.
India under the Hindutva regime is experiencing a civil societal crisis in terms of communal and caste violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits and Adivasis. The growing poverty and rising wealth inequality match caste marginality and economic disempowerment. The liberals helped bring us here but they don’t want to accept responsibility for having done so.
Democracy as a political system recognises the value of individuals and their right to represent themselves in terms of political parties. Thus, counting heads is the fundamental ingredient of democracy. As numbers matter in democracies, they take up the exercise of a decennial census to count the numbers and to understand the demographic changes in terms of ethnic composition, gender ratio, age, health, distribution of wealth and other parameters. Of course, non-democracies are also interested in counting. In India, the British colonial state conducted the first decennial census not to democratise but to govern, rule and control the subject population.
Beginning in 1872, the British colonial state continued the exercise of the decennial census without interruption till 1931. The last caste-based enumeration was held for the 1931 census. After 1947, the postcolonial Indian nation-state abandoned that practice. Since then, all speculation about the number of people in each caste is based on the 1931 census. By abandoning caste-based enumeration, the postcolonial state has created an illusion that caste does not matter.
The caste-privileged elites of the Hindu and non-Hindu religions conveniently took forward the state’s illusion. They denied the existence of caste in public life, and in private, they pretended to be above caste. In their public and private lives, of course, they hardly associated with the oppressed castes, except as their servants and manual labourers. The erasure of caste from public life also helped them protect their inherited caste privileges, as they did not need to self-reflect on their subjectivity.
File photo. B.P. Mandal submitting copies of the Mandal Commission report to Gyani Zail Singh, former President of India.
The liberal bubble that overlooked caste burst in 1989 with the implementation of the Mandal Commission report that granted reservations to Backward Castes, who were not represented in public educational and employment sectors until then. Implementation of Mandal brought out the vulgar contempt of the privileged castes towards the oppressed, as they used demeaning and dehumanising forms of protest, such as sweeping streets and polishing boots. These protests facilitated the consolidation of savarnas in urban India, which breathed a new lease of life into the Hindu right as it sought to overwhelm the social justice agenda with communal politics targeting Muslim minorities.
In facilitating communal polarisation and the spreading of contempt towards the social justice agenda, liberal intellectuals and the media, exclusively dominated by savarna elites, played an important role. By valourising Hindu right politics as principled opposition to the mainstream, they ridiculed oppressed caste politicians as boorish and corrupt. In this way, they demonised the social justice agenda as undeserving and worthless. By enabling Hindutva, they prevented any genuine discussion on caste-based oppression and exploitation. They claimed to be above caste – to be conscience keepers of the society. They defined the public and intellectual sphere as casteless, and their arguments coincided with Hindu right’s arguments.
In the last decade, liberals have been trying to suppress any discussion on caste and avoid census enumeration so that India’s imagined Hindu majority can remain intact. They know that any data which sheds light on the actual number of people in each caste, when coupled with the educational and employment details and wealth distribution based on caste, would puncture majoritarian Hindu communal politics.
In this regard, Mehta’s stand is not especially different from that of other liberal elites who make meritocratic arguments against reservations. Mehta resigned from the National Knowledge Commission in 2006 as a protest against giving reservations to Backward Castes in premier institutions, saying there was a need protect the quality of these institutions.
Historically, elites have always feared numbers and facts as they reveal the pedestal of unearned privilege they stand on at the expense of the oppressed majority. Moreover, the numbers awaken the oppressed to ask questions about their share in education and employment and demand opportunities on par with the elites. The elites, whether liberal or radical, will always fear equality as they imagine the ground under their feet will vanish and their world will turn upside down. At the very least, the data will force privileged elites to acknowledge their inherited caste privileges.
Check your privilege
Indian elites, especially the caste privileged, are a strange species. They were one of the earliest colonised non-whites in the world to be assimilated into colonial institutions and trained in Western liberal ideas. They effectively used liberalism against colonialism but refused to see that the foundation of their privileged existence was built on caste-based exclusion and denials. Even after more than 70 years of independence, political and public life in India is the prerogative of caste-privileged elites who have monopolised intellectual spheres and media spaces in such a way that they made caste an anathema.
They act as gatekeepers and conscience keepers of the nation. If one watches mainstream media channel debates, privileged elites sit across the tables and argue against each other. They aren’t even conscious that not a single person from the oppressed castes, who number around 70% of the population, is present at the table.
It was the same when Ambedkar was at the Round Table conferences. If he was not present as a Dalit and became a member of the constituent assembly and the drafting committee chairman, would the liberals of that era have championed the cause of the oppressed caste against their own privileges? Would they feel ethical suffocation at the unbearable suffering of most people? In the world of privileged people, the marginalised would not even figure in their blind spots.
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar delivering a speech. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
So, one Ambedkar was needed to bring the sufferings of Dalits to the centre stage of Indian national politics. Telugu has a proverb: “Unless you ask, even mother will not serve you food.” Similarly, justice is not a charity, and the caste census is necessary to build an inclusive society that responds to inequity and injustice.
Data is a basic requirement for any policy changes in this context. As a political theorist, Mehta should understand this. The absence of data helps the elites make spurious arguments to avoid accountability – which is what the present regime in India is doing.
Is Rahul Gandhi a trailblazer of social justice politics?
It is heartening to see oppressed castes reach the altar of Indian democracy, i.e., parliament, and take centre stage in the mainstream. The heartlessness of the Hindu right regime for a decade has proved that the state had abandoned its responsibility to deliver justice, delegitimised the language of equity and normalised the savarna culture of arrogant entitlement. Caste-based humiliations haunt even the political elites from the oppressed castes.
For example, a temple was cleansed after a visit by Akhilesh Yadav, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and the president of the Samajwadi Party. The assault of Brahmanical elites is so complete that political parties and ordinary people feel powerless and voiceless. It is here that the courage with which Rahul Gandhi rose has the potential to make a difference in the lives of the marginalised.
While challenging Hindutva, he articulates the aspirations of the oppressed and marginalised sections. One might think of it as the cheap political use of identity. But isn’t it the responsibility of a leader of a political party to speak on behalf of the people? When all other parties surrender, his refusal to kowtow to Hindutva is a new hope for the nation. Mehta cannot recognise the revolutionary potential of caste data that can pulverize the mythical majority Hindutva has conjured up to serve the interest of a few Brahman-Bania elites.
Mehta says of Rahul Gandhi that there is something “deeply insincere about a savarna calling out the caste of individual civil servants or ministers to signal his own virtue on this score.” But there are many examples in India where people voluntarily gave up their privileges. They dedicated themselves to the cause of the marginalised. Among those legendary figures were P. Sundarayya, S.R. Sankaran, B.D. Sharma and many others. They are celebrated by the oppressed castes as their messiahs.
Rahul Gandhi succeeded in bringing the issue of the caste census to the political centre stage through his unwavering commitment to the cause of the oppressed, which will be a new beginning in democratic politics. He will undoubtedly become the trailblazer of the social justice movement in India as V.P. Singh did by the Mandal Commission.
It is important to remember that Rahul Gandhi is not alone in demanding a caste census. The formidable INDIA alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Samajwadi Party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi among its constituents signifies its larger ideological front. Moreover, Dalit leaders like Koppula Raju in Congress act as Gandhi’s conscience keepers.
Chinnaiah Jangam is an Associate Professor at Department of History in Carleton University, Canada.
The Bangals and the Ghotis wanted to come together under one banner. “We want justice”.
I was barely in my teens, an aspiring cricketer, when my father took me to the Cooperage in Bombay, to watch a football match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. It is the greatest rivalry in all of the universe, he told me.
In the late-1970s, my parents were film-makers. My father was a professor at the Film Institute in Poona before being transferred to Bombay. In Bombay he was with the Films Division.
In Poona, where he taught direction and my mother was a student many times over (Jaya Bhaduri and Shatrughan Sinha were contemporaries), I remember my Ma taking me by the hand to meet mukti-jodhhas from what was to be Bangladesh to the military hospital. The Poona Military Hospital was considered the best at that time. In particular, when I saw this soldier with his hands tied left and right and his legs tied left and right, I remember asking my Ma, “O paykhana ki kore korey” – how does he shit?
Baba was Ritwik Ghatak’s chief assistant director and the writer from his first film, Nagarik, right till Meghe Dhaka Tara. He is the man smoking away in the first shot in Nagarik. By the time of KomolGandhar, he had left Calcutta and taken up the government job in Poona.
Ghatak and my Ma both graduated from Rajshahi University. My Ma’s family moved from Dinajpur to Calcutta and she graduated from Women’s Christian College, Calcutta University.
In that Cooperage encounter, I was told that the match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, between the Bangal (people from now Bangladesh) and the Ghoti (people originally in what is now West Bengal), between the iss paar and the uss paar, was a match of great significance. It is this match that has been cancelled. There is a tide that is rising up the Hooghly.
In my paternal family, we are from the Calcutta that sold large tracts to the British, the Duttas of Hatkhola, the zamindars who expended gold to hold weddings for pets.
Back in Kolkata after decades across the world, I am the outsider looking in. The social unrest may have a mismatch with the electoral outcome. You should know that the distance from Kolkata to Dhaka is 372 kilometres. The distance from Delhi to Kolkata is 1400 kilometres.
The distance from my house to to Salt Lake Stadium is 26 kilometres. It is where the Bangals and the Ghotis wanted to come together under one banner. “We want justice”.
We did not always consign ourselves to spending adulthood in cities that were not our hometown so as to be able to earn a livelihood. Buddhadeb is emblematic of that time.
Every Thursday, Kolkata’s cultural arbiter TheTelegraph ran a column in its children’s special Telekids where prominent adults would recount their childhood days. These would be short lengths of prose, transcribed from a verbal recounting. Singers, actors, politicians, statespeople, writers and businessmen would speak about formative experiences and advise young readers to stick to a moral and ambitious path.
The year was probably 2001, just after he had come back as chief minister of Bengal. The net was a peculiar concept then – it had been only five years that the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited had launched its services and it would be four years before India would even have a broadband policy. As a 10-year-old I had only heard of the worldwide web and considered it part of a scientific realm I would never really need to access. There was also the fact that the chief minister was asking us to indulge in what appeared clearly to be a form of extra-curricular fun. Surf the net? And not study? What a strange, forward-facing thought!
I have remembered this line often and, in my mind, it has become significant of a lore that surrounds Buddhadeb – the lore that he was the last time Bengal’s youth had reason to hope. A lot has deservedly been written about the former chief minister’s politics, his policies, and his disastrous hard-headedness when it came to bringing policies to fruition. But, at a time when Bengal slips past a shocking number of cities when it comes to jobs, opportunities and ability to retain its young, it is worthwhile to acknowledge the last time it felt otherwise.
For those outside Bengal, Kolkata is placed on a pedestal for its ideologies, for an overall secular drift, and for being old. Residents, however, know full well that it has slipped from the category of old to the category of a city in ruins. Its young – and this is true for Bengal – have left in large numbers for opportunities that the city just does not have. If you want to travel abroad, chances are you need to travel to another bigger Indian city first. It has not lost its culture, but it has lost a large number of people who can patronise it and offer its artistes a taste of the success they deserve.
For many, the downward slide started with the Left Front, the state government of which Buddhadeb led for 11 years. But the government that followed and has ruled for 13 years has struggled to reverse it, pushing the city and the state into a deeper crisis, making it unlivable for newer generations.
We did not always live in a state and country where it was difficult to respect politicians. We also did not always consign ourselves to spending adulthood in cities that were not our hometown so as to be able to earn a livelihood. Buddhadeb is emblematic of that time – a time when we had hope. As my colleague Sravasti Dasguptaput it, “I remember there was this absolute promise in the air that Buddhadeb will change Bengal.”
I do not think this is a sentiment worth discarding, no matter what followed, because if we cannot enthuse our young to hope, we have failed as a society.
Buddhadeb had plans for a young Bengal. He wanted educated youth to work jobs befitting their quality and qualifications. One day, there was talk of Wipro landing in the state, while on another day there was talk of enticing the Salim Group of Indonesia, to say nothing of Tata’s Singur project. Kolkata’s own tech park, Sector V, came up to serve its growing crop of talented IT engineers.
Looking back today, the measure of transparency in governance that marked Buddhadeb’s time in power is a bygone marvel, as are his ability to apologise and open himself up to criticism. In his uncharacteristically straightforward memoir PhireyDekha (‘looking back’), he wrote of what he was thinking once he assumed power. In comparison to today’s mass allocations to projects, without delineation of exactly where how much money is going and why, Buddha’s plans were precise, and displayed his own intrinsic understanding of what ailed Bengal. In November 2009, for instance, he wrote to then Union minister Jairam Ramesh, highlighting exactly why cultivating the Bt variety of brinjal is not a good idea for Bengal’s farmers because it will hike output without offering a clear path of what to do with the excess brinjal. Elsewhere, in candour that finds no home in present time, he notes how a delegation of women who came to him asked him if he would have been able to subsist on Rs 2,000 a month. He also observes, sheepishly, that women’s self-help groups came up by themselves, and that his government did not need to do much about it. Because we did not know better, we took this devotion to governance and candour for granted.
We do not know what Bengal would have been had Nandigram and Singur’s industrialisation plans worked out. Perhaps the state would have suffered less from unemployment and the drain of youth. There are reports of villagers in those areas saying they regret opposing the move. This is a good time to admit that Buddhadeb’s own party was partly responsible for Bengal’s factory closures and industrial downslide – a wrong he had perhaps tried to reverse but which his successor Mamata Banerjee administration continued and deepened. Bengal has not been able to kickstart its economic revival.
Key elements of what Kolkata is and continues to be are thanks to the late chief minister’s vision – the cinema house of Nandan which hosts the Kolkata Film Festival, the refurbished colonial theatre houses Star and Minerva, a polished Jorashanko Thakur Bari where Rabindranath Tagore grew up, and so on. Buddhadeb devised a plan to plant saplings on each death anniversary of Tagore’s – it was a brand of quiet culture which Bengal deserved, got, and then, forgot.
It is difficult not to miss a time when elected representatives acted like they owed their position to the common man – with a certain gravity that reflected respect for the citizen. That former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Buddhadeb got along so well is an example of this. It was a world that perhaps did not foresee the Union government withholding crores of MGNREGS funds to Bengal, which it alleges was corrupt in using it.
Buddhadeb’s passing signals the end of a Bengal which could be worth its young. As Shramik Trains and Karmabhumi Expresses carry its young away, we mourn our own hope in the promise of our home state. In Phirey Dekha, Buddhadeb writes of a time when US diplomat Henry Kissinger arrived to meet him – to the accompaniment of very little press attention. He writes: “While talking he said, ‘The world is changing, only communists aren’t’. I said that the opposite is true. ‘Communists are changing. It is America that is holding on to the power machinery that controls its administration.”
It is the historic conceit of every autocrat to think they would be able to bring unprecedented prosperity and peace in their land if only they shut down the nagging voices from civil society and the carping critics in the Opposition. Sheikh Hasina is not the first and will not be the last ruler to fall in this illusional trap.
It could just be a coincidence. Barely 24 hours before Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was compelled to flee Dhaka, India’s home minister was making a statement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inescapable durability beyond 2029. Just as Sheikh Hasina had come to entertain notions of indispensability, the prime minister’s right-hand man appears to have convinced himself – and probably his boss – that India is doomed without Modi at the helm.
On Sunday, Amit Shah was telling an audience in Chandigarh: “The Opposition may try and make as much noise as it wants to. Let me make it clear that in 2029, it is again PM Modi who is coming to power.” Such undiluted arrogance. Such a sense of entitlement.
Of course, the Union Home Minister’s primary purpose to signal to all the democratic and constitutional stake-holders not to take too seriously the rebuff the electorate has administered to the Modi regime in the Lok Sabha elections two months ago. Of course, with an invigorated Opposition making its presence felt in Parliament, the Modi coterie has every reason to feel worried that many in the judiciary and bureaucracy may not be all that enthusiastic about implementing their agenda of vengeance. Of course, the Modi establishment cannot be unaware that murmurs of unease and defiance within the BJP, starting from Lucknow, are gathering a critical mass.
Sheikh Hasina was also recently “elected” under an arrangement that lacked credibility. The opposition parties had boycotted the poll process. There was no pretence of any free and fair vote. In our own country, there were many voices who felt that given the Modi regime’s stranglehold over the Election Commission, the anti-BJP parties should stay away contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha poll. It was the Supreme Court’s verdict on electoral bonds that persuaded the cynics to have some faith in the overall constitutional scheme of things. Even then, the Election Commission of India failed to earn the unqualified respect of all.
And, this precisely is the obligation of the Opposition – to put on notice every stake-holder, from the President of India to the Chief Justice to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha to the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha to every governor, that if democratic voices of dissent are not allowed to be raised, then the only noise that prevails is the crowd in the street. What happened in Dhaka should sober up the Modi-Shah groupies.
In an interview to the Indian Express (August 5, 2024) Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus had observed of the Sheikh Hasina government: “The government is a lie-making factory, continuously lying and lying and lying, and they just start believing in their own lies.” A familiar strain in every elected autocracy.
A similar weakness has marked the Modi government’s approach to fact and figures. It rejects all international reports and opinions; it even dismisses international standards and yardsticks of democratic health. Civil society and its critiques are dismissed as the handiwork of those who want to create instability and/or bring a bad name to Mother India. Refusing to heed the voters’ admonitory slap across their face, Modi’s commissars are now trying to throttle all independent voices in digital platforms. It can only be hoped that the Modi government’s overreach will have to pass the test of judicial scrutiny.
The past ten years have made it abundantly clear that the Narendra Modi project has had no answers to the problems and complexities of national governance. Apart from self- praise and self-promotion, Modi’s decade long tenure in government is one of inefficiency, insensitivity and incapacity because it was premised on the fallacious and arrogant assumption that one honest, incorruptible helmsman could fix the “broken” system.
After 10 years India remains as, if not more, corrupt a place it was before 2014; in 10 years, it has become more unfair, more unequal and more undemocratic a place. In Bangladesh, every good impulse, every healthy tradition, every admirable protocol, every vital institution had been suborned in the interest of the glory and power of one individual. We have come very close to flirting with the Bangladesh model. The self-corruption of the establishment has eaten into the Modi sarkar’s pretensions.
The Bangladesh events make it imperative to remind ourselves that irrespective of whatever Home Minister Amit Shah asserts, democracies do not elect kings or emperors. Democracies choose prime ministers and presidents, all drawing legitimacy and authority from the Constitution. A democratic government is an accountable government. The BJP and RSS will make a terrible mistake if they think that they can get away with misusing constitutional processes to suborn institutional arrangements anchored in democratic accountability.
It is the historic conceit of every autocrat to think they would be able to bring unprecedented prosperity and peace in their land if only they shut down the nagging voices from civil society and the carping critics in the Opposition. Sheikh Hasina is not the first and will not be the last ruler to fall in this illusional trap. Every ruler commits this folly, only to find either the army or angry mobs storming the presidential palace.
No one can be confident that the Amit Shahs and the JP Naddas of our world, who traffic in political arrogance, have the wisdom and sagacity to draw appropriate lessons from Sheikh Hasina’s flawed model of personal rule. But one can be confident that India’s constitutional institutions will regain their vitality and assert themselves against the Modi regime’s uncured waywardness. The Dhaka denouement need not be replicated in New Delhi.
The emergence of the offshore non-deliverable forward market in the rupee has made it more challenging for the RBI to maintain exchange rate stability.
Maintaining stability of the exchange rate is among the most important goals of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). On a de-jure basis, India moved towards a market-determined exchange rate system in 1993. Yet the de-facto reality is that the RBI regularly and actively intervenes in the foreign exchange (FX) markets. The official position of the RBI is that FX interventions are made to curb excessive volatility of the exchange rate and maintain orderly conditions in the market. This task however has become progressively more challenging for the Central Bank owing to the steady rise of the offshore non-deliverable forward (NDF) market in the rupee (INR).
An NDF contract is similar to a regular forward currency contract (which sets a fixed foreign currency exchange rate for a transaction at a future date), with the main difference that an NDF does not require physical exchange of the underlying currency. Instead, it allows the counterparties to settle profit or loss in a convertible currency like the US dollar. Hence, the moniker “non-deliverable”.
The INR-NDF market has grown substantially in size over the years. It has emerged as the second largest NDF market globally in terms of average daily turnover. In fact, the INR-NDF market is almost thrice as large as the onshore deliverable forward market. This has led to concerns in the RBI that the offshore market is playing an increasingly important role in determining the value of the rupee and hence may hamper the ability of the Central Bank to maintain exchange rate stability. This has been of concern especially because the offshore market is beyond the RBI’s legal jurisdiction.
It seems that the RBI may have finally found a way to influence this offshore market. The Central Bank recently released a draft direction proposing to allow offshore electronic trading platforms (ETPs) to register with it. If this regulatory strategy works, it could help establish the RBI’s extraterritorial reach over the offshore market in an unprecedented manner, and other emerging-market (EM) central banks could also follow suit.
Background
After World War II, the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 led to a fixed exchange rate system under which all countries’ currencies were fixed, but adjustable, to US dollar. This system came to an end in 1971, and the world’s major currencies moved towards floating exchange rate regimes. On the other hand, emerging economies like India, gradually shifted to ‘managed floating’ regimes over the next couple of decades, wherein their central banks would intervene in the FX markets to maintain currency stability.
In an increasingly globalised world where investors, traders and other market participants regularly conduct transactions in multiple currencies, fluctuations in exchange rates expose them to currency risks – that is, they experience financial gains or losses depending on fluctuations in exchange rates. To protect themselves from such risks, they use financial instruments called currency derivatives such as currency forwards. Currency derivatives are contracts in which a specified amount of a particular currency pair is traded on a specified date in the future. These instruments help hedge their currency exposures and also help FX market participants take speculative positions in multiple currencies.
For participants undertaking transactions in EM currencies such as the rupee, there are additional layers of complication. The financial markets in these economies are underdeveloped and currency derivatives may not be available. And even if these financial products are available, foreign investors’ access to these derivative markets is limited. This is because EM policymakers occasionally impose capital controls to limit the flow of foreign money moving in and out of their economies.
Access to Indian financial markets is even more difficult than most other EMs because India is the only emerging economy, other than China, that continues to have in place a complex and elaborate framework of capital controls, despite liberalisation reforms undertaken more than three decades ago.3 Hence, despite the existence of an onshore INR forward market, capital controls and other institutional constraints such as high transaction costs, complex tax regime, etc., impede the ability of foreign participants to take positions on this market.
As a result, over the years an offshore INR-NDF market has developed at various international locations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, London, Dubai, and New York. This offshore market allows participants to avoid the stringent capital-account restrictions of India and take positions on the rupee. Given that the NDF does not require physical exchange of the underlying currency, it is ideal for hedging risks arising from currencies such as the rupee, which are not freely convertible due to capital controls.
Apart from INR, South Korean won, Brazilian real, Chinese renminbi and New Taiwan dollar also have sizable offshore NDF markets. The NDF contracts in rupees are bilaterally settled in the US dollar and are traded in the over-the-counter (OTC) market. India accounts for close to 20% of the global trade in NDFs. According to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) Triennial Survey, 2019, the NDF volumes for the USD-INR currency pair reported a staggering three-fold increase, from around US$16.4 billion in 2016 to US$50 billion in 2019.
Domestic impact of offshore NDF market
Over the years, the linkages between the NDF market and the onshore financial markets have drawn considerable policy attention. In India’s case, there is evidence that the NDF market exerts influence on the value as well the volatility of the INR-USD exchange rate. Especially in times of heightened uncertainty and stress (such as the taper tantrum episode of 2013-14 or the 2018 emerging market crisis when the rupee depreciated substantially), the price volatility in the NDF market tends to spill over to the domestic market.
In response to this, the RBI set up the Task Force on Offshore Rupee Markets in July 2019, under the chairmanship of ex-Deputy Governor Usha Thorat, for a deeper understanding of the factors causing the sharp growth of the NDF market and to identify measures to reverse the trend. Based on the recommendations of this committee, the RBI allowed all Indian banks having an IFSC (International Financial Services Centre) Banking Unit to participate in the NDF market from June 2020 onwards. This would arguably give the RBI greater control over the NDF market.
However, in October 2022, the RBI reversed its stance and informally restricted banks from building additional positions on the NDF. This was done presumably to manage the rupee, which was rapidly depreciating against the US dollar in response to the aggressive interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve. In December 2022, RBI lifted these restrictions only to bring them back in August 2023 when the rupee began depreciating again. By April 2024, banks were once again allowed to take positions on the NDF market, but by then, according to news reports, banks were no longer interested due to the uncertainty arising from the RBI’s policy flip-flops.
It seems that the RBI has now proposed the latest regulations on offshore ETPs, in an attempt to once again encourage Indian banks to take positions on the NDF market.
Regulations for ETPs
One of the crucial learnings from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was that the OTC derivatives market needs to become more transparent. This had prompted the G20 group of countries to come to an agreement in 2009 that all standardised OTC derivatives should be traded on ETPs. Since then, ETPs have been encouraged globally.
In October 2018, the RBI issued its first ETP directions providing detailed eligibility criteria, technology requirements and reporting standards for ETPs executing transactions in financial instruments regulated by the Central Bank. Thirteen ETPs run by five operators have since been authorised under these directions. On 8 February 2024, the RBI’s statement on developmental and regulatory policies highlighted some new developments in this space:
“Over the last few years, there has been increased integration of the onshore forex market with offshore markets, notable developments in the technology landscape and an increase in product diversity. Market makers have also made requests to access offshore ETPs offering permitted Indian Rupee (INR) products. In view of these developments, it has been decided to review the regulatory framework for ETPs. The revised regulatory framework will be issued separately for public feedback.”
On 29 April 2024, RBI released a draft Master Direction on ETP for public feedback. This draft adds a new concept, namely, ‘offshore ETP’. Such an ETP is operated from outside India by an operator incorporated outside India. Operators of offshore ETPs need to apply for registration with RBI only if they are desirous of providing resident Indians access to their platform for transactions with non-residents in eligible derivative instruments involving rupee or rupee interest rate, as permitted by RBI under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA). This implies that, effectively, only registered offshore ETPs can allow residents to transact with non-residents in INR-NDF contracts, albeit on the assumption that residents (other than banks) are also prima facie permitted to enter into such transactions on a cross-border basis.
Legality of extraterritorial operation
A unique feature of RBI’s proposed regulation on offshore ETPs is its extraterritorial nature, that is, its effect beyond the territory of India. It may be worthwhile to note here that Article 245(2) of the Indian Constitution categorically states:
“No law made by Parliament shall be deemed to be invalid on the ground that it would have extraterritorial operation.”
The RBI Act, 1934 is a parliamentary legislation. Section 45W of this legislation empowers RBI to give directions to any agency dealing in derivativesas long as the same is “in public interest or to regulate the financial system of the country to its advantage”. The definition of ‘derivative’ includes an instrument, to be settled at a future date, whose value is derived from change in interest rate, foreign exchange rate, etc.
The RBI proposes to issue the new directions for registration of offshore ETPs under this provision. However, section 1(2) of the RBI Act, 1934 explicitly states that the RBI Act “extends to the whole of India”, thus potentially implying that it does not extend beyond India. The legal implications of this particular provision on RBI’s proposed directions on offshore ETPs merit a brief discussion.
A similar provision exists in section 1(2) of the SEBI Act, 1992. The Supreme Court in SEBI vs. Pan Asia Advisors, however, upheld SEBI’s powers to initiate proceedings even when the underlying acts or transactions took place outside India as long as they have an effect on the interest of investors in India. This legal position is supported by the constitution bench decision in GVK Industries Ltd. vs. Income Tax Officer, which held that the parliament is empowered to make laws with respect to extraterritorial aspects or causes that may have an impact on or nexus with India.
The underlying legal principle is often referred to as the “effects doctrine”. Following the same doctrine, it could be argued that the proposed RBI directions requiring registration of offshore ETPs are within the scope of the RBI Act, 1934 since such offshore ETPs are envisaged to permit Indian residents to enter into INR-NDF contracts offshore. This in turn will have an effect on the INR-USD exchange rate and consequently, the RBI’s attempt to stabilise the exchange rate. Therefore, the extraterritorial operation of RBI’s proposed intervention could be legally justified under Indian laws.
Potential impact
Offshore ETPs as well as the RBI are likely to benefit from this new regulation. Offshore ETP operators interested in the INR-NDF market have strong commercial reasons to apply for an RBI registration under this proposed direction. This is because Indian banks and other Indian entities can potentially become important players in the INR-NDF market. Till date, their participation in the NDF market was limited due to the lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework. The RBI is clearly trying to fix this lacuna. Hence this should make offshore ETP operators keen to offer their NDF products to Indian banks, which are all major potential clients in this space.
From the RBI’s side, the more offshore ETP operators register with the Central Bank, the more leverage RBI will have on the NDF market. RBI is likely to exert its extraterritorial influence on this market by modulating Indian banks’ access. This will effectively enhance the RBI’s influence over the INR exchange rate in the NDF markets.
For this strategy to yield results, RBI has to be cautious that its regulatory approach is predictable and consistent. If it arbitrarily keeps cutting out Indian banks’ access to this market, like it did over the last few years, these banks will once again stop building positions on the offshore NDF market. That would ultimately limit their influence in this market, which in turn would also limit RBI’s own extraterritorial influence.
Conclusion
A large offshore INR-NDF market has developed over the years largely owing to capital controls imposed by the RBI on onshore currency and financial markets. Yet the existence of this offshore market has made it more challenging for the RBI to manage the INR-USD exchange rate. The RBI has been trying to get a hold on the NDF market, albeit with little success. So now, in order to deal with the problems created largely by its own capital controls, and given its objective of exchange rate management, the RBI has issued directions to register offshore ETPs. This latest attempt may be more successful than the previous ones at getting a foot in the door because the commercial incentives of offshore ETPs are aligned with the RBI’s objectives – to increase the participation of domestic Indian banks in the NDF market.
If this strategy works, other EM central banks may follow suit. How this may impact the NDF market in the long run is difficult to predict at this point in time. At an extreme, extraterritorial application of rigid local laws of EMs with capital controls may end up shifting the focus of the NDF market from registered ETPs to unregistered ETPs. EM policymakers such as in India should instead take proactive steps to liberalise their onshore currency derivative markets, if they want to curb the influence of the NDF market on exchange rates.
Pratik Datta is Associate Director (Research) at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co, a leading Indian law firm. Dr. Rajeswari Sengupta is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) in Mumbai, India.
Major leaders of the freedom struggle were very clear about the nature of RSS, which masquerades as a cultural organisation and expands its base by appealing to the emotions of the public.
RSS is the biggest organisation in the world. It aims at working for Hindu Rashtra and also claims that it is a ‘cultural Organisation’. It is as such striving for nationalism (Hindu)’ contrary to the one underlined in our Constitution, Indian nationalism.
It regards Hindus as a nation and so it has set its goal. Time and over again one or the other top leader of BJP voices the demand for scrapping the Indian Constitution and proclaiming that we should become a Hindu Rashtra.
RSS Sarsanghchalak K. Sudarshan himself had stated this when he became chief of RSS in 2000. Prior to 2024 elections BJP President J.P. Nadda stated that now BJP is more capable and does not need RSS support for its electoral campaign which was the norm in previous elections. What does the pledge and prayer of RSS tell about its goal?
We also recall that RSS has been banned thrice, and wriggled out of those bans by wearing the façade of Culture. As we know, the ban on government servants taking part in politics is to ensure that our bureaucracy remains committed to the values of the Constitution and not be politically partisan.
The Sangh’s role in shaping BJP, its political progeny, can easily be discerned from the writings and actions of RSS. One recalls that it was Shyama Prasad Mukherjee of Hindu Mahasabha, who collaborated with RSS to float the previous avatar of BJP, Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The then RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar,(Guruji) regarded as the major ideologue of RSS; time and again outlined the role of RSS trained Swayamsaevaks and Pracharaks, while being in Jana Sangh or BJP.
Golwalkar writes, “For instance some of our friends were told to go and work for politics that does not mean that they have great interest or inspiration for it. They don’t die for politics like fish without water. If they are told to withdraw from politics, then also there is no objection. Their discretion is just not required.” (Golwalkar, MS, Shri Guruji Samagar Darshan (collected works of Golwalkar in Hindi, Bhartiya Vichar Sadhna, Nagpur, vol. 3, p. 33) tells us clearly that Jansangh or BJP was supposed to follow the instructions of RSS.
Further Guruji says, “We know this also that some of our Swayamsevaks [cadres] work in politics. There they have to organise according to the needs of work: public meetings, processions etc., have to raise slogans (Same as above Vol 4, page 4-5).
RSS nurtured and trained its swayamsevaks on these lines and later floated many organisations. Nathuram Godse, the killer of Mahatma Gandhi was also a trained pracharak of RSS. RSS at that time did not keep any records of membership so it could wash its hands off from this murder. Nathuram Godse’s family believes that the assassin, a staunch member of the RSS was neither expelled from the sangh nor did he ever leave the organisation.
Shamsul Islam, eminent scholar of Hindu Nationalism, points out, “The central publication house of the RSS, the Suruchi Prakashan, Jhandewalan, New Delhi, published, Param Vaibhav Ke Path Par (1997) which gave details of more than 40 organisations created by the RSS for different tasks.
The BJP as a political organisation figures prominently in it at number 3, along with the ABVP, Hindu Jagran Manch, Vishva Hindu Parishad, Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Sanskar Bharti etc.
Similarly, the prayer and pledge of RSS make it clear that they make its followers commit to Hindu nation. Its prarthna (prayer) says “You/O God almighty, we the integral part of the Hindu Rashtra salute you in reverence/For Your cause have we girded up our loins/Give us Your Blessings for its accomplishment” (RSS, Shakha Darshika, Gyan Ganga, Jaipur, 1997, p.1).
The pledge is also equally forthright in this “I become a member of the RSS in order to achieve all round greatness of Bharatvarsha by fostering the growth of my sacred Hindu religion, Hindu society, and Hindu culture (page 66, above).
The masquerading of RSS as a cultural organisation does help it to expand its base by appealing to the emotions of many. Major leaders of the freedom struggle were very clear about the nature of RSS.
“A member of Gandhi’s entourage had praised the efficiency, discipline, courage and capacity for hard work shown by RSS cadres at Wagah, a major transit camp for Punjab refugees. Gandhi quipped back, ‘but don’t forget, even so had Hitler’s Nazis and Fascists under Mussolini’, Gandhi characterised RSS as a communal body with a totalitarian outlook” (Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, Ahmedabad, page 440).
Nehru did regard RSS as having traits of fascism. Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, had stated that “The RSS is strictly secret as regards its organisation. It has consequently developed along fascist lines and is definitely a potential menace to public peace (Dr. Rajendra Prasad to Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, 12 December 1948).
Sardar Patel wrote “As regards the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, the case relating to Gandhiji’s murder… about the participation of the two organisations, but our reports do confirm that, as a result of the activities of these two bodies, particularly the former, an atmosphere was created in the country in which such a ghastly tragedy became possible… The activities of the RSS constituted a clear threat to the existence of the Government and the State. Our reports show that those activities, despite the ban, have not died down. Indeed, as time has marched on, the RSS circles are becoming more defiant and are indulging in their subversive activities in an increasing measure [Letter 64 cited in Sardar Patel: Select Correspondence19450-1950, vol. 2, Navjivan Publishing House, Ahmadabad, 1977, pp. 276-277.].
In between Janata Party and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were also at the helm of political affairs but the ban on government employees holding membership of RSS was not lifted. Mr. Modi has been in power for the last 10+ years. Why is he taking this decision now? Is it after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has been making oblique criticism of the supreme leader?
There is a need for cultural activists and social scientists to assess the contribution of RSS to Indian culture. This mask of RSS being a cultural organisation needs to be undone and its political agenda grasped for protection of Indian Constitution and democracy. As such it seems that it is a supra-political outfit.
Ram Puniyani is president of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism.
At the Asian College of Journalism, Yogendra Yadav discusses the causes, effects, and future implications of the 2024 Elections, focusing on the critical state of democracy in the Indian Republic.
At a recent talk at the Asian College of Journalism, Yogendra Yadav analysed the “moral, political, and personal” defeat of Modi and the BJP, despite their victory in the 2024 general elections. He discussed the pre-election climate, pointed out the likely and unlikely reasons for the BJP’s smaller win, and described the post-election status quo. Yadav proposed building a new democratic India through class politics, grassroots resistance, and cultural ideological contestation, aiming for a better Indian republic.
The following is the full text of the talk, edited lightly for syntax and clarity.
Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to come to this extraordinary institution which has kept the flame of true journalism alive in this country. I’ve met many of your alumni, some very, very bright minds, very good journalists, and therefore you didn’t have to persuade me. You don’t get this invitation every day, and I jumped at it. Thank you for this opportunity, and thanks for enabling me to speak about something which, to my mind, goes much beyond the elections that we are talking about, you know, and that’s what I really appreciate this opportunity for.
In fact, I think I’ll probably end up writing a small book because what we have witnessed recently is not just an election and just one election outcome. This country has seen 18 [elections], but something very unusual has taken place, and we need to learn from that. Thanks for this first opportunity for me to talk about that big picture. Delighted and honoured to see so many friends, some of the best minds in this country amongst us, and it’s always a pleasure to come to Chennai for that reason. Thank you.
The question is simple, the answer is not. Are we back to democratic politics? I think we need to ask at least six questions in order to answer this, and I’ll try and ask those questions one by one and answer them one by one.
The first question is where were we? Back to democratic politics assumes that we were in something other than democratic politics. Indeed, that was the case. So, where were we? Second, what was this election all about? I would argue that this was not an election. Third, which is to say, what exactly was at stake here? Fourth, what was the outcome? All of us know the numbers, but what’s the overall outcome all about? Fourth, what led to this outcome? Why? Fifth, where are we now? Sixth, what’s the way forward?
Sorry, it’s a very classroom kind of a thing, but that’s the way I think. As I said, some of these questions are not really just questions about an election; these are questions about the future of this country, the very future of our Republic, and the very possibility of maintaining our Republic.
Where were we?
My one-line description for that is India had very rapidly become, for the last seven or eight years or you could say ten years, someone could say five years, India had become what should be described as competitive authoritarianism. Now, the point to remember is that this simple binary between democracy and dictatorship does not capture even 10 to 20% of the countries in the world. In order to describe most countries in the world now, we have to think of hybrids. One of those standard hybrids is competitive authoritarianism, where the government holds elections, there is some element of competitiveness about those elections, but there’s very little democracy outside those elections. Elections themselves are structured in such a way as to give the ruling party a structural advantage.
Without getting into the details of it, there’s a lot of technical literature now on competitive authoritarianism throughout the world. India had become a textbook case of competitive authoritarianism. Instead of simply calling it a dictatorship or simply calling it a democracy which was flawed, I think we had moved much beyond being simply a flawed democracy. We’ve been a flawed democracy for 70 years, but in the last ten years, we had crossed to something else. It was competitive authoritarianism mixed with non-theological majoritarianism. That is to say, countries which do not declare themselves to be officially a theological country. My sense is that India was unlikely to declare itself into one, but for all practical purposes, it was a majoritarian country.
Please remember these words: competitive authoritarianism, non-theological majoritarianism. This is what we had become, and we were very rapidly sliding towards a full-blown 21st-century style authoritarianism, where competition was beginning to become a formality, and we were sliding towards a de facto Hindu Rashtra. Please remember, no dictator in the 21st century wants to be seen to be a dictator. There was a 20th-century model of dictatorship where someone would wear a uniform, come to the radio in those days (there weren’t televisions), and say you have martial law and censorship. Dictators have become smart, like everything else, like smartphones and everything. Dictators now know that it’s silly to do those things. So, every dictator holds elections in the world. Putin also holds it, for your record. We were quite like this 21st-century style dictatorship, where you don’t officially do things like censorship, but someone who opposes you, that television channel somehow closes down in three or four months or is bought over. You don’t officially put martial law, but somehow all the dissenters find their way to Siberia. So, this is what’s happening. This is Russia, this is Turkey, this is Hungary, and this is happening in so many parts of the world.
We were very rapidly sliding in that direction. We had reached the end of the First Republic of India. It’s a harsh thing to say, but the fact is that the Republic of India, which was inaugurated on 26th January 1950, actually has come to an end. It came to an end around 2019. We are not used to those things. In France, they are more used to it, so they have the First Republic, Second Republic, Third Republic. So, our First Republic is pretty much over. We were headed towards a new constitution without a new formal document called the Constitution. A constitution need not be written. You just have to bring in a new amendment to change it completely. It happened in 1975-76. Just one amendment could change everything in the Constitution. We were headed in that direction.
So, this is where we were before this election.
What was at stake in this election then?
What was this election all about? What was the significance of this election? In one word, I would say this was not an election; this was a plebiscite. The difference between an election and a plebiscite, as you all know, is that in an election you choose your representatives; in a plebiscite, there is one question that everyone answers. Brexit: yes or no? So, this was about seeking public endorsement for dismantling of the Republic. In the 21st century, you need the public to dismantle the Republic, and this election was about ensuring public stamp of approval on dismantling of our Republic. More specifically, “Modi ki guarantee” was a catchphrase to legitimate all that this regime had done in the last ten years and anything that it possibly could do in the next five or a number of years to come.
Mind you, this election was nowhere about this entity called NDA. Did anyone hear about it before the election results? NDA did not exist before the election results. This election was not about NDA. It was not even about the BJP. It was about the Supreme Leader seeking unconditional approval for his regime. “Modi ki guarantee.” BJP was in small fonts throughout the country. I’ve seen thousands of BJP hoardings. BJP would be written, BJP symbol was there, of course, but BJP party’s name was in tiny font towards the end, as if it was just one of the sponsors of the hoarding, no more.
Every plebiscite has its own conditions of what would constitute a majority. Some plebiscites have 51%, some plebiscites put it higher than that. Because this particular election was a plebiscite which was meant to get popular endorsement for virtually rewriting the real constitution of this country, formalities apart, the threshold was pretty high, although somewhat unspecified. “Chaar Sau Par,” or “400 plus”, was indeed a gimmick. Probably the BJP knew that they were not going to get it. That was definitely the upper end of the threshold. But my sense is that the regime felt comfortable in expecting a substantial improvement upon its tally of 2019. So, in a sense, the unstated threshold was that we would do even better than 2019, and if BJP had done one seat more than 303, that certainly would have meant “yes” in this plebiscite.
For the last ten years, I don’t know if you noticed these things. In any television discussion, ask BJP spokesperson any question on Earth, it could be about demonetisation, it could be about MSP to farmers, it could be about Umar Khalid. The answer would be, “People are with us.” You know, and this is what was most important. This election was about being able to say that people are with us, and 303 plus was that threshold which would have given that. My sense is that the ruling party very much expected this to be the case. This was not merely a plebiscite; it was a carefully controlled plebiscite. Given the high stakes, the regime left nothing to chance. To eliminate the possibility of any real contest. All legitimate, semi-legitimate, and completely illegitimate means were deployed to ensure that the plebiscite produces the desired result.
Ram Temple was to do in 2024 what Pulwama or Balakot achieved in 2019, perfectly timed two months before the election. You know, I mean, it’s sort of part of the electoral calendar, perfect orchestration around that. I don’t know if that frenzy reached Chennai very much. Fortunately, many bad things stop much before they reach Chennai, but in this case, I suspect it did reach Tamil Nadu as well. But perfect orchestration of a kind which is unprecedented, careful strategizing.
In the light of the results, many of us may not wish to believe in what I’m saying, but you see, I keep saying this, Mr. Ram, very often that all political commentators must listen to cricket commentary very seriously because I find cricket commentary is so nuanced and political commentary is so crude. No cricket commentator ever says that CSK won because their fielding was good, their batting was good, their bowling was good, their pacers were good, their spinners were good, their fielding was good. No. You always come up with a nuanced thing to say. Okay, in the middle overs, the spinners did this, and that really turned the game around. So, cricket commentary is always nuanced, but in political commentary, whoever loses got everything wrong and whoever wins gets everything right, which has always amazed me as a piece of such poor commentary and poor understanding.
So today we know the results, but please do not forget that the Ram Mandir bit was orchestrated perfectly. That they probably overreached is another matter, but timing, you cannot fault them for timing. The kind of massive reach out to the country, very few events, let’s call it an event, very few events in the history of post-independence India had the kind of footprint that that particular event did.
BJP had a strategy, a strategy where a few years ago they had started thinking about Odisha, they had started thinking about what to do in Tamil Nadu, and as a part of that strategy, towards the last few weeks, they did the unthinkable in Andhra Pradesh. You know, went and tied up with TDP, which was unthinkable a few months before. So, it’s part of an overall strategy that you need to have a huge organizational machine and something I was mentioning to Mr. Murali right now, something that we all forget, there is now a very large industry of political intelligence and political consultancy. These are thousands of professionals. I believe BJP employs about 2,000 on a salary basis every month. 2,000 full-time professionals are doing nothing except gathering political intelligence and doing consultancy. This is the army being deployed to win elections.
BJP had it all. The communication was focused, the dominance, the less said about mainstream media, the better it is, with a few exceptions. And is that a surprise that most of those exceptions come from English language, which doesn’t fetch you many votes, and come from outside Delhi? The Hindu, Telegraph, Deccan Herald, and the Indian Express occasionally don’t fetch your votes.
You know, the interesting thing I’ve discovered in the last five-seven years is that the BJP had put an informal ban on me from appearing on Hindi television. English, they don’t mind. Angrezi mein kuch bol lo, kya farak padta hai? [Say things in English, how does it matter?]. Hindi is where they have a problem. So, all the exceptions come from English media, and since I have the misfortune of reading Hindi papers every morning, I can’t tell you the kind of things Hindi media was doing. I mean, you know, even BJP’s official papers would not stoop to those levels to which they were stooping to support this. Anyway, that’s a separate thing, and people who know this much better than me are here. I shouldn’t waste my time on that.
The interesting thing is that BJP worked hard and managed to almost match the dominance in social media as well, which they couldn’t do with their ideas but with enormous money infusion. Even social media was matched. Unlimited money, you know, this was not from a scale of 1 is to 2. I know of several constituencies where BJP candidate spent more than 100 crore rupees per constituency, which includes some in Tamil Nadu. More than 100 crore rupees in one constituency was being spent. I needn’t speak about the misuse of official machinery—CBI, ED, all that is such standard stuff that I wouldn’t take your time in talking about all this.
A special word, of course, must be reserved for the utterly disgraceful conduct of the Election Commission of India. You know, Election Commission of India has not, it’s not that Indian Election Commission has always been independent. Many of us would remember that before the 1990s, Election Commission was not all that independent. But even the not-so-independent Election Commission would not do the kind of thing that these gentlemen who occupy those three chairs today have done in this election. I say all this with a lot of pain because there was a time, a phase where I was the self-appointed ambassador for Indian elections, and I used to preach to the world about the beauties of Indian elections. And I would tell Americans, “You can’t get your Florida right. Why don’t you come to India and learn a thing or two about how to conduct elections?” And then when you see this being done, it truly brings me to shame. But anyway, that’s all, this is all distraction.
The point I was making was it was not a competitive election; it was a controlled plebiscite where almost everything was controlled. All was set for a formal endorsement. While 400 plus for the BJP was a public gimmick, something around 325 plus for BJP and 375 plus for NDA must have appeared a very real possibility to the rulers. Everything was prepared for that. This is what the supreme leader not merely hoped, he expected it. Something like 325 plus for the BJP and something like 375 or more for the NDA is what they truly expected. I mean, all this preparation, control, and everything was for that. And if anything of that kind was achieved, you know what would happen next day. Public humare saath hai [Public is with us]. So then, you know, everything would be bulldozed because the people are with us.
What was the outcome?
The trouble is that in a plebiscite, there are only two outcomes: yes or no. That’s the problem with plebiscites. You know, in Quebec, you’ve had plebiscites which have produced 51.5% vote for retaining Quebec and 49.5% votes for exiting and Quebec being a separate country. So, the trouble is that in a plebiscite, you either have a yes vote or no vote. In this case, the result was a clear no, and that is what is so remarkable about this election. With all this control, everything was done, script was ready, yet something went wrong. Let’s not be deceived by numbers, 240, you know, because if it was a normal election, anyone would say and should say that, look, a ruling party which has had two terms, you are in your third term, things do get wrong. So even if you manage to somehow scramble a majority, well, that’s creditable if it’s a third term. But that if it is a normal election and if it is a fair competition. This was neither.
Let’s remember what this contest was all about. It was about unconditional popular endorsement. Let’s remember the threshold. Threshold was 320 to 350 for the BJP. Let’s remember the conditions under which the elections were held. And then look at the numbers. Numbers do not make sense otherwise. Anything below 303 would have been a moral defeat for the regime, and this is not something I’m saying after the election. This is something I wrote and said throughout the election. Anything below 303 would be a moral defeat for them. Anything below 272 would be a political defeat for the BJP, and anything below 250 would be a personal defeat for the Prime Minister, for the supreme leader. That’s what happened. It’s a moral, political, and personal defeat.
Someone might say, well, the BJP actually improved in so many places in the entire southern and eastern coastal belt. Yes, it did, but remember, number one, Mrs. Gandhi did very well in South India in 1977 after the emergency. She almost swept it. How do we remember that election? As a defeat for the emergency. So, number one, it doesn’t take away from the overall character. Two, yes, in fact, that’s what hides the extent of BJP’s defeat because but for that, BJP was not down only by 63 seats or so. It’s actually down by more than 80 seats. It’s Odisha and other places which have kind of concealed it. But more importantly, BJP’s good performance in some other parts of the country, actually strengthens my point.
Remember, BJP has done well only in those places where it has improved, only in those places where BJP was the challenger. BJP was anti-establishment. It’s a regional party which is anti-establishment. It is so in Kerala, it is trying to be so in Tamil Nadu, it was so in Andhra Pradesh, in Telangana, and above all in Odisha. So, wherever BJP has done well, it is not an endorsement of the political establishment of the last ten years; it is actually an anti-establishment regional force which is coming up.
Someone might say, well, they may have lost seats, but they’ve lost only less than 1% votes. That again is a distraction because this 1% vote is a net outcome of plus and minus. But please don’t forget that in this entire area from Karnataka to Bihar, the sort of, or let’s say, west and north of India, there has been an almost uniform swing away of votes from BJP. Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have produced very different outcomes, but in all three states, there was an almost identical swing away from BJP: 7% in all three cases. Places where there was no loss to BJP have seen huge swings. Himachal, Rajasthan, and Haryana have had huge swings. So, the fact remains that a very large geography of this country has shown a very significant swing away from BJP, which needs to be explained.
In any case, as I keep saying, this was under controlled situations. As Mr. Sashi Kumar said, we played some thought experiments, some computer simulations. And I said what? Let’s imagine for a moment since we are in a media college, let’s entertain an illusion. Let’s imagine that the media in this country had said at the beginning of this election, if the media had said this appears to be a close contest, we don’t know which way it’ll go. That’s all. I’m not expecting them to have said BJP is losing UP, nothing of that kind. If the media of this country had inserted this, had entertained this suspicion that this could perhaps be a close contest, that this was a contest to begin with, that would have easily moved one or two or 3% votes away from BJP.
I asked my friends to play this game on a computer to see what 1% would achieve. I said don’t take away that 1% from Odisha or from these places where BJP is going up. Only in places where it went down, what would an additional 1% vote do? 1% additional vote would take 30 seats away from BJP. BJP would be down to 210, and 2% of the national vote concentrated in these areas would take 54 seats away from the BJP.
In both these situations, in the first situation, NDA and India would be tied. In the second situation, India would have a clear majority. NDA would be 40 seats below the majority. This is the artifact. So, let’s not take these numbers as some gospel truths. These numbers have been produced by this artifact of a controlled situation.
In other words, there is no way to evade the conclusion that while the NDA has the numbers, it does not have the mandate. NDA has managed to cobble together numbers to form the government, and no one should quarrel with their constitutional propriety in forming the government. The president did the right thing. They deserve to form the government. I personally think that it almost was a boon in disguise that the India coalition was not called upon to form the government at this stage. But anyway, they had the numbers, but this was no unconditional approval. This was not a popular mandate.
It is a government without ‘iqbal.‘ ‘Iqbal’ is a word that comes from Mughal courts, a word for sovereignty in those days. But in a modern context, ‘iqbal’ would mean not just power, but authority, not just control, but a certain aura, not just a legal title, but legitimacy. If I were to put it in the language of modern political science, basically, the hegemony of this regime has been fractured. That is what this verdict has done, and that’s why it’s such a major verdict.
Now, that’s a very complex story, and I would just skim through that very quickly. The only one thing I would alert all of us against is a very routine temptation. In politics we tend to read consequences back into intentions. We assume that something that must have helped secularism must have been done with secular motives. Something which helps democracy must have been done with voters gunning against dictatorship. That’s a simplistic reading. That doesn’t happen because any plebiscite passes through multiple layers. Layers of people respond differently to the proposition, not just because they have different opinions, but because they are different persons, because they are located differently, because they read the question differently, because they bring a different set of parameters to answer the question. So, the entire sociology of Indian politics, the geography of Indian politics, everything comes into play. As I said, since that’s not my real focus today, I would just make a few remarks. I wish to write about it, as I did after 2004. These are complex issues.
It is tempting for me; it would be tempting for someone like me to say people of India voted against dictatorship, people of India voted for secularism. But the story is not as simple as that. Yes, what has happened has actually strengthened secularism or at least opened space for secularism. It has strengthened democracy. But let’s not be so simplistic as to read that these two things have been achieved, that people of India have voted for that.
You know, the things we say in political rhetoric, we say these things because if that were to be the case, then much of our job in the future would be so much simpler. But I’m going to propose that our job is not so simple. It would be a mistake to assume that people voted on authoritarianism or on dangers of majoritarianism or on the supreme leader. It would be equally a mistake to think that the main reason was BJP’s strategic mistakes.
BJP is into analysing it in the last one week, and this is the interesting thing about all dictators in the world: they look for every reason other than their own conduct. You know, you made a technical mistake, this candidate was bad, Yogi was bad, no, Maurya was good, or some such stuff that keeps going on. Somehow the assumption is that BJP made some small strategic mistakes in the course of elections, which is not the case. I mean, they only made mistakes that all dictators always make in the world, which is hubris and losing touch with the people. But that’s not a special mistake. I think it would equally be a mistake to credit opposition leaders with great political virtues. Their real virtue was that they stood up and they were there.
And that’s no mean achievement given the conditions under which they had to fight this election. That they were standing there, that they were there, that they stood up, and some of them even gathered the courage to say that secularism is a virtue, that there should be some, that ‘mohabbat’ [‘love’] is something that can be talked about in the public arena and so on. All these are big virtues. But by and large, it would be a mistake to assume that the opposition won this election by a great campaign or something of that kind. Frankly, I think the opposition could have done much better than they actually did in the last one year.
My only problem is that because the conditions under which they were fighting the election were so strange that I don’t know how much to blame them or how much to expect from them when you don’t even know whether your own candidate tomorrow morning is going to be your candidate or not. I mean, remember what happened in Surat and Indore. I mean, these stories you used to hear about panchayat elections in Bihar, this never happened for a parliamentary election. You know your candidate is walking away with someone from the BJP. The collector is calling candidates, which they did in Indore. The collector was calling all the independent candidates to say, look, the Congress candidate is about to withdraw. I mean, the Congress candidate has withdrawn, everyone else has agreed, come and withdraw, there are only two hours left. This is what happened in Surat. This is what was going to happen in Indore. The trouble in Indore was that there was a left candidate, a small party called SUCI. They had a candidate, and he said, no way, I will not withdraw. That’s why you had elections in Indore; otherwise, everything was set.
So, in that sense, I don’t know how much to expect from the opposition when they did not even know whether their bank account is their own bank account, whether their candidate is their own candidate, and things of that kind. But anyway, I don’t think we should start imagining that the opposition did everything right. That again would be the kind of mistakes that cricket commentators don’t make, and we should also not make.
To my mind, the biggest reason is that people refused to treat this as a plebiscite. They refused this invitation to a perpetual state of siege, anxiety, almost frenzy that we were kept in the last ten years, where they would give up every other consideration except Modi. Basically, what happened was a return to normal politics, which is what the BJP did not want. They wanted anything other than normal politics. Because when you have normal politics, you say, why has this fellow not come to my locality for the last five years? Why is this road not working? Why is this hospital not working? And the name of the game from the BJP’s point of view was to bypass all such things and to get people to vote.
To my mind, the most important thing that happened was people said, wait a minute, we’ve done it for ten years, Ab Nahi [“Not Anymore”], now we have to ask. That’s exactly what people said in Uttar Pradesh to me again and again. Look, we’ve done it for ten years, now we have to ask, what were they doing? And that is the return to normal politics. People converted this proposed plebiscite back into an election, a seat-by-seat election of representatives in which routine considerations play their role: performance of the incumbent, everyday livelihood issues. And that is what began to matter.
And when that happened, two or three things became very important. One was the state of the economy, which was truly in a very bad shape for ordinary people and continued to be in a very bad shape. Unemployment and what people called “mehngai” [“rising prices/expensiveness”]. I keep saying for my overeducated friends that what ordinary people call “mehngai” is not inflation. There’s a difference between price rise and inflation. You know, what people call “mehngai,” because a lot of economists say, but you know, our inflation levels are so low, what’s the problem?
When ordinary people say there is too much “mehngai,” what they are saying is, I cannot afford to purchase things that I really need to. They’re talking about the lack of purchasing power. They’re not talking about what the economists call inflation. That was the real issue. So “mehngai,” unemployment, and in general, the state of the economy, that was a very major reason. Then there were specific anxieties of some specific sections among the minorities, de facto being reduced to second-rank citizenship. What would you do if that’s what’s happening to you? You would come together; you would vote in a strategic way. What option do you have?
Although I must say that there is enormous mythology built around Muslim votes and the idea that somehow Muslims of this country have ensured BJP’s defeat. A, they don’t have the numbers to do so. B, for all that mythology, the turnout of the Muslims is still lower than the rest of the population, notwithstanding the entire mythology that you get about this question. And three, yes, they strategically came together in many states, and they were one of the factors.
Among Dalits, for the first time, at least for North Indian Dalits, North Indian somewhat educated Dalits, the message was reservation can be challenged. You know, it’s like the farmers’ movement. In the farmers’ movement, the unspoken message was that your land can be taken away. Now, what land is to the farmer, job and educational reservations are the same to Dalits. And the unspoken message was this is under threat. And the moment that gets touched, that of course had repercussions. But these were sectoral things. I think it may not be correct to say that there was widespread anxiety about the Constitution being taken away. That was very specific sectoral anxiety. Same in the case of Muslims.
And there was a small slice of generalized unease about authoritarianism. Now, I’m partly contradicting what I said earlier. I said we should not simply assume that because an authoritarian ruler has been defeated, therefore people voted on authoritarianism. For the first time in travels, I heard the word “tanashahi,” which is the Hindi word for dictatorship, spoken by ordinary people and even BJP workers being somewhat uneasy about the kind of things Mr. Modi’s government was doing to the opposition leaders, to chief ministers, to, you know, the kind of attack on centres that was being done.
Just one last thing about the causes, because many of us have now started saying, look, money did not matter, BJP’s media control did not matter, all the manipulations did not matter. Unfortunately, all of them did matter. That’s why the BJP has 240, you know. So, what appeared as severe reverses were actually potential disaster for the BJP, which was managed and limited since this was a controlled election. Money, media, and Modi myth did work, and they managed to salvage the BJP numbers. But for that, this would have been no different from 1977. But the reason why the numbers don’t look like 1977 is this: that money, media, all this actually did work to the BJP’s advantage.
Where are we now?
Return to democratic politics? Not quite. We are poised at a very critical moment in the history of our country. When I started, I spoke of the end of the First Republic of India. If you ask me, where are we now? I would say we are in no man’s land. I would say we are in no man’s land between the first and the second Republic of India, and that is what makes this situation so critical, so fraught with dangers and potential possibilities.
Therefore, it’s necessary to separate, you know, hope can be very treacherous, and we can slip. And I see so many of my friends slipping on false hopes, hopes like BJP RSS have a tussle. There’s no tussle. It’ll be resolved, and if it is resolved, it’ll be to this country’s disadvantage. So, these are false hopes, or the idea that somehow NDA allies are going to really prevent the BJP from doing what it is doing. Unless the BJP is stupid enough to launch an onslaught against South India, which I think now they won’t. One of the few very nice things about this election from BJP’s point of view is that they are beginning to develop vested interest in South India, which is good news for democracy, you know? So, unless they do something as stupid as that, I don’t think TDP is going to do very much. I don’t think JDU is in much of a state to do anything. That’s not where your hopes should reside, and I personally don’t think institutions are going to change their character very much. The stranglehold that the regime has over our institutions is not going to change.
I have mild hopes from media and judiciary. Very limited hopes. With media, my limited hope is while they would continue to be the spokespersons of the ruling party, they may stop hounding the opposition, which is what they specialized in the last five, seven years. If they were to stop just this little bit, I would see that as an important course correction. And judiciary, occasionally, we can find slightly better judgment on a few things, just minor course correction. I don’t expect any major change from judiciary either.
Where do I reside my hopes? My hopes are, one, in the opposition. The opposition has found its voice, as was evident in the last parliamentary session. Second, in resistance movements. Just watch the streets carefully. If democracy, you know, republics are saved never inside parliaments, republics are always saved on the street. So, watch the streets carefully. Next few years, I expect resistance, protest movements to gather courage because, in many ways, politics is like the stock market. It’s all driven by sentiments. Are you going up? Are you coming down? The message today to anyone who wants to stand up to this government is they’re going down, and that changes the character completely. That’s my second hope.
And my final hope is, this might look romantic, but actually the people. In this election, I travelled thousands of kilometres, spoke to thousands of people because by the end of March, in the middle of March, I was so depressed, and just to, I think, cure my own depression, I started traveling. I spoke to thousands of ordinary people, and one thing I’m sure, Indian people will not accept dictatorship. That, to me, was the deepest faith I came back with, and I said even if BJP gets the majority they want, if people know their democracy is being taken away, they will not allow that to be.
Finally, the last question. I know I’ve exhausted my time, so I’ll just quickly go over it.
Is it the beginning of the end of Mr. Modi? I’m afraid that would be too rash a conclusion to draw. One thing you can be sure about Mr. Modi, he will not preside over the meltdown of his government. Unlike Mr. Manmohan Singh, he will deploy every trick in the book, outside the book, wherever. Most of these would be dirty tricks. We have already, in the last one month, witnessed that the government hasn’t learned almost anything. Look at the president’s address, as if they’ve got 350 seats. Look at the manner in which the speaker has been elected. Look at the speaker’s conduct after that. Look at the manner in which the ruling party has behaved. Look at the lynching on the streets. Look at the bulldozers being used. Look at what’s being done to Arundhati Roy, to Medha Patkar. I suspect the regime will be even more repressive than it has been because Mr. Modi has to recover his “iqbal.” He has to demonstrate that I’m as strong as you always thought I am. And because the numbers are down, he has to be even more repressive. So, I don’t think it’s a very easy story.
His institutional stranglehold continues. Misuse of state power would be even more than before. So, something will have to be done. There are two readings here, and that’s the final point I would want to make. I think many friends would agree that, yes, political opposition has to do much more. Opposition has to be proactive. You cannot simply wait for this regime, the decline and fall of this regime. That won’t happen. You have to work for it on the street.
There are two possibilities here. One is that, okay, there are elections coming. In coming elections, work to defeat Mr. Modi’s government. Gradually, the government is pushed, allies start rebelling, things start happening, and the regime goes out. Which is to say, you fight a battle to reclaim democracy in the electoral political arena. Somehow, I think there is another possibility. I don’t have the time today to explore that in detail but let me just mention that. To my mind, in India, a battle to reclaim the Constitution and democracy by itself may not succeed. A battle to reclaim the Constitution and democracy has to be combined with a social radical agenda. And this moment in history offers one of those rare opportunities, opportunities that come only once in 25-30 years, that you actually combine political and social agenda.
What do I mean by social agenda? Economic front. Basically, the way to take on the BJP would be to create a social coalition of the bottom of the pyramid, of the poor. In fact, strange as it might seem, and it might tickle my friend sitting here, this is actually a moment for class politics in our country. I’m not one of those who say it all the time. I say there are moments which come and go. This is the moment for very sharp class politics to actually talk about redistribution. I mean, somehow we have made redistribution into a cuss word. You know, the allegation is these people talk about redistribution. Sir, the Constitution of this country talks about it. There is directive principle of state policy that talks about, you know, preventing concentration of wealth in this country. So, this is the moment. So, the point I’m making is that the way for recovery of democracy is not merely through political battles for recovery of Constitution and democratic norms. It is in and through struggles on the question of class, on the issues of caste and patriarchy. If you push these three struggles, it is in and through this that you can actually recover democracy. This is one of those rare moments, radical moments in our history.
What would it mean? Specifically, it would mean three kinds of actions. In the electoral contestation domain, ensuring that BJP’s defeat continues because BJP, Mr. Modi, and this election machine would do everything possible to stall this series of defeats, which they’ve had even in the by-elections a week ago. I think the next ten by-elections in UP and particularly the three assembly elections that are going to happen, BJP would put in everything to ensure that they are not seen to be on a losing streak, and the challenge is for the opposition is to ensure that the ruling defeat streak continues.
But more important than that, there is the question of strengthening resistance on the ground. The farmers’ movement has already given a call for a nationwide struggle on the issue of MSP. There is the question of caste census. Adivasis have been drawn towards the BJP, and the one segment in which BJP has increased its vote share this time is the Adivasis. A very significant movement is required there. So, the second domain would be working on resistance on the street.
And the third domain would be cultural ideological contestation. I have zero time left now, but I would just mention what to my mind that cultural ideological contest would be. People like us must concede that we have lost a cultural ideological battle. We need to regain it, and in order to regain, we need to regain three things: nationalism, civilizational cultural heritage in its multiplicity, and religious traditions of this country. We cannot turn our back to either three of these things, which we have. So that’s the third domain where we need to operate. To my mind, what looks like what has been a very grim moment in our country’s history, which has led to the collapse of the First Republic, need not be somehow an attempt to recover some fragments of the First Republic. We shouldn’t try that. That’s impossible. You do not go back in history. It has to become a battle to create, to reimagine a second Republic of India, a second Republic which redeems the constitutional pledge contained in the preamble to our Constitution.
Thank you very much.
The talk was followed by a question and answer session.
