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Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ -! We're here with Fareed Zakaria talking about the Indian election. It is exciting. He's a transformative, candidate Modi butt.

Speaker 1

00:12

And there is a big butt, and that butt took place in 2002.

Speaker 2

00:16

Right. So, so, the butt is nearly...

Speaker 3

00:17

-...(clears throat quickly, clears throat loudly,

Speaker 2

00:18

coughs loudly while speaking): The butt is not just about what happened in 2002. It's that he comes from a very extreme, hard-line, kind of Hindu nationalist background, something called the RSS. This was the organisation, 1 of whose members shot Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Speaker 2

00:35

So it has a long past of having been fairly tough on minorities, particularly the Muslim minority in India. 2002, Modi was the head of the government of Gujarat, 1 of the states in India, there were riots. And in those riots, 1,000 Muslims died. And it was alleged that he, as the head of the government, either encouraged or ignored the fact that the police were actively assisting in the kind of vigilante violence that ended up killing 1,000 people and, of course, displacing tens of thousands.

Speaker 2

01:09

His actual role seems to me a little bit less clear. There are investigations that have cleared him from it. The way, the best I can tell of it, it's like those politicians in the South in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement where they knew what the police was going to do if they didn't actively, you know... So it's a sin of omission.

Speaker 2

01:27

He didn't tell the police, go out and kill anyone, but he knew by not restraining them, bad things might happen. So, it's a little murky, but it's something he does have to get over if he is now prime minister of all, you know, 1.1 billion Indians.

Speaker 1

01:43

Right, but it's a sin of omission with a thousand dead people at

Speaker 3

01:47

the end of it.

Speaker 1

01:48

That's the problem. And yet incredibly, I was seeing that there were Muslims in India who voted for Modi anyway because they thought he would be stronger on the economy. And at that point, is that not the final example of elections are just about the economy.

Speaker 1

02:03

He could have killed or been involved in killing your people. You think, well, you know, if the stock market goes up, he is the best for the job.

Speaker 2

02:10

Well, it also shows you how frustrated and aspirational Indians have become. Frustrated by the fact that they were growing at 8% a year, and then it dropped to 5%. I know this doesn't sound, in the United States, to say, well, we're only growing at 5%, but India is, of course, a very poor country.

Speaker 2

02:26

And so to go from 8%, where you thought you were kind of entering the ranks of the Chinas of the world, and all of a sudden for that whole thing to collapse. Huge, huge problem. And again, the Indian media, as you showed, is very lively, very vigorous. They're awesome.

Speaker 2

02:42

They're constantly showing you, you know, This is what you could be living like. There's a kind of Bollywood aspect to Indian news media, which is insane. But it does feed that kind of aspirational class.

Speaker 1

02:53

I'm telling you, they are 1 sentence away from just all collectively bursting into song. But it's not.

Speaker 2

03:01

Just so you know, India has 15 languages. Only about 15% of India speaks English There are 18 all news channels in English in India 18. We have got like 3 in the United States

Speaker 1

03:16

You're welcome Now but this this Modi and

Speaker 3

03:20

2002 You're welcome.

Speaker 1

03:20

LAUGHTER Now, but this... Modi and 2002 poses a problem for America diplomatically now, cos he was banned. He had a visa revoked here.

Speaker 1

03:29

So He's not technically allowed into the country other than on state visits, I imagine.

Speaker 2

03:35

Well, as it turns out, technically, because he's prime minister, he can get what is called an A1 visa, which is a special category. So he's got to get out of jail free pass.

Speaker 1

03:46

That's fantastic. So if you want to visit Disney World, just become prime minister

Speaker 2

03:50

and it's all yours. Exactly. But you're right.

Speaker 2

03:53

For 10 years, he couldn't come here as a private citizen, even as the head of the state government, because he was on this list. The list, though, is very bizarre. It's a list of 1 person. It is...

Speaker 2

04:04

It has only ever been used to keep this 1 person out. And-and as often happens with American foreign policy, it's more a kind of incoherence and accident that produced it. They set up this commission on religious intolerance. The commission was charged initially from outside the United States.

Speaker 2

04:22

They were like, you're just worried about violence against Christians. So they were like, no, no, no. We're very worried about violence against everybody. The riots happened in Gujarat in 2002, and they're like, you see, we don't like violence against Muslims either.

Speaker 2

04:35

They named him. They've never named anyone else. And, me, I mean... Wow.

Speaker 2

04:39

And, you know, there's been a lot of religious intolerance in the world in the last 10 years.

Speaker 1

04:44

People have earned the right to be on that list? There are some very... There should be some justifiably disappointed dictators going, -"Hey, hey, hey!

Speaker 1

04:52

What do I have to do?"

Speaker 2

04:53

-$$LAUGHTER Exactly. You look at Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, you know, our man. I mean, That government has been associated with death squads, with reprisal killings, and then, of course, you have Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1

05:05

Of course.

Speaker 2

05:05

Need I say more?

Speaker 1

05:08

LAUGHTER That's right. That is the perfect thing with Saudi Arabia, isn't it? And then there's Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1

05:15

Let's just let that hang in the air.

Speaker 2

05:17

Well, you know, it has 2 great... It's had 2 great exports over the last 30 years, oil and religious intolerance.

Speaker 1

05:24

That's right. Yeah, it is. It is the landmass version of an asterisk, that country.

Speaker 1

05:31

But, yeah, so he has a huge, huge mandate, Modi. What is he expected to do with it?

Speaker 2

05:37

All he talked about while running, and he ran 1 of the most disciplined, really brilliant campaigns, was just all about development and good government. Development and good government. People tried to get him into the anti-Muslim stuff or Hindu nationalist stuff.

Speaker 2

05:52

He never bit. He never went there. He would just keep talking about it. He said at 1 point, I'm more interested in toilets than in temples, meaning I'm going to build, India famously does not have a lot of toilets.

Speaker 2

06:03

If you've been, people who visited notice that some of that activity takes place outdoors. And so this is a, you know. But that was really the whole message was about development. And I think if you look at Gujarat, his state, he's been pretty good at that.

Speaker 2

06:17

Gujarat has grown faster than China in the last 10 years. And this is a state of 60 million people, so it's not trivial.

Speaker 1

06:23

But I think you've hit there on the absolute key problem with the whole thing. When you mentioned the toilets in temples, because there was even a cartoon information, public health information video in India, trying to teach people the importance of using toilets. And it went viral.

Speaker 1

06:41

And that, I thought, must be the perfect distillation of the potential and the challenges in India for Modi and governing India ahead, because India is... It currently has an economic disparity so vast that you've got 50% of people with a dangerous lack of access to toilets and the other half watching viral videos about that problem on their iPads. Daddy, there's a spectacular wealth disparity there.

Speaker 2

07:09

Well, and especially at the top. So India has, I forget, it's 1 of the 5 or 6 countries in the world with the largest number of billionaires. And yet, the per capita income in India is, I think, still under 2,000.

Speaker 2

07:22

And just to remind people, the United States is more like 50,000. So it's still a very poor country, but with the halves really in an extraordinary. The halves in India, the top 10% or 5% live like people do in Western Europe. And then you have the bottom 30% or 40% who are still living on essentially under $3 or $4 a day.

Speaker 2

07:46

It's a huge disparity. And his challenge is going to be to try to provide the kind of growth that China has been able to do, which required often very, very determined government policy, which is tough to do in a democracy. But that's the promise. Because China's development in some way is a model for no 1, because most dictatorships are not that competent.

Speaker 2

08:08

I mean, you know, people often say, -"Wouldn't it be great to

Speaker 3

08:11

be..." -...that is

Speaker 2

08:11

so true. Wouldn't it be great to have a Chinese-style... Yeah, but how do you know you're gonna get the Chinese?

Speaker 2

08:16

Most people get, you know, Marcos or Mobutu or some crazy African guy who wants to build a temple to himself. And if you could be guaranteed that you'd get the kind of Chinese-style technocracy, that would be great. What India represents is a democracy that might actually make development work and figure out a way to get growth. So it's much more transportable, right?

Speaker 2

08:36

If the Indians with their crazy, messy, colorful democracy can somehow make the right choices and get economic growth, well then, Indonesia can do it and Brazil can do it, you know. Whereas the Chinese, it's like, well, yeah, maybe we should get the Chinese to run every country. That's not a really viable model for the world. Though the Chinese might like it.

Speaker 3

08:54

I was

Speaker 2

08:54

going to say,

Speaker 1

08:55

that's not a viable model, but that's probably where we're headed. But that's what, that's what we, everything, everything about this election was fascinating to me. Not even just the result or what that, what the projections of that result are likely to be, but the process itself was incredible.

Speaker 1

09:12

814 million registered voters. And the Indian Election Commission mandated that there had to be a polling station 2 kilometers from every place where people were living, meaning that they were putting polling stations up on the side of mountains.

Speaker 2

09:30

And the results were tabulated, because it was all done electronically, faster and more authoritatively than the elections here. No hanging chads. Exactly.

Speaker 2

09:40

No butterfly ballots.

Speaker 3

09:42

None of that. And in

Speaker 1

09:42

terms of fighting for access for people, it's an antithesis. Do you look at the voting rights laws that are going on here? They're putting...

Speaker 1

09:48

Putting polling stations on the side of mountains. In Texas, they would be proposing laws building mountains between voters and the polls. It's... There is something so inspirational about it.

Speaker 2

10:02

That is 1 of the things, you know, growing up in India, there was so many crazy things. It was a crazy socialist period when I was growing up, particularly in the 70s. There were nationalizing banks.

Speaker 2

10:12

There were so many things that you felt sad about. But this was the 1 piece of India that was always so inspirational, that these poor, illiterate people not only could vote, but wanted to vote, demanded to vote, and understood the issues from their point of view, and, you know, did it repeatedly. And there's never been serious violence. There's never been anyone who's contested the results.

Speaker 2

10:35

In other words, the loser has always accepted them. For a country, again, that's 1 of the poorest countries in the world still, that is an inspiration.

Speaker 1

10:42

It really is. It's so exciting to me, because the possibilities seem potentially limitless.

Speaker 2

10:46

And that, by the way, maybe the British have something to do with the tradition of parliamentary democracy.

Speaker 1

10:52

Yes! We did it! We did it! If we take nothing else away from this evening, I'll take that as a verbal thank you letter.

Speaker 1

11:07

In fact, there's this... So we did our first show, we did a whole big section on the

Speaker 2

11:12

Indian election.

Speaker 1

11:13

And it went... It was seen quite a lot in India, and there was a bit of pushback in India with people being angry, saying, the map over my shoulder was drawn wrong. And to that I say, I'm British.

Speaker 1

11:26

That's impossible. I... If I... If the map is like that, that's just the way the map is now.

Speaker 2

11:33

I can't get it wrong. It was probably the piece of Kashmir, the part that's contested between India and Pakistan. So when I got as a kid a...

Speaker 2

11:43

My copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which my parents had bought for me. I can't remember, I think my 14th birthday or something. The page with the map of India was blacked out by the Indian censors. So it's like, you can't take a look at this.

Speaker 2

11:57

You know? It's just too horrific to see.

Speaker 1

12:01

It's... I can't thank you enough for being here. There's nothing that is not fascinating about, about this whole election, and, I can't think of anyone better to talk to about it than you.

Speaker 2

12:10

Thank you so much.

Speaker 1

12:11

I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3

12:15

Great show. Fareed Zakaria, ladies and gentlemen! Fareed Zakaria!

Speaker 3

12:21

APPLAUSE