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So I have a question for you. Where does your sense of purpose come from? In my case, frankly, it's mostly from ego and self-interest. I want things for myself, whether it's success or fame or maybe some creative accomplishment. I stand at the center of it.

Sometimes, yeah, I want to make the world a better place in some way or the other, and I'd do things to that effect. For example, I could cite altruistic reasons for doing the seen and the unseen, improving the quality of the scores, creating an important historical record, especially when it comes to the lives of people, and so on. But even these could boil down to conceit. And ultimately, when I think of waking up happy and looking forward to the day ahead, it's for personal reasons. But with some remarkable people, It is clear that they think way beyond themselves.

My guest today has devoted his life to a higher cause. He has not let apathy touch him. He has not let setbacks temper his resolve. He has energy and optimism and also the humility that we all must have to accomplish anything. And I feel like this is infectious.

Every time I meet him, I end up feeling a little more idealistic, a little more energetic, and always much smarter. Maybe that's the best selfish reason for me to do this podcast. I expand my own world. And maybe by doing that I expand yours as well.

Welcome to the scene and the unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.

Welcome to the scene and the unseen. My guest today is Jay Prakash Narayan, 1 of the people I most admire in modern Indian politics. JP started off as a physician, was inspired by the original JP in the early 70s and repelled by the emergency and joined the IAS to try and make a difference to the nation. He soon realized that in his words, quote, the public sector is a private sector of those in public office, stop quote. He decided to enter politics, started the Lok Satta movement.

He was an MLA for a while, he was a driving force behind much reform such as the RTI Act and was an influential and respected figure in national politics. I see him as an elder statesman today, a man of immense wisdom we can all learn from. My last episode with him, A Life in Indian Politics, is 1 of my favourites. And when we got together for this recording, I decided not to repeat anything from there, but to add to it, to explore the gaps, to discuss higher order questions, and also to chat about what has transpired since we last recorded in 2019. So please listen to both episodes together to get a complete picture of JP's life in times.

But first, let's take a quick commercial break.

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JP welcome to the scene in the unseen.

Thank you Amit. It's always wonderful to have a conversation with you.

You know the last time we spoke was in 2019, I think in November we spoke, the episode was out in December 2019. And some time has passed since then. And this time, in a sense, is even more momentous than any stretch of 4 years would normally be because there have been 2 years of COVID. I think that in different ways change the way people look at themselves and the way people look at time. And I actually want to ask you about a subject I've been thinking about a lot, which is how 1 looks at time differently with the passage of time, right?

Because when we are young, like when I was 20, it seemed to me like 25 was unbearably old, who would wait that long? I wanted everything now, you know, 50 seemed like, Oh, my God, so far away and old man and all of that. And now I'm almost 50. And I'm looking back and you kind of 1 of course in your in terms of your personal life, you look at time differently, you realize the importance perhaps of trying to live every moment of trying to live in the present because you realize so much is past and you didn't really engage with it as deeply as you could have. But I also look at history in the world differently.

Whereas, you know, a span of passing of 50 years no longer seems as deep as it would have when 1 was young. And, You know, in your case, you were born practically in the middle of the century, a few years after, you know, India got independence. And so much has a way that you looked at time changed, especially since you embarked upon endeavors that we've discussed in our last episode. And by the way, I'll try my best not to repeat anything from the last episode but you've spoken so vividly about your entire life there and it's been a life of striving and trying to get things done and trying to bring about change and all of that but any change if there has been has been glacial. So at both a personal level and the level of kind of looking back at this nation and with an understanding of political currents and economic currents and so on and so forth, do you look at time differently?

I think it's a very interesting question. From a perception point of view, how you perceive time with age, I actually read somewhere that there is a formula. Let's say there's a 16 year old, as opposed to a 64 year old, That means you're 4 times older. I believe time moves twice as fast, square root of the multiples. Oh!

I don't know if it's accurate, how they measured it. I thought it's an interesting perspective, but unquestionably, almost everybody who has lived some years, they recognize that time seems to fly much faster. I think that's human, maybe biological. In terms of the work that we do, our perception of society and our perspectives, I was a very desperate young man, probably a very desperate not so young man also. Because when I left the government and embarked on this journey, I thought in 5 years time, we will transform the country.

And my God, if it's not transformed, what will happen? I remember vividly the chief secretary and others, very affectionate and very concerned, pleading with me, don't take too many chances, stay clean, or at least wait for a few more years when you're compensable and so on and so forth. I said, my God, in a few years is too late. So there's a desperation that if India doesn't change in a few years time, my God, what will happen? I think 2 things.

1, as you hinted, a realization that great societies just don't change, you know, in a few years or so, however much you wish. Though in some respects, some changes do come suddenly. You can't anticipate exactly. Sometimes technology accelerates the changes and so on and so forth. It takes time.

And I think with age, recognition that it probably doesn't matter as much as you think it does, except a few issues. Some issues do matter. They are so seminal that if they don't get corrected quickly, there could be a very serious long term consequence. Most others we exaggerate the impact of either the good things or the bad things. So you tend to become more strategic.

You tend to become a little more careful. I used to work 30 days a month, travel most of the days, writing 3 or 4 columns a week or 10 days, even while traveling without the aid of this modern technology and internet and so on and so forth. Travel, research, conferencing, studying, writing, you know, life was full of activity every minute, every hour. As you grow older I think you tend to have a strategic sense. You marshal your energies, identify the most important areas.

As they say, the wise general chooses his battlefields very carefully. So I think it's a very interesting thing.

In our last conversation, you spoke about reading Sathru and Kamu and how they no longer are so much of an influence on you. But you mentioned Kamu's myth of Sisyphus as something that does resonate and I didn't double-click on that in that conversation but I want to double-click on it now because it seems to me to almost be a tragic metaphor of the futility of caring too much about change.

I'll go a little beyond that, take it in a more metaphysical plane. My daughter at the age of 8 asked me, Dad, if the universe is going to be cold, lifeless 1 in the long term, what's the purpose of it all? In a fundamental sense, Camus is right. Not necessarily about human society or in the short or medium term, but about the existence of humanity. I don't have an answer to that.

I always tell her, look, we are incapable of looking that far beyond. We can look at 25, 30, 40, 50 years and think of a society which could be more humane, more sensible, which could give us more happiness and more sense of purpose. If you think beyond that, all life loses meaning. Planet Earth loses meaning. Maybe the solar family or Milky Way galaxy loses meaning.

So I think at some level you must suspend your disbelief. You must forget too much of a knowledge of astronomy. It's interesting intellectually but if you are too much into astronomy all life becomes meaningless.

But as much as Camus' essay itself I was struck by the actual myth of Sisyphus which of course is about Sisyphus being condemned by the gods to roll a stone uphill and when he gets to the top it goes back down and he goes back down and starts again. And that almost sense of futility that for the rest of eternity, he's going to try and do something that fundamentally cannot be done.

There I disagree with Camus in terms of human history, human society. Since of course, there's a lot of unfinished tasks all over the world. But if you take a broad historical view, not even hundreds of years, even a generation or 2, how far we have traveled is quite remarkable. Because our ambition is much greater, we always think of what is not done quite rightly. But we sometimes forget what we have done.

No, Hans Rosling, for instance, the Swedish physician who passed away some years ago, maybe oversimplified things, but the broad point he made, 1 thing struck me, when he was born in Sweden, Sweden at that time was roughly where Egypt is today. But in a lifetime, we can see the difference between Sweden and Egypt. So we forget the remarkable change that at least in modern era we are bringing about. I think that should give us a lot of hope. So I don't agree that It is really a myth of this person.

You really say a fictitious existence.

So I'll just single out now. This is really sparked by something that you just said and I was kind of taking notes. And I think that there are 2 kinds of perspectives we can have and 2 kinds of views we can take on them. And 1 perspective is a big perspective, where you look at society and country and nation and democracy and all of those. And the other is a small perspective, so to say, without putting a value judgment, which is my own life, the things I want to do, and so on and so forth.

And equally, there are 2 views we can apply. And 1 is a long view, where we think of something 20, 25 years in the future, and we are focused on that, and we are aiming for that. And the other is a short view, where we want things quickly and want to get immediate gratification. And here I'm thinking aloud, and I might change my mind within 10 minutes of this. But it strikes me that as far as the big perspective is concerned, the nation and society and all of that, we have to play the long game where we have to realize that immediate gratification is not going to happen.

We've got to have that sense of purpose and just focus on processes and doing the right thing and maybe 30 years later there will be change. And as far as a small perspective is concerned our own lives. I actually now think that we need to have the smaller view, where you focus on the small joys. You don't get too ambitious about something happening 20 years later, 30 years later. But you live in the present, you embrace the present moment, you focus in the small joys.

And of course, you do plan and you do work for the future. But in my life, and I look back, I think what young people tend to do, and I might be guilty of it as well, is that when you're young, you look at the big picture of nation and society and you want to change everything in a hurry. And you look at the project of you and you have big dreams that are very far off, but you don't do anything in the immediate term to bring them closer and it should really be the other way around.

I think it's a great question. About the big perspective, I agree it's a long game. There's no way you can go and you're going to transform very swiftly and thank God actually if you can transform that swiftly and that easily maybe sometimes it's a very wonky idea, a very dangerous idea. With 2 caveats, sometimes technology brings about profound changes, we underestimate its importance. And 2, sometimes unique opportunities present themselves.

Therefore, a reformer must be a unique opportunist, in the best sense of the term. I always believe in the power of the context. Great things happen not so much because somebody made valiant efforts, but because they seized the moment and they're ready. You know, a prepared mind, meet in the context kind of a thing, What some people think is luck. With those 2 caveats, I think it's a long game.

There's no question about it. It should be a long game. Otherwise, every tin pot dictator, every dangerous demagogue can destroy our lives collectively. I don't think we should allow that to happen. Insofar as the personal perspective is concerned, I'm 1 of those lucky ones where my...

What shall I say? The things that I always thought mattered a great deal by the age of 17 or 18, I came to that conclusion. And the kind of life I wanted to lead, they are indistinguishable. But at a deeper level, I think each of us, particularly if there is no God for us, those who really have faith, true faith, they're very fortunate human beings in my view. You know exactly what it's all about and you follow the commands of the God or whatever.

But if you're a skeptic, if you're an agnostic or an atheist, an agnostic I suppose is a cowardly atheist, so it's okay. I think you have to figure out what it's all about at a personal level. Each of us, I think, have our own sense of that. My own sense is it's about 3 things. The first is universal for all life forms, the survival of the individual and that of the species.

Therefore, your own survival instinct and your own reproductive instinct and so on and so forth. They're nothing unique. The second unique for human beings is unless there is harmony in society, because human beings alone being large societies, beyond kinship and so on and so forth, unless we have harmony, life is a living hell. And unless there is harmony in nature and increasingly we're realizing because the disharmony is very evident, life again is living hell. Therefore, the second big goal is this harmony of 2 kinds.

And the third is even that does not satisfy us. That is still a mechanistic world. Unless the freedom can be exercised in full, freedom again in 2 forms, the political freedom of making choices and doing whatever pleases you, but the intellectual freedom required, intellectual adhilism, if you have that genetic endowment or your ability or passion or the brain power, if it's not fully harnessed, I don't think people are happy. And I think an individual's quest essentially is that. These 3, the hierarchy of needs, as Maslow said, I'm only trying to put it in a different way.

Once you're clear about that, the rest of the life is pretty easy. If you simply have a very typically Indian ambition, I suppose, I don't know if it's universal, but certainly it's very Indian, that I want to be something, not to accomplish something, but I want to be a district magistrate, I want to be a minister, I want to be a millionaire. Well, it's okay. Each individual is entitled to her role in dreams. But to me, it seems to be purposeless because once I accomplish it, you are never satisfied.

It has to be deeper than that.

Yeah, I love what you said about an agnostic being a cowardly atheist, though I would also point out that actually people have the misconception that there's a continuum from where you go from believer to agnostic to atheist and I keep pointing out that atheism has to do with belief and agnosticism has to do with knowledge. So an agnostic is someone who believes it is not possible to know whether there is God and an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in God because there's no evidence of it and it's an absence of belief not a belief per se. So it is possible to be both agnostic and atheist at the same time as I am because I don't believe there is a God and yet I believe the larger questions are fundamentally unknowable. And from that notion of epistemic humility that comes with talking about agnosticism. I also want to talk about a related subject of how through life 1 develops humility, right?

Like when we are young, we think and again, all of this in a sense is a form of self-reflection because I am guilty of all of these. But when 1 is young, you imagine you know the world and you can grok everything and you've kind of figured everything out. And obviously time tempers that. At the same time you might have great ambitions when you are young and time tempers those 2. And my feeling is that the good way to sort of deal with that is to develop humility when it comes to knowledge to what you know, but to at the same time have a certain arrogance of the will and believe that no, I can do all of the things I want to do.

No matter how bold and daring I will not give up, I can do them. So I want to know about your journey through these 2 different kinds of domains of developing that humility and realizing the limits of your own ability, the limits of your own knowledge and also despite that, despite knowing how the system is so much bigger than you imagined and so on, despite that having the will to kind of keep going and keep you know hammering away.

I think you put it beautifully Amit. Humility combined with confidence and perhaps also a desperation that needs to be done. It's almost like being in love. You can't sleep, You can't enjoy good things in life, you're breathless on occasion. If you don't have that, I think you've not lived a life.

It keeps you alive. But humility, I think there are 3 things that happen in life. 1, As you see more and more people, in the small little pond, you are the big fish and you think that the whole universe you can control and command and so on and so forth. But as the pond becomes bigger and bigger, you realize that you are just 1 small fish. That is 1 inevitable thing and therefore, limits of your own knowledge and your own capacity and so on and so forth.

The second is perhaps a sense of mortality as you grow older, a recognition that ultimately it's much bigger than you and your lifetime. But there's also a third thing. In my case, I have a very special ability. I'm sure many people have it. I truly enjoy somebody's success.

I adore people's success, true success. If they actually accomplish something, if they think something, if they really have a wonderful message, I love them, I admire them. Even when I disagree with them on some issues, I rejoice in somebody's accomplishments because I treat them as our accomplishments. And I think each of them is a foundation for our next work. So luckily, I'm not particularly perturbed with envy or something else.

I think it's a true treasure. And that makes it even easier to be both humble and confident.

That's quite remarkable because you know I remember some 24 years ago a friend of mine who's a well-known novelist now and we were friends and we were both unknown and we were walking through the streets of Bombay and at 1 point he turned to me and said that you know every time a friend of mine does well, a part of me dies and I just stopped in horror because I realized he was serious

But his honesty in communication is remarkable. Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. And but I was sort of pretty stunned by that. And what I have realized is that he was being honest about it. But that's an attitude of so much of the world, like on so much of social media, I just see people tearing each other down. And, you know, never like in every interaction, my rule is always assume goodwill, unless you have reason to believe otherwise assume goodwill, go towards it optimistically assume the best in the other person and so on and so forth.

And so much social media is just the opposite of that a few months ago. In fact, I quit a lot of WhatsApp groups because I was like, I don't want negativity in my life.

You

know, my my group of writing students is 1 with which is full of positivity. Everybody really cares about everybody else's success. And that's great. But 1 doesn't see that so often. My next question is this, you know, in our last episode when you spoke about your trajectory from, you know, being in 1 village, being in another village, then going to, you know, Vijayawada to college, then Guntur for medical college and then getting involved in the 70s with first JP's movement and then what happened to the emergency and all of that becoming politically aware and that early decision which you mentioned you came to at 17 that you want to make a positive contribution to the democracy.

Now I was thinking about this and I was thinking that at that time for someone with your energy and passion and intelligence and exposure also because like you pointed out you were listening to the BBC all the time and getting news of the world through there and all of that. That arena, the arena of the nation must appear to be the obvious arena where a grand difference can be made. But if a young person is growing up today, there are many other things you can be ambitious about. You could look at the world of technology and say that I will solve this massive problem at scale. Or you could look at just entrepreneurship and saying these are the holes in the market, this is where I'll get in.

You could look at the intellectual universe and say that this is what the discourse is missing and I can really play a part here. And there are so many other things to sort of be passionate about. And I guess in your time with limited access, and there's no private sector to speak of technology isn't available to everyone at that extent. You know, if you are an enthusiastic entrepreneurial person, 1 natural outlet for that is to say, okay, what problem do I solve? Like if we boil it all down to, I want to solve big problems, all the big problems that you faced would have been problems with the nation or with society.

And you've jumped in that, you know, trying to figure those out. 1, I would postulate that a JP of today would not necessarily have only those problems to contend with. There are many other problems worth solving. And I would argue many of them actually have a far greater possibility of coming to fruition in a short span of time and therefore changing people's life at scale. I believe technology does that.

I believe any good business venture can do that. So if this is something that you can think about and tell me what you feel like, I know it's an impossible counterfactual to imagine yourself in the in a current time with a lot else to do but do you are there other directions you could have gone down on?

No I completely agree with you in fact I would tell young people today all power to your elbow. There are a hundred things whatever really appeals to you there's so much you can do. The notion that it's only about the nation and the government and policy and the grand themes is a nonsensical 1. It was more a vacuum in those days we had nothing else really. We were frogs in the well.

And as I said, the economy was very closed, the communications were closed, and there was really nothing much. Therefore, I increasingly realize, not only is it much more realizable in the short term technological excellence, but perhaps sometimes it makes far greater impact than all the political philosophies of the world in making human lives better. And therefore, I think there should not be any doubt about that. People should pursue it aggressively. There's also another reason.

1 of the things that propelled me into action or what influenced my thinking and my life was Richard Nixon's resignation in the United States, how I thought at the time, naively as now I look back, how a system could hold a very powerful leader to account. And how in our country, compared to Nixon's infractions, maybe several times bigger infractions, and yet there's almost nothing we can do. But then, after we talked last time, Donald Trump became President of the United States. He could yet become president of the United States.

He was already president at the time. 2019 we spoke.

Oh, 19. Okay.

16 to 20. But yeah, he might well become president again. He might.

Who knows? And then he was indicted. In a society where there's a whiff of criminality, general expectation is that you would never have any chance politically. That he's still a viable candidate and almost certainly he'll get Republican Party nomination. It shows that maybe as a youngster, people like me were too starry-eyed.

We saw the world as black and white. There's another reason why the focus on improving human life in a variety of ways, and governance is just 1 facet of it, an important facet nevertheless. I think it's so incredibly important. So I would completely agree with you. CPU saw the world from a certain person.

And that appeared to be an incredibly important thing. Maybe it's also a sign of history of that time, post-independence, therefore the overall ambience, and emergency being a very defining moment for many of us. But I would agree with you, there's no 1 particular thing that your heart and your mind should propel you.

You mentioned seeing the world in black and white and 1 of the things that you said about Nixon was, okay, at that time, Watergate seemed like so immense. But over time, you realized how it was relatively in the bigger scheme of things a minor infraction and actually he was a pretty good president outside of it.

He was actually I would even go he was an outstanding president minus his personal prejudices and proclivities and insecurities as a statesman, even in terms of domestic politics, no? He was the man who wanted to bring healthcare, universal healthcare to the United States. I think many Republicans will be shocked that 1 of the great leaders actually wanted universal healthcare in the United States. I think he was a great president barring personal insecurities and what I get.

And what I'm going to get at is that in your case, there is that development of perspective where initially it's black and white and you're animated by the what's going on and whoa, Watergate, corruption, this, that, lying, abuses, all of that. But then you begin to take a broader view. And 1 would imagine that in the course of human affairs, there might be some people who always see things in black and white because it's convenient and they're intellectually lazy or whatever. But there are others who gradually they evolve to a more shared view. However, what we see in modern times is that the incentives now, especially exacerbated perhaps by social media, are driving people towards taking simplistic views, driving people towards always passing judgment.

Like whenever we talk of whether it's Gandhi or Ambedkar or Vajpayee or whoever, anybody who's been in the public life for a certain period of time, they contain multitudes. You cannot pass a 1 line judgment on any of them. There is so much to admire and learn from. Often there are so many things to condemn as well, but they contain multitudes and yet, depending on which political tribe we are part of, there is a tendency that you want to pass judgment and you know, so and so is evil, so and so is great and that percolates down to everything. And this is disillusioning for me because my imagination was that, okay, some people might always see the world in black and white, but others evolve, as you mature, as you grow older.

I think you're absolutely right, Amit. We are increasingly becoming tribalized. Absolutely no sense of evidence or logic or the larger public interest. Our own gain. I remember some 27 years ago, my first visit to United States.

And I went city to city and I think from Virginia State, I was going to Pittsburgh. There was an event there or a series of events there. A friend was driving me there, an Indian friend. During the drive, those were the days if you remember 1996-97, Narsimha Rao, some of the corruption scandals, you know, and then Jharkhand Murthy Morcha, MPS being bought and all that. So I said, look, when you look at public affairs, perhaps you must look beyond individual middle-class notions of morality.

There is a hierarchy of principles. Nassim Maraud was trying to bring stability and then change the course of our economic management in a very complex system without adequate political power. And certainly from a purely narrow moral point of view, buying off MPs in a no-continence vote is immoral, apart from being illegal. But is it right that 2 diametrically opposite political forces, the BJP that believed broadly in market economy and these changes, the communists who hated that, They would come together to bring down a government on that issue. While it may not be legally criminal, is it right?

Is there not a higher morality than notions of middle class morality? I remember giving an example. For instance, there is a sage who took an oath that he would never utter a lie. 1 day, a young woman, terrified, she comes running and says, Swami ji, There are 4 or 5 thugs. They are chasing me and they want to harm me.

Please tell me in which direction I should go and help me, protect me". He says, go in that direction. A few minutes later, the thugs do come. He says, Swamiji, you never lie. A young woman came in this direction.

Where did she go? What is his duty? So if you reduce these large questions to a simple middle class notions of morality, it may satisfy us because we're putting down a prominent man and a man in power or something. I think we're not being particularly wise. The second part of it is the tribalization.

If we don't have the capacity, even as we retain our political autonomy to decide what we want or whom we want, that is our choice. But if we can't view each individual decision or policy in terms of the evidence, logic and the collective good or collective bad it will bring about. If you do something and I love you and you're always right and if I don't like you, you're always wrong. I think that's a very dangerous thing and that's happening not only in India and much of the world today. It's 1 of the most distressing things in this day and age.

I don't have the answer. I think all we can do is people like you and I consistently uphold certain principles and have some first principles around which you build your philosophy and your ideas and don't compromise on that and hope that eventually people will wake up and realize what is in their best interest. It's not a question of moralities, it's a question of people recognizing what is in their best interest?

A couple of related questions. And 1 is a question of ends versus means. On the 1 hand, I completely agree with you that politics involves all kinds of uneasy compromises, you do what you can to kind of make the system run. And sometimes you're making the system run as Narsimha Rao indeed did for the good of the people, you know, the 91 liberalization helped hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It's a massive humanitarian good.

And, you know, politics involves making compromises and doing certain things. But the danger there is that we can use that kind of thinking to then lose all sense of principles in terms of, you know, it's a means versus end thing.

I hear you. I hear you. But My broader point is that the grand question of means versus sense is a very rare but vital issue. If everything is reduced to that, then you're going to moral absolutism. You want to be a Mahatma Gandhi.

I think It's impossible to run a society if you are a Mahatma Gandhi. Reconciliation of conflicting interests is the very essence of politics. Whereas, in the moral certainties of means, you don't have that reconciliation of conflicting interests. And you cannot reduce a large number of views and dreams of multitudes of people into good and bad. There's no good or there's no bad.

That's the way they believe. And there's a society. And there is diversity. And there is democracy. If you believe in that, you cannot simply say this is right and I don't care what you want, then why democracy?

There's going to be a gradual evolution even if there are some things which are obviously right in the light of cold light of history. When history was actually happening, nobody knew what was right, what was wrong. So unless you have the capacity to reconcile conflicting interests, if you reduce everything to moral absolutism, supposing your own judgment is flawed, then who is going to save the society from you? So yes, I do agree about the means and ends question and fundamental like Hitler doing what he did, like emergency being imposed and converting the country into a jail. But if everything is reduced to such moral absolutism, I think a society will be poorly served.

Even Lincoln, 1 of the historic figures I admire, I love him. I'm sure many people would realize 1864 election was actually sort of rigged. And in the midst of civil war, His Secretary of State, though Secretary of State was almost like Prime Minister of the country, he gave leave to all the soldiers on the front because he was very popular with the soldiers. He brought them back to vote. He did many things and Lincoln actually laughed.

If Seward is given a choice, he would not allow the people to vote. So, no, this moral absolutism and the notion that everything is reduced to means and ends is not a wise thing. This is not a call for immorality in life. This is a call for a deeper perspective that there is a hierarchy of principles. That's the best thing I can say.

Anil Roy My friend and someone you know as well, Barun Mitra would, you know, keeps talking about Gandhi and means and ends in exactly this context. And I completely agree with your wise words about moral absolutism and about how 1 can go too far. At the same time, there is the worry that politics can then become just a game of negotiating these conflicting interests with no other principles in play to constrain you or to guide you. Because it's easy for, for example, it's easy for you and me to say, okay, what is a higher purpose? Economic growth is a higher purpose.

It'll get people out of poverty XYZ. We could name 3, 4 higher purposes, but those would be our subjective views on what is a higher purpose, what is an end for which we can disregard the means. Somebody else could say Hindu Rashtra is a higher purpose and therefore we should disregard means for that and so on and so forth. And I think Varun's argument probably would be that fine if you don't treat means versus ends as if you're saying only apply it in extreme situations like Hitler or Mao or whatever, you know, but then the other danger is you don't apply it at all and therefore principles don't matter at all.

I don't think it's a binary. Again, look at Lincoln. Lincoln, I think, had tremendous clarity about what kind of a world he wanted to help create and what kind of a society he wanted to create in his own country. But as the film Lincoln demonstrated, certainly certain means were used which were not always the perfect ones. I think while this question is germane, in most occasions we actually know when the means adopted, even if they are not technically legal or very moral.

There's a higher purpose which is much greater and it's not really earth-shaking. We are only oversimplifying issues. That's the reason why political scientists often say idealists do more damage than pragmatists. After all, what was Hitler? He was an idealist.

But couldn't it also be said that idealists have the greatest chance of affecting positive change than do pragmatists? Because what were the American founders, for example, you know,

they were pragmatists. They were the ultimate pragmatist. They never trusted anybody with power. That's why they created a federal government which fought against itself. They understood human nature as opposed to somebody like Mahatma Gandhi for instance.

I think they were pragmatic when it came to the design of the state and accepting that human nature is a certain way so you have to constrain those in power. But they were idealist when it came to the question of independence itself and designing what they felt would be an ideal system.

No, basically I don't think we're really looking at a binary. You, the way you conduct yourself is your personal choice. I think in that a leader must be as moral as humanly possible. But in public affairs you cannot take an extreme view without regard to the circumstances. That's why probably a soldier of fortune who really had no pretensions of idealism like Napoleon, he did more good to Europe than a great idealist like Hitler, the kind of damage he did, or take Mao Zedong, or take the Leninists for instance, they were all great idealists.

But imagine the amount of harm they had done to their societies. Whereas Deng Xiaoping, a pragmatist who transformed China and perhaps the world. And to me, Deng Xiaoping is a great hero. It is not an argument for immoral conduct. It is a recognition that we are very limited in our understanding the human dreams and human aspirations and incentives and we have to reconcile conflict interests and we have to drive a large mass of people, multitudes of people with their own dreams, their own desires, their own beliefs, their own attitudes in a direction that is broadly the right 1.

Yes, your question is right. If the direction itself is wrong, then what is the alternative? I think that is where constitution and the broader vision of society, they matter. In a country like India, or perhaps in the United States, and many other countries, if the broad constitutional goal is what you are propelling, and in the process there is some means and ends question, you actually focus on the ends rather than the temporary means, I think we are okay. But if you want to completely invert this picture, that is when the danger arises.

I think that's where the fundamental law of the land is so important. Or a broad consensus in the society as to exactly what kind of society they want. But once that is set, I don't think that absolute morality is the right issue. That's The reason why many of us are not good politicians. I know I am not fit for politics.

I have great respect for politics. I'm 1 of the few in India who never reviled politics, always called politics a noble endeavor. I'm not fit for politics because I don't know how to reconcile conflicting interests because despite my intellectual understanding, my own middle class morality does not allow me to compromise. And it's not a very wise thing.

I agree with you that politics is a noble endeavor in theory, but Are you saying it's not a noble and a variant practice necessarily? No.

You see, the nobility comes from reconciling conflicting interests creatively. It comes from reconciling the short-term goals with the long-term good, short-term satisfaction with the long-term good. And it comes from reconciling the individual and the community. To the extent that the political process achieves these 3 objectives, it's extraordinarily noble because without that, societies cannot survive. But if it's a quest for power without purpose then all nobility ceases.

And unfortunately increasingly we see in many parts of the world and definitely in large parts of India the quest for power is the only purpose of politics. And that's where the nobility part is in serious question.

Isn't it inevitable that the quest for power would be the dominating incentive in a country like India, where power is so centralized in the state and where for decades, in fact, it was the 1 way of getting ahead by being part of the state in some way by being a rent seeker yourself by being a babu.

I hear you I think even obviously the economic policies we chose sadly were a disaster for the country but even before that I think culturally I'm a great believer that our society has tremendous strengths. I admire our society with all its imperfections. I believe without those strengths, India would have been in a thoroughgoing mess. Having said that, culturally, I think we have an incredible weakness. We have not adequately understood or addressed.

The lust for recognition, visibility, relevance, and power without purpose is intrinsic to our society, not to merely politicians and bureaucrats. I remember years ago, I was in a village in Karnataka. I don't know if we had this conversation or not. Local serpent in a backward village, very poor village. He came in the evening to meet my extended family.

And then it was my son became, I got elected as a lineman in electricity board. Good congratulations. Then he said they're asking for a bribe. I need to pay a bribe. I don't have money.

I need some help". Now, the morality of bribe giving, bribe taking, that discussion, let's leave it aside. I asked him, you got elected as a Sarpanch a few months ago. Your son needs some help and you're not in a position to provide because of your own means issue, apart from the morality question. How much would you spend for the election?" He said, serve 10 lakh rupees.

I said, why would you spend that kind of money? There's no power in this office or ornamental. There's no money. It's a small interior village in the backward area. You can't afford a way to spend.

The answer he gave me was so accurate and so expressive. He said, Unmadham sir, Unmadham. He put both his hands on the head and this Unmadham, in Kannada, the word Unmadham, which is Sanskrit word, they actually habitually use it. I think it's the most graphic explanation of what's happening in India. It's not really about corruption.

There is this desperate yearning for recognition and visibility and relevance, which is, I think, intrinsic to the whole society. And that is destroying our politics. Having said that, the point you made, The initial choices we made, 3 of them in particular, are choices we did not make. The first is the socialist mumbo-jumbo, license, permit, quota, without understanding the meaning of socialism, without enhancing human capabilities, the state control and taking away the autonomy of the individual and the economic freedom did immense damage to the country. There's no question about it and our psyche.

The second is the centralization of power. We never institutionalized local governments. Ambedkar had deep suspicion of local governments because he thought casted in villages, the domination of the false elites will continue. He was right, but he did not have the imagination and others did not have the energy to look at an alternative model where you combine existing villages, a large number of villages, so that the traditional notion of a village with caste fragmentation and segregation that will disappear as a political unit and you force a bigger unit to come together. So instead of finding that kind of resolution, they lip sympathy.

Typical Indian compromise of directive principles and the 73rd, 74th amendments in my judgment are a disaster. I am 1 of the few who openly says that over-structured, underpowered, bogus thing which is a great fraud on the people of India, well-meaning. I'm sure the people who designed it are well-meaning, but it ultimately proved to be a fraud. That made democracy irrelevant. It's all, it's namesake, it's notional, it's just vote and shout.

Third is rule of law. At least if there's rule of law, genuine rule of law, so that no matter how mighty you think you are, you're still accountable, then power probably would not have been so important. The lure of power, the glamour of power would have been diminished. Then or now, we don't have rule of law. Well, we committed mistakes, we have to set them right.

But we have to also recognize the reason why we have to institutionalize these 3, economic freedom, decentralization and rule of law. They're relevant in Indian society, but in India, particularly so because culturally we are prone to finding some place to try and dominate or to find relevance. It's a very special cultural trait. I've seen in the Netherlands, my first visit abroad way back in 91 or

90,

I was visiting cooperative banks, Rabobank Netherlands, a very famous cooperative bank. I was astounded to discover 2 things at the grassroots level. 1 of the greatest banks in the world, when the president's position is vacant, you have to go and persuade Amit Verma or somebody bright and competent whom you trust to come and take over that position. And they say, look, my own personal dreams, I want to retire, I have to take care of my family, my business is important, etc. And other people pursue them saying, you are the best man for the job, please, and we'll also assist you, etc.

Whereas in Andhra Pradesh at the time, there were 1 crore members of the cooperative banks. Most of them are silent members. Somebody paid money for them to become members. And they queue up like in a general election. And every Tom, Dick and Harry who doesn't understand any financial management or cooperative, would contest.

And the election is fierce and camps are run, people are bought and sold. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The second thing that bank I noticed is out of 24 or so members of the governing board at the apex level,

23

were from the ruling party's political background, ruling combined's political background. 1 was from the opposition background. When there was a vacancy in the chairmanship of the bank, and that happens only once in

15, 20

years, 24 of them unanimously chose the opposition bank. I was astounded. But Tuned as we are to Indian culture of politics, it was a shocker to me. I asked them, what did you do? They said, a political ideology is a different matter.

On that we will never compromise. But in managing this bank, understanding money, understanding the way of the future, he is the best. Our interests are safe in his hands. I don't think in India it's likely to happen for the next 30-40 years. So there's something cultural, more than individual politicians and bureaucrats.

It is a sad recognition because I relish the strength of our society, but I think we also must understand some of our serious failings.

So I have 3 big related questions to this and the first of them is sort of double clicking on this aspect of culture where I always feel that we can get fatalistic about culture also and say that XYZ is culture, what are we to do, this is how it is. But often I think is useful to look at institutions and structures and that they determine culture more than we realize. And I feel that what you have correctly pointed out is this Indian tendency, the desire for the Pagri, the desire for recognition. 1 of my friends, when she joined the civil services, she said another batchmate of hers who had joined the IAS, who came from a village was saying that I will go to the village by putting a red light on the car.

I remember when I removed it from the official car when I took a new job, the resistance was from a driver and from my dafidaar. I mean, how can this happen? Exactly, so you are an outlier there.

And my sense is that the reason that there is this desperate quest for recognition among us or some kind of power is that is because of poverty is because of the extreme scarcity we face that when we cannot get self actualization and other ways, it is, this is all that is left. It is it then becomes incredibly tempting in the same way that I keep going back to how you know, the reason we often seem to have such a rent seeking mentality is because for decades, there was no other way to make money or gain power, but use the mechanisms of the state and use some of that power, whether as a crony or as part of the state to actually take advantage of that. So I think a lot of this has to do with a, the institutions or the absence of them, and b, just that structural thing of if you are in extreme poverty, it kind of, because what you want the most is what you lack the most. No, that broader point you made is absolutely valid. That culture cannot be isolated.

It's not genetic.

It is institution except there's a long term institutional thing. Decades, generations, sometimes centuries. That's the only difference. I totally agree with you. Why it happened in India?

I don't have a ready answer which is, we can guess probably colonialism and recognition suddenly a culture which is technologically advanced and much better organized has taken over and therefore that is our aspiration, the British bureaucrat or even a policeman or an official or somebody. And therefore, the whole society desperately seeking public office for recognition and perhaps even wealth in that time. And post-independence, this whole economic mess. But I think scholars and historians who understand society much more must gather evidence. But it happened over time.

I don't know if it was part of Indian ethos in ancient India. I have no real understanding of that, but it is what little I've read, I have not got the sense of it. But definitely colonial India, you see the literature, like Kanyasulkam in Telugu, 1 of the masterly free ties, a fantastic play by Gurjar Apparao, It clearly demonstrates the mentality of the citizens in the colonial era, the worship of power and so on and so forth. But precisely for the reason you stated, that institutions reinvent culture or reshape it. The 3 things that I mentioned should have been institutionalized.

That's the reason why American founding fathers were pragmatic, understood human nature. Our founding fathers were romantic in a broad measure. Except the grand institutions, the election commission, some of the good things they have done In making democracy work, actually what makes an illiterate people without any serious proximate experience of democracy? I had some Chola experience, Uttaramira inscription a thousand years ago, and Licchavis and others, the republics, 2, 500 years ago. But in a broader sense, democratic experience was alien to us for centuries.

In such a society without education, without literacy, without economic ability, to pretend that vote and shouted work is nonsensical. I think our leaders were not mindful of that. They thought we are good people and we will govern well and people like us will come, they will govern well, things will be automatically good. They never realized that people must be prepared for democracy and that means local government. They never realized that power should be held to account, that means rule of law.

They never realized that economic freedom and therefore economic growth are important engines of democratization of society, and therefore they simply fell for the Stalinist model. And These 3 indicate that our leaders were great people, but their judgment was extremely faulty. Of course, it's in the cold light of history, it's easy for us to make that judgment.

So, I did a recent episode with Subhashish Bhadra, who's written a book called KH Tiger, very talented young intellectual. Do listen to the episode and read the book. I'll send you the link. And Subhashish made a really interesting point, which I found a very wise point and I knew it in the context of India, but I hadn't thought about it enough to realize that it applies everywhere. And what he talks about is that every time a constitution was made or the principles of a republic were laid down, it was contingent on those circumstances in those times.

For example, the American founders were rebelling against an alien taxation regime, for example, for the Boston Tea party. And everything that they designed was based on the values that mattered to them in that moment. And similarly, if you look at our founders, like let's talk about all 3 of the failures that you mentioned. The first failure is the statist slash socialist model of government. Now, much as you and I can look back and understand the damage it has done, and perhaps if you transplant us into that time, we'd say no, no, these are the principles, this is why it won't work.

But at that time, it was a that kind of socialism was a fashion of the times. No 1 knew how bad the Soviet Union was. And also capitalism was associated with colonialism because it is after all the East India Company, which came in and did what they did. So all the attitudes came from there. Nehru once famously said to JRD Tata, do not speak to me of profit, profit is a dirty word, and so on and so forth.

So for that reason, it's wrong, but it's understandable. As far as the centralization of power is concerned, at the time that the constitution was being framed, the country was falling apart, no 1 knew if the center would hold. It certainly did not look anything like the lines on the map today. That was really, you know, the effort of what I call fast track colonization that Siddharth Patel and VP Menon did to, you know, and all the means that they used to make those lines on a map happen. But when you did not know whether or not the center would hold, it made sense to centralize a lot of power.

And especially also if you consider, you know, Ambedkar's recognition of the realities of villages as dens of ignorance, apathy, etc, etc. You get where he's coming from. You can now take the broader view looking back that you can add that nuance that it could have been federations of villages and all of that. But at that time, 1 can understand where he's coming from. And as far as a rule of law also is concerned, what we did was we create, we took over the British colonial system where the idea of a policeman was someone who will control the people.

You know, it was a mechanism of oppression. And we just took that over. Now, instead of white rulers, we had brown rulers, but it's the same mechanism of oppression, where your policeman is not serving you. He is a maiba. You know, I think in the last episode, you correctly said that the lowest constable, you know, can treat 99% of the population as if they are mendicants, right?

We should not be the case, they should be serving us, You know, the most senior police officer should have to serve every citizen of the country because you know, you're in service of them. And all of these in a sense are circumstantial. And the larger question that I'm coming to, which I asked Subhashish in a different context as well, and there's really no satisfactory answer to it. But the thing is, on the 1 hand, I completely agree with what you said earlier about the need to proceed with caution to not have revolutionary change. I mean, look at what happened to the French Revolution.

So you need to proceed with caution in a Burkean kind of way, gradual, you know, gradualism, step by step in a small way. But the thing is that every few decades, something as dramatic as a constitution, the making of a constitution comes about, it shatters everything. And there is no gradualistic way to change it. Only another revolution or a civil war and perhaps that will happen during delimitation. Who knows?

We can talk about that later, but only something dramatic and drastic can change that. And what was born in that moment of violence, you know, is something that we all have to live with, which are these 3 realities of the Indian state that you laid out. And, you know, and you can make changes of the margins, but you can't sort of change it fundamentally. And I don't have an answer. I'm not advocating revolution, because obviously, that will take us into the stone age and especially because you and I won't get a say anyway.

The revolutionaries will be people who want something different.

First of all, this is more to learn from the past mistakes rather than throw the blame on somebody. Because our founders did a fantastic job. The fact that they actually envisaged and dreamt of a republic with such diversity and poverty and tradition is a miracle and that they made it work is a greater miracle. So, this is more about nuances. They could have done it, but it's not really about what they had done or had not done.

What we should be doing now, why are we not doing? It's a challenge to us. 75 years is a long time. The second point you made, while I broadly agree, yes, obviously, great men and women, they were creatures of their circumstances and therefore, they made some judgments. The point you made about India, center of hold or not and therefore, the desire to centralize, that was largely true about union and states.

I don't think that was true about local governments. If anything, to make sure that the states don't go out of control, the best way is to have a check on them through local governments. But that's a more finer point. The broader point is, why are you not learning lessons from them? What has happened is, subsequently, the institutionalized players, the legislator at the state level, the civil servant who has become at 1 level subservient to political masters and another level tin pot dictator in dealing with the people.

They found the status quo Very beautiful, very advantageous to them. And both the MLA and the official are opposed to decentralization. Economic liberalization happened more out of compulsion than conviction, though a significant number of elites were convinced, and therefore it became somewhat easy, and we have the genius to accommodate when the time came, though we're not doing it fully or even now there are a lot of unfinished tasks. Rule of law, again, those in power do not feel the pain of it. We are making it an issue of either human rights or some elite notions of law, we're forgetting it's about ordinary people.

Absence of rule of law does not affect the rich and the powerful much. It's more an emotional intellectual thing. Absence of rule of law affects the poor every day. Somebody who collects a hafta because you simply go in the morning at 5 o'clock in KBR Park where you go for walking and you woke up at maybe 3 o'clock in the morning and then you commuted to the central market bought some goods with the thousand rupees that you have. You came there in that cold or rain or whatever.

And then if a VIP comes, it's closed. If there's rain, it's closed. And you go through all that risk. And then a policeman or somebody comes and says, if you don't give me this after, I'll make your life miserable. That is rule of lottomy.

And that we have not figured it out even today. And we're only playing games. And even in the larger political discourse, when the those in opposition in states of the union, they attack those in power quite rightly. I don't hear 1 person or 1 party saying, this must be set right. They're only saying, you are abusing power, let me come there, I'll abuse it.

I'll teach you a lesson. That's very deeply disturbing. And unless we raise a voice consistently, beyond parties, I don't think there's a hope. We're polarizing it so much now. In the last 24 or 48 hours I watched an alleged debate on what will happen in 2020 or

2024

on a major channel. They're all very wise people and unlike other debates this was without any polemics because these are all non-politicians, mostly senior journalists. They all spoke sense and calmly. What is shocking is not 1 person raised any issue of relevance to the people. It's all about which party will combine with whom and who will win, who will lose.

Nothing to do with people. And in a country beset with so many crises and problems and challenges, I find it shocking, forget the politicians, that The elites have no concern about what's actually going to happen in respect to who is going to be in power. I'm not an angry man, not anymore. I don't judge people very harshly, but I find it very offensive that we have serious political debate totally unrelated to human lives. I don't understand what is politics if it doesn't touch human lives.

The education of children, which they don't get, despite spending enormous money. The healthcare that most people don't have access and people become poor in India annually, they sink into poverty, they sink into poverty because there's no healthcare access. The absence of rule of law, the economic growth which is so incredibly important to lift people out of poverty, not 1 issue even peripherally mentioned. In that sense, I think there's a great tragedy enveloping. A political game has become a cynical who is there 1 day, 1 very imminent public figure, occupied high constitutional office.

I was fulminating like this at a particular moment in history, this was probably 1991-92, around that time. He said, Jai Prakash, you're always worried about constitution, people, democracy, etc. And in a moment of weakness he said this. He said, you know, in the corridors of power, all that matters is who is in, who is out. It was a very stark revelation.

I was stunned. But I think he was incredibly right. In a moment of candor and honesty, he stated the truth. I don't think we should accept that. I don't think the people should accept that.

So I have 3 digressive questions from this before we go to the larger third question I wanted to ask as a question to the something you said earlier. And the first of them is you said you're not an angry man anymore so why is that when did the anger go was it the futility of anger or was it a lack of energy or

no it's a recognition that anger corrodes you unless you channel it constructively and creatively it's a wasted emotion you have only this much energy

did you feel it corroding you

if I am angry it will corrode me by simply I channelize it all the time I channelize it

But was there a time when you were angry?

Yes, as a younger man, I was much more angry. Until much later, in fact, I could not tolerate a corrupt man. See I had something to do with the Right to Information Act along with some of the colleagues. People regard me as 1 of the people who fought against corruption. So inevitably a Lokayukta is there.

I am made to sit next to them in an event or information commissioner or somebody. When I know their individual proclivities as a former judge or chief justice or something else as an official, how incredibly corrupt they were, I found it impossible to sit next to them and then maintain equanimity. Now I don't care. So, that's the way it is, but it doesn't matter. Let's not waste my energy and emotion on that and worry about what this man has done earlier, why am I sitting next to him, etc.

But focus on what needs to be done. And even if a corrupt and bad fellow does some good thing, encourage him to do that. Negotiate with him. I remember the first citizens' charter in India, which came by an executive order on the participation in municipalities. A thoroughly corrupt public official signed it finally.

I actually wrote a column praising him, knowing fully his anticellence because I don't care about his anticellence. In this case, he did well and therefore, if I show my recognition and appreciation, Maybe that will make better things happen. So, I channelize my anger now. Ultimately, do I get something out of it for the people?

There's this old saying about how the world is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. So, have you started feeling less and thinking more?

That I don't know, but no, certainly you must have a sense of humor. In the midst of all this, if you don't have a sense of humor, if you don't laugh at human failings and foibles, life becomes very, very painful, personally. Apart from us being much less productive. So here's my second question and

it's kind of a two-part question and part 1 is that you spoke about these elites who were analyzing election kya hoga, this coalition, that coalition, this vote bank, that vote bank but not actually touching on the issues.

Not even peripherally. I mean, it is some of them I like them.

So first question about the elites, which is that, are they overrated and irrelevant? Is it all just this drama that is playing out in TV studios and social media and all of that and are they so removed from the real world that it doesn't even matter?

Obviously, they don't. But that's not the right thing. Because ultimately, in a democracy in a modern sense, the media should shape attitudes, should set the agenda. And without the oxygen of publicity and media attention, sensible politics cannot work. If they completely deflect themselves and indulge in this luxury, in this very dangerous pastime, they're irrelevant, but they're doing immense damage to the country because there's no other mechanism.

How else do you conscientize people? How else do you convert the people's day-to-day concerns into tangible program of action? How else do people see the causal relationship? What else is the mechanism available? That is my concern.

I don't care whether they're relevant or not. But I care that the people are becoming relevant in the process.

That the media is failing. When COVID started, I wrote this column about how there are 2 ongoing disasters and 1 is COVID. And I said, okay, it's a medical disaster. We'll figure it out. We'll come out of it on the other side.

I mean, God knows how early days April 2020, I had no idea either. But I said it is a disaster, we'll come out of it. But the second ongoing disaster was a disaster of the failure of the Indian state, according to me, where we have normalized all of that. Like I gave figures like, okay, so many children die, so many thousands of children die every day of starvation. This percentage of children born are malnourished.

There are so many things going wrong that if a natural disaster caused any of that, if a natural disaster caused 8000 children to die, the whole world would come to our aid and it would be a calamity and all the news channels would be talking about nothing else. But these are dispersed across the country. It's been it's an ongoing disaster for 70 something years still ongoing to this current date. And we completely normalize it. And it seems to me that this therefore holds not just to the elites you speak of who are literally blind to this stuff, not just to the media, who are looking for more sensationalistic immediate things which can be pinned down, but even to some extent to the people who then become apathetic and perhaps fatalistic about all of this.

So they don't think of governance in a larger sense. In any case, in our last conversation, we spoke about the disconnect between power and accountability, that the ordinary citizen knows that his vote doesn't really affect anything anyway. So that can lead to a kind of apathy where to the extent that good things can happen to you directly like welfare schemes or whatever, to that extent you're willing to exercise your vote, but otherwise it's expressive, it's tribalistic, it's like going to a Manchester United match.

More than apathy, 1 thing happened, because the Indian state did not pay attention to these things, it seduced people into believing that it's no longer the state's responsibility. Therefore, when a catastrophe, a very visible thing we can't ignore happens, then we pay attention for a couple of days, new cycle, and that also about who is right, who is wrong and blame throwing. I still remember vividly after, I think within months after the current UP government came to office the first time, Gorakhpur, I think, his own district perhaps, there were several deaths of children in a hospital. There was big talk about it in the country. At that time, 2, 000 children were dying every single day in this country.

Almost all of them were preventable deaths, 2000 a day. The whole media and the political system pretended as if these 100 alone are the deaths which is a tragedy in the country and it's all about Gorakhpur. A particular party or a chief minister or an officer or somebody else and that's it. Years before that, I remember in Ahmedabad, a district judge gave warrants for the arrest of Abdul Kalam and 2 other prominent names. He did not even bother to check who are the names.

Somebody gave fictitious things deliberately to expose the system. And the then President of India and 2 other names, warrants were issued. An issue came to light, the Supreme Court said, we'll go into the bottom of it as if the corruption or inefficiency of a particular judge is the central issue and it's not systemic or endemic. So this pretends that we are doing something dramatic without actually either recognizing the problem or addressing it. I think it is institutionalized in the, again, the ruling elites of the country, which I find it very deeply offensive.

So, Frinko actually said at that time, you know, we'll go to the bottom of this particular church, what happened? And everybody who has any understanding of the judiciary in the country knows it's habitually happening every day in the country. And therefore, I think we have to somehow refocus on things that matter. And they're not many things, they're not a thousand things. Apart from the 3 things we mentioned, all that matters is education quality.

India has appallingly poor quality education. In a global survey, I'm sure some of the other interactions we've had, PISA survey way back in 2009, India ranked 72nd and 73rd respectively, because 2 states, 2 entities were participating in that. Thank God there was a country called Kyrgyzstan in that list, and therefore we narrowly missed the ignominy of being the last country. You know, when some of us started talking about it as loudly as was possible to the extent that our voice would be heard. At least some people got to know about it.

You know, the government's response? I hope that the government would look at it. In a country where there's so much of demand for education, even the poor are spending disproportionate sums to get education for their children. Society values education. Government is spending a lot of money on education.

In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, we're spending 70, 000-80, 000 rupees per child per year, which is not a small change in a country like India. So it's not because of anybody's deliberate act. It's just there's a common neglect, not enough understanding of what needs to be done. I hope that there will be a search of that, the reasons and the solutions. You know what the government's response was?

Henceforth, India shall not participate in PISA survey. Since then, until today, 14 years later, India did not participate. And which are the countries number 1 and number 2, number 3 in that list? China, Hong Kong, China, Singapore. Part of It is this quest for power without a purpose and the media completely ignoring their duty and the so-called intelligentsia and others really not figuring out what matters in a country like India.

Part of it, I hesitate to say this because I don't believe in conspiracies. There is an unspoken elite conspiracy that if every child gets the same opportunity as my child, then my God, how will my child flourish? I don't think it is a conscious 1. And I'm, as I said, hesitating to say this, but I find it deeply offensive because I went to a village school, a Telugu medium school, a government school. The contrast between then and now, whatever be the deficiencies then, the society cared to educate its children, give real meaningful education.

Today kids going to the same school I think have no future and that we are not bothered about it. It doesn't trouble us. It doesn't drive us to a frenzy and anger and action. I don't know what else will I don't know what else is more moral than this.

There's a film I forget the name in which Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan are having a bath and obviously they're having a bath naked though the camera doesn't show all that but they're naked in the bathroom and then the door opens and a woman comes in, I forget who, 1 of the heroines and instead of covering their crotches, both of them immediately cover their eyes. And to me it seemed like the government saying we won't participate in PISA anymore. Seems

exactly that.

My next question is kind of my third of the smaller 3 questions of third of the bigger 3 questions will come late. But the third of the smaller 3 questions is this that you spoke about looking at the past not to assign blame, but to learn lessons from them. Now, the question that obviously comes up is that, okay, we'll learn the lessons, but who will implement it? Because those who will implement it actually have the most to lose because they are benefiting the most from the current system, that is where they are in power. And I can break this down into 2 parts.

That 1 is that some of the larger structural reforms, like the centralization of power and so on, are problematic because the people who have to change that are the people who are benefiting from it, why should they do it? But some of the smaller problems like the power that the ordinary policeman has over the citizen, for example, is something that can be reformed without necessarily affecting the people who are taking that decision to reform it. You know, and I'm just taking 2 examples of categories, but I'm guessing there is 1 category of problem where the incentives are clearly against the politician in power changing them and therefore it is hard to make that case to them because you can't really appeal to the self-interest. But there is another category of problem. And as you point out, many people who are in politics and who are bureaucrats today are people of the finest intellect.

You know, whatever their incentives might be, they're good people, they want to do good things, they understand the problems and so on and so forth. Why can't we solve that second category? Start with like, what has your experience been? Because you have interacted with top politicians, you've interacted with bureaucrats, what has your experience been about a the understanding of the issues that we are faced with and b you know what gets in the way of the smaller ones being sorted out is a sluggish nature of the Indian state as it were also a huge intractable problem. I think

inertia is the biggest problem. It's not so much malice or conspiracy. There are 2 positive factors. I think in the large part, most of the politicians and quite a few of the professional public servants actually want to do something good. I don't believe they're all villainous, evil, bad people.

This is a very caricature, Hindi film, big, great Hindi, orthodox film caricature. The second is, I believe actually if they do it smartly, there are political incentives and some people on occasion are discovering it and getting the benefits. Rajasekhar Reddy, as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, he understood the power of vote to provide at least some elements of healthcare or a history program and EMRI, you know, this 108 and then emergency response. Narendra Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat used the EMRI and he was 1 of the greatest supporters and got the political benefit. But only bits and pieces.

1 bright doctor of Indian origin got training in the UK and then moved to the US. He asked me once in the US, why is healthcare not a political issue in India? Because there are so many words in that. I asked the same question. Actually, there are so many words in that.

I think there's a lack of imagination because you're used to a certain way of doing things. Most of us simply go in that track, go with the flow without actually re-engineering it. Occasionally, somebody does it, but only in part because, again, in the absence of the overarching debate and discussion and a set of solutions emerging, at least in the public domain, it's very difficult for the political parties to themselves take on the task of actually innovating. We see innovation comes in terms of ideas, the party can pick it up, and the media can be the conduit. When both those things fail, occasionally by intuition or some accident, some politician may pick up something and make it work, but it does not become systemic enough to make a big impact.

But I believe there is hope. I believe there is hope because, for instance, take the national education policy. On the whole, it's a sound policy, but in a large federal system with diversity, to make it happen for 260 million school kids and about 40 million college kids in India, each of them would be a huge nation. It's going to take time and effort, but we must be constantizing, must make it central issues. Too many priorities will destroy things.

Any government or any official who has more than 3 or 4 priorities has no priorities at all.

Wow, wise words. Let me double down on the phrase lack of imagination because 1 thing I have often wondered about is do our political, are our opposition political parties in this moment showing a lack of imagination and I assess in 2 ways. 100% 100%

there is so much to attack the government and to show the way. All you can think of is the ugliness all around.

Yeah, And I was thinking of really 2 dimensions across which I wanted to ask this. And 1 was that we constantly see other parties doing what might be called a certain kind of soft Hindutva, you know, whether it's the Hanuman Chalisa of the Aam Aadmi Party or even the Gandhi's going to temples and all of that and 1 argument and 1 possible reason for that could be that they have realized that that is a non-negotiable. So we are stuck with it. The other possibility could be as some of the defenders say that they don't want the Hindu part of it to be something they are contesting. So they are saying we are also equally Hindu and then we'll contest on the other margins.

And that's 1 way of looking at it. But to me, it's the certain kind of pandering to that vote base, which I feel is short sighted. And the other aspect of it is when I compare the political marketplace with an actual marketplace. Now in an actual marketplace, which is functioning like a free market where, you know, there is ease of entry and so on, What would typically happen is that if anyone within that marketplace shows a lack of imagination, a newcomer will enter that marketplace and disrupt them completely and wipe them out. So you have Kodak completely getting wiped out because they don't invest in digital early enough.

You have Nokia getting wiped out when you know the iPhone comes and the other Android based phones comes and so on and so forth. That's what happens in a real marketplace. But this marketplace is because of all kinds of structural reasons that ease of entry isn't really there. First within a part within our parties, you don't have inner party democracy, you've already got to be connected in deep ways or deep pocketed to even have an entry into the party in the first place. And for a new party to come in, though Aam Aadmi Party, much as I don't like them, but they did a tremendous job of showing what political entrepreneurship actually can do in a limited marketplace like Delhi.

But, you know, and to me that seems another factor that I refuse to accept that like on the 1 hand, I would say everyone in the market understands the pulse of the consumer better than anyone else. That's why they're there. That's why they're succeeding. But I refuse to accept that what the political parties of India currently perceive as a people's will is actually the people's will. My sense is that no, people want many more things like these fundamental things like healthcare and rule of law and all of that.

But there is no 1 there to fight for it and articulate it and so on. And there's a lack of imagination.

You're absolutely right. It's an oligopoly created by the perversions of the system. There's no real marketplace in politics. And there is simply no possibility of realistic entries, a huge entry barrier within the party internal democracy systemic because it was past the post system you're absolutely bang on target I genuinely hope I normally don't talk of party politics or anything whatever the other flaws I hope and expected Mr. Narendra Modi to take the transformation of Indian politics seriously.

Because after all, a man who chose at a very young age to do something bigger than himself, you like it or don't like it, it's a different matter. But there's a cause bigger than himself and devoted, dedicated. That's the life of simplicity and a very Spartan life. And obviously, cares for the greatness of India in his own vision, etc. And anybody who understands a bit of India, recognizes the pain inflicted by politics of India today as they are and how to transform it must be central issue.

But apparently, either because there's not enough mind space to go into other things and he thought economic management and then strengthening his own base and so on and so forth are important. Or because increasingly those in power feel that status quo is beneficial to them. I do not know what exactly the reason. That seems not to be happening. But 1 day if we don't address that, I don't see how greatness of India, even if that is your goal, for me and you, better lives and better society, but even greatness of India, there's nothing wrong with that, that goal.

I don't see how that's going to be accomplished. But that apart, now the challenge is, how do you make our political system address the concerns of India and yet be politically competitive? Take the current opposition. Let me continue this train. Obviously, nature abhors a vacuum, politics should abhor a vacuum and you cannot allow monopoly of power.

Whether it's Congress earlier or some other party now, BJP, healthy political competition is good for the health of democracy, there's no question about it. Even if soft Hindutva is not what is embraced all the time by the opposition today, they are now taking the easy recourse to short-term individual welfare measures, which are necessary. If in the United States, somebody like Joe Biden gives loan waivers and puts a lot of money into people's pockets, I mean, democracy ultimately has to also satisfy the voters. But if they don't see, put it in perspective and don't see the need for balancing the short-term individual welfare measures with the long-term economic growth prospects and how to bring them together and how to make people ready for that. If they don't understand that, it's a colossal tragedy for India.

That's not happening. Not only are they... Take Karnataka, the 5 guarantees that are offered, I'm not even questioning them. If they are mixed with what should happen to Karnataka's long-term economic growth and what is wrong with the model from their point of view, if there is something wrong with it, politically they are saying, we'll put an alternative, I would have been very happy. Nothing of the kind.

Pre-election and post-election, they're only hopping on that. And on top of it, now they're saying it's not even about the people, it's about a small section of the organized section of the vocal people, the government employees who have immense power and money and collective bargaining power. You are now yielding to their pressure at the cost of the 97% of the people to resort to unfunded, open-ended pension system, which was given up 19 years ago in India quite rightly and everybody agreed. And today we are going back because the parties are so weak, so anemic, they cannot withstand the pressure of 3% of the workforce of India. It's a disgrace.

If this is alternative politics, then I think it's a tragedy. If you cannot imagine a better life for people, if you cannot identify an agenda that actually makes things different and if you cannot attack the governing system today for their failings, and there are many failings we discussed, education, healthcare, rule of law, decentralization and the political system itself, if you have enough imagination to look at that and a hundred other things. If you cannot address that and all you can think of is, I will buy the vote either the money, which everybody is buying now, I'll give a thousand rupees. Karnataka is a thousand, 2000 rupees per vote. So, in the case of Andhra Pradesh or Telangana with Tamil Nadu and other states are following suit.

Or I will simply indulge in short-term freebies. Even that is okay because they go to the large number of the poor people and they deserve some help or the other. And you can always withdraw it if you find it not feasible tomorrow. There's no irrevocable legal guarantee or anything like that. And you can provide something else.

But irrevocable legal guarantee to a people who don't deserve it. When there's unilateral contract that post 2004, there'll be contributory pension, you're getting pension, it's not that you're not getting pension and you yield to their demands and you call it a great socialist step. I find it deeply, deeply offensive and anti-people and anti-democratic. And state after state now, West Bengal never joined the national pension system, which is a contributory pension. And right now, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, they all went back.

You know, Amit, take the US or other countries. US, as you I'm sure are aware, there's something called payroll tax. The employee and the employer, they both contribute 6.2% of the income as tax. And it applies to everybody in the country, private sector, public sector, self-employed people pay that much money. And from that fund, you draw a pension.

The average pension is about 25% of the GDP per capita, average. Some people get more, some people get less, but an average. In India, unfunded, not a rupee is funded by the government or by the employee. Amit Verma doesn't get anything because There's no social security system for you. Private sector employees don't get anything.

The 97% workers of India don't get anything. It's only for the privileged 3% workers, unfunded, index-linked, irrevocable legal commitment, open-ended. So much so, an employee who retired at 10, 000 rupees wage can get 80, 000 rupees pension. And for 3% of the people, the expenditure of the exchequer is 15%. For 100% of the people in the United States, expenditure is

15%.

The enormity of it, politically, it is don't understand and when they give up and then they pretend to be the socialist or pro people, I find it deeply offensive, deeply offensive.

Well, socialism in practice has always benefited only the elites. But here's, you know, what you earlier said about Mr. Modi, that maybe if he were motivated by a desire to a certain India's grandeur or his own legacy and so on, things could be better. And I'm reminded of, and I want to ask you a question about power, because you've been in proximity with power and with people in power. And I'm reminded of this anecdote, which serves as a good metaphor, not an anecdote.

I mean, there was a new story I read maybe 2025 years ago, I can't remember who it related to. So if some listener can help me, I'll be grateful. But it showed the picture of a mafia don with the 5 people who succeeded him after 1 by 1, they died. So basically 1 guy died, his right hand man would succeed him and all the way down. And this mafia don himself was something like a 5 foot 6 or 5 foot 4 and everybody else was shorter than him, which meant that each person picked as his right hand man, someone shorter than him, so he would not be a direct threat to himself.

And this seems to me to be an interesting metaphor of how small minded people would tend to surround themselves with yes men who will never challenge them or be a threat to them. And I wonder if this is 1 of the perils of being in great power, that you might then tend to reject people who challenge you and to embrace people who are essentially yes men. And if you yourself are a simplistic thinker, then they would also become equally simplistic thinkers. Like I was chatting with Rajesh Jain, who was a guest a long time back on the show and Rajesh told me something interesting about the PMO. And I told him I'm going to quote you on this and he said yeah, yeah, quote me.

So what Rajesh has said was that people in the Prime Minister's office or people around the Prime Minister, they're like day traders, not Warren Buffet. Right? So everything that they do, you know, whether it's demonetization or anything that they do is really with some simplistic short term aim in mind, they're not thinking long term, they're not thinking deeper consequences. So partly this came to my mind because I was a little skeptical about the faith in any 1 man, especially someone who seems to have, you know, fallen for that trap of, you know, like when Modi started in 2014, he had access to great advisors, but he's pretty much ignored all of them or those he didn't ignore are people who I think debase themselves by becoming yes men and getting down to his level. But then I want to ask a broader question not about Modi in particular or not about this tendency by itself in an abstract term, but in your interactions with people of power and you've interacted with what the last 4, 5 prime ministers and all of that, you've known politicians so intimately.

What is your sense that, you know, does power have this kind of effect on people where it diminishes them? Are they aware of it? Do they fight it? Have you ever been tempted by this?

In general, power tends to isolate you because there are so many seen and unseen barriers. People put a protective cocoon around you. But again, it's very individual. Even in our country, a man like Vajpayee, I had never met him personally. And the more I think of his accomplishments with the limited power he had and the coalition with a very difficult political management, I am astounded.

A, when you interacted with ministers during his time, you actually felt the ministers are empowered. They were confident. The old man would back them up As long as they did the right thing, even if a mistake is committed inadvertently, it's okay. But they really were in charge, the government commander. And B, he looked at the long term, whether national highways or the mobile telephony or the FRBM Act or the national pension system or something else.

Nobody forced him. There was no need to do many of those things. If he simply went about business as usual, nobody was going to complain because nobody was asking for that. But he went under an 80-year-old man thinking of the future, to me, it's astounding. So that's the second thing.

Even in political management, during his time, the disclosure law came. During his time, that political funding reform after the Tehelka scam, I remember meeting everybody, key players, including George Fernandez, who was accused in the Helga scam. When we persuaded them, they all were more than willing, and across party lines. And Congress Party constituted a committee with Dr. Manmohan Singh, the chair on party finances.

The BJP-NDA government accepted the Congress party's internal committee report in total and enacted the political funding law. That morphed into no electoral bonds. There is a story behind it. Now that even if I'm digressing, I think it's interesting. Arun Jaitley, he was the law minister at the time and LK Advani, he was looking after all these matters.

I think, unspoken kind of a jurisdictional thing, all electoral reforms, other matters, he more or less, they say. So I fought for and got a 100% tax assumption to the donors for political contribution so that honest politics gets honest money. If you revile politics and think that politics doesn't mean it's a silly approach. And everybody came on board, unanimously that was enacted. The second part I asked for is, as electronic media campaign is going to be increasingly important, let's move towards that and therefore give free air time on private and government electronic media, not government alone, as a part of licensing condition, that's what the law is, to recognize political parties in a certain agreement.

The second 1 was never implemented. Electronic media, I don't know who, why they stopped it, I can imagine. The first 1 was implemented. Mr. Arun Jaitley told me several times subsequently, you worked so hard for this.

Mr. LK Advani said, now that the donors get 100% tax exemption, why should we collect cash? So collect only by cheque. Despite being in power, within 3 months, the receipts to the ruling party fell by 90%. Wow.

Because not merely a question of tax incentive. In a country where there's no rule of law, where the presiding deity of the country, the prime minister or the governing party can determine your economic fortunes, no matter how big you are, you are vulnerable. People are not willing to pay by check because the other party, when they come to power, or somebody else, they will harass. Or if you want to support the opposition, because that's where your heart is, you'll be penalized. And therefore, when Arun Jaitley became the finance minister later, his legalistic response to address that specific thing is give anonymity with tax exemption, rather than look at rule of law issues and then how do you make an individual's economic fortunes invulnerable to political vagaries?

That is the bigger question. But there is a larger point, there is a preference to deal in cash because there is fear of those in power in the country. But the point is, Mr. Vajpayee actually tried to address some of these things. And he used to always say, I don't know if you remember, all of us are entering political public life by uttering a lie.

We are signing an affidavit saying that we spent only this much money. All of us know that we exceeded that amount. Even if we could not do much about it, he was conscious. He was generating a debate. So, he was an extraordinary man.

So, the point I'm making is, it's not necessary with all men and women of power. It's also, I think, individual. Are you capable of absorbing and listening and finally making up your mind? Or are you so insecure that if there is a mind which is different from yours or not yes-men, you cannot take it? Again, Lincoln comes to mind.

Lincoln was a relatively minor political figure in the Republican Party establishment at the time. People like Seward, the former New York governor, a major figure in the party then, or Salman Chase, the former Ohio governor, theoretically very sound in the anti-slavery and all that. He made all of them his cabinet members. That's why that book you must have read, The Team

of Rivals. The Team of Rivals, brilliant book.

It doesn't mean that his power was diminished. Ultimately, he was a decision maker. Famously, in a cabinet, when Lincoln asked to put something to vote, 12 people said no. He said 12 nays and 1 ayes, the ayes have it. At the end of the day, he would call the shots, but he was not afraid to surround himself with the people who dissent and listen to them and make up his mind.

That is true leadership.

What you said about, you know, the attitude of people in Vajpayee's cabinet and the way all of that moved and the way that they would listen, you know, I have a bunch of friends who are economic policy makers and they tell they speak of that time with nostalgia. But they also speak of relatively less recent times with nostalgia in the sense that they'll talk about how in that time, that establishment would still, Vajpayee's establishment would still speak across the aisle to Chidambaram and listen to what he had to say on economic policy and so on and so forth. There was mutual respect and talking across the aisle. Equally in 2014 when the Modi government came back to power, Arun Jaitley was finance minister, Chidambaram had been cleaning up a mess left behind by the disastrous Pandamukarji and Jaitley for a long time, there was some continuity for a few months between the Jaitley and the Chidambaram ministries where they were pretty much, you know, they understood that sound economics is sound economics. You're doing what you got to do, I'll do what I got to do.

They continue down that way. But the sense that I get increasingly is that now we don't talk across the aisle anymore. And that partly that there is a cultural shift within the elites and within the bureaucrats and within politics itself, you no longer talk to the other side. And partly, I also see a shift that we referred to earlier when we spoke of tribalism and polarization, that everybody's busy demonizing the other side, to the extent that you behave as if nothing good can emerge from the other side. Everything the other side does is wrong.

In our conversation, the example I gave of that was, you know, there were people who were criticizing the BJP when they were against FDA. And when they became for FDA, the same people continue criticizing them for being for it. Right. And perhaps another example, I don't know what you think about it, is the farm laws themselves. You know, the farm laws, of course, were, I think, the way they were put forward in front of the people announced was brushed through Parliament, which is bad politics.

But was it bad economics?

Very sound laws. They're absolutely necessary.

Very sound laws and many of what was proposed in the farm laws were in the Congress manifesto before that. And yet the Congress opposed it just because it was something that the BJP did. And the principle today seems to be you oppose whatever the other guy does. It doesn't matter what are the individual merits of a law or a policy or whatever and this makes movement or reform in any direction quite difficult doesn't it?

Answer is obvious. It's a very dangerous thing for a country. Farm loss is a classic example, a classic example that Sharath Joshi, my good friend from whom I learned a lot of agricultural economics, 1 of my mentors and heroes, he always argued for a liberal regime, you know, some protection is required for the farm sector and entry of retail chain so that the supply chain is compressed and we get value addition so on and so forth. Some policies has time-mediated the initial stage, some like retail chain policy on paper it exists but we're not allowing it to happen. So we are damaging the farm sector enormously And as somebody said, God save me from my friends, enemies I can take care of them.

It's the friends of farmers who are more dangerous 1 than the enemies of farmers, unfortunately. Let's leave it at that. But the broader question that you raised, I think there are several layers in that. In the states, in many states, this kind of, you know, I will not deal with the opposition, I'll treat them as enemies has happened for quite some time in many states. Some states are exempt, but in many states it happened.

I remember Andhra Pradesh vividly. And by men and women of goodwill, well-meaning people who never understood post-politics, he's NTR, he's a great man. I knew him intimately, worked with him, a man of great heart, integrity, and his contribution to India's federalism or creating an alternative to Congress or ethical politics is unquestioned. But he truly believed for quite some time that Congress is the enemy. In Telugu, there's a proverb, इंति मेदे का कि इंति मेदे वाल गोड़तने, The crow cannot come from that house to this house kind of thing.

He actually believed that if somebody interacted with the opposition, he thought that was betrayal. So this kind of a thing happened in many states. Some states are an exception. Karnataka was refreshing. At least for some time I noticed.

But Tamil Nadu, if you remember, the opposition leader cannot even come to the assembly and vice versa. If you are in power, you jail them and vice versa. That model is now exported to Delhi. Just as very high degree of centralization where chief minister alone matters, ministers are inconsequential, that's true in most states, that's now exported to Delhi. There was always some degree of centralization but never so much now.

So there is an inadvertent export of the state's moral to the Delhi, That's 1 thing. Second is, apart from the overall tribalism and deterioration in some parts of political culture, emergency still is playing in the minds of many people in BJP. Mr. Narendra Modi himself, they all felt betrayed because they were formative years, engaged and all that. That anger, some people overcame like Mr.

LK Advani and Mr. Vajpayee overcame, but many others were not able to. The third is Congress also played that game. Post Gujarat rights and other things, some of the language used, some of the efforts made, but to delegitimize everything and to take an extreme level and therefore, there's now a tit-for-tat kind of a thing. Whatever it is, it certainly is very dangerous for democracy.

I used to tell Mr. LK Advani and Mrs. Gandhi that look, you know, this whole idea that Bajpayee government is for India shining and Hinduutva and Congress is for secularism and aam aadmi is a market segmentation. At the end of the day, except that with some certainty I can say Mrs. Sonia Gandhi will never become BJP president and Nal Krishna Dhwani will never become Congress president, 90% of the rest are interchangeable.

Party is more a label than to get a symbol. Therefore, while you fight politically very strongly, that competition is required. You bury the hatchet and look at the big picture where at least on the 3, 4 fundamentals, you're all together, and there you quietly cooperate. That is always my stand. And that sense is missing.

I heard a story, I don't know how far it's accurate, but I would not be surprised if it's actually accurate. Mr. Jaiswant Singh made a commitment to George Bush in the US that they will send troops to Iraq. And they would be happy to have our boots and their money and the strategic alliance on so forth he came to the prime minister And briefed him and said I gave a commitment. Let's do it Watch page he said do you understand the danger that you put us in?

He said so what's the matter? He said why should we get into their war? We have India world's second largest Muslim population. We have to build harmony here and ultimately our people will die there. What do we get out of it?

Then just 1 single panicky. Kabili Mr. Vajpayee lifted the telephone, that's what the story says, called up Mrs. Gandhi, the opposition leader. He said, no Iraq and all the pressurizing, what do you think?

And Mrs. Gandhi said, no, why should we be involved in that? He said, then why are you not making noise about it? She said, what shall I do? Write to me, make some noise, make statements, attack the government.

And then he said, look, we're a democracy. If you allow the opposition voice, if you actually have an interaction, it benefits you. Not only the country. You can get out of very tricky situations, dangerous situations, but that requires enormous wisdom. If the Prime Minister in the opposition, if the Chief Minister in the opposition cannot have an equation to talk on telephone and say, let's have lunch and discuss, I think it's bad government.

But unfortunately, even countries like United States and Britain perhaps is a little better. Germany is even better. But US is a terrible example. This degree of polarization, we are learning the wrong things from other countries too.

This is such a brilliant story about Mr. Vajpayee, just such a brilliant story. And the fact that we've almost come a full circle since then, since there is no question of anything like that happening in the current day. This also makes me wonder about something a good friend of mine was chatting about recently, where he was saying that, you know, and both of us are in agreement that so far, you know, this government hasn't rigged any elections. As my friend Nitin Bhai says, it's easier to rig mines, why do you need to rig machines?

But at the same time, he said that I'm worried about 2024 or even 2028, that if the BJP finds they are losing, they might well take elections and or they might well suspend democracy. And I said, okay, that's a bit alarmist. Why do you feel that way? And his answer was that I feel that way, because they have gone too far in hurting the other side. And they know that the moment the other side comes to power, the tables will be turned.

So, you know, so and so minister will definitely go to jail, etc, etc. So they cannot allow that to happen because now it is existential. No longer does that collegial atmosphere exist between parties. These are all

vastly exaggerated fears. As somebody who has managed elections, hopefully understood the electoral process and did some work at least in trying to improve the election process, I'm absolutely certain. Election is not about 3 election commissioners in Delhi alone. There's a whole machinery across the country. And however disgraceful their conduct is in normal administration, many of them are corrupt and competent buffoons.

But come election time, a certain culture, a certain systemic approach and certain institutional behavior and the public watchful public eye and the media all these make sure that things are perfectly okay. I'm not saying everybody acts as a wonderful hero. Now We had chief election commissioners who were completely partisan and who had a terrible track record. Now Vin Chawla was an emergency accused. He was Sanjay Gandhi's acolyte.

He should not have been made election commissioner. But heavens did not fall. He became chief election commissioner. Heavens did not fall. Because the system is strong enough.

We must trust ourselves. I don't think any political party is an incentive in rigging. And our politicians, because power is so important for them, they're like examination going students. They're terrified before the election. They always see the worst.

The examiner will ask the toughest question. The 1 question I did not prepare for, I did not read or some such thing. Much of it is meaningless. If you remember, what are these electronic voting machines, Chandrababu Naidu, the great champion of modernization, Amarinder Singh in Punjab, J. Lalitha in Tamil Nadu, each of them in the last elections, they blamed electronic voting machines.

Each of them with thumping margins next election with the same EVMs. So don't take these things. In India, there's too much of conspiracy theories. That's absolute nonsense.

I agree about the technology and I agree about the institution, but then a party can suspend democracy itself, like the Congress did in 1975. And that is what my friends... I'm

much more optimistic. This country is much more resilient. And the Congress learned the lesson, the hard way. I'm absolutely certain that any damage to our democracy will not be a dramatic dictatorial takeover. It will be a creeping decline in institutional strength and a creeping decline in the conduct of politicians and our own readiness to embrace that behavior or accept that behavior, like failure of rule of law, perverting crime investigation across the country, it's not merely in Delhi.

Real crime investigation and police are in the States. 98% of the crime investigation is in States. In every single state, whichever be the party in power, there is a habitual abuse of power by every single MLA. We're pretending as if it's a Modi phenomenon or some other phenomenon. There's a deeper systemic phenomenon.

And it's perhaps like you said, an erosion so gradual that we may not even realize it is happening.

So I'm not worried about some BJP or somebody becoming dictatorial. I don't believe they are enemies of the people anymore than anybody else is the enemy of the people. I think their hearts are in the right place about the constitutional freedom as a linear party and there are black sheep everywhere in the country vilifying this group or that group is absolutely wrong.

On that positive note Let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side of it will continue our conversation Long before I was a podcaster I was a writer In fact chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time. I loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways. I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things. Well that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it. Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.

I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to IndiaUncut.Substack.com and subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.

You don't need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free. The India Uncut newsletter at IndiaUncut.substack.com. Thank you. Welcome back to the scene and the unseen.

I'm chatting with JP Narayan on the nature of Indian politics on his own life, and you know, so on and so forth. And we last spoke 4 years ago. So tell me in that time you know what has changed in the sense what have you been doing in that time you know you've spoken about it earlier transformation of Lok Sattva from being a movement to a party to a movement again and sort of you're, you know, taking a backseat from actual electoral politics at the very least. What have the last 4 years been like? What have you been thinking?

What have you been doing?

1 realization has dawned on me that there's no appetite for political reform in India, whether the elites or the media or the political parties or the key leaders in the country for whatever reason, as I mentioned before. Therefore, can we protect economic growth and a holistic economic growth on a sustained basis because I think because of a variety of factors internal and external, partly luck globally, partly because successive governments have done a few right things in this country since

1991.

We are reasonably well placed to have 67% growth rate on a sustained basis provided we get some things right. Therefore right now my most important preoccupation is how to protect the growth impulse of India. And that's the context in which I'm deeply troubled by some of the things like going back to old pension scheme, because politicians are running scared without any imagination or concern for the country's future. The second is, without getting into big political reform, can we at least improve the delivery of education and health care? Because these 2 are politically winners if they actually deliver.

I don't think governments are unwilling to do that except that The space is not there in the mind, they're too preoccupied with other things. Probably it's more bureaucratic failure than political failure because their job to get things done and they're not imagining a new way of doing things either. So there are some green shoes like new education policy, national education policy, etc. The third area is, can we look at some emerging issues which are completely grown by the political system and by the elites in the country? Urbanization.

We are still at 30% urbanization, which is nothing compared to what it's going to be. But our imagination of urbanization is like Mumbai. Millions will descend upon Mumbai and all kinds of ghettoization and urban poverty. You have seen in the case of COVID particularly, COVID apart from the healthcare issues, the migrants from villages, how they suffered. I think if it's not saved in our memories, if we don't take this seriously to look at the future, then I don't know what is this experience about.

So clearly, we need to do a lot about it. Without urbanization, there's no future. I'm not a great believer that rural India, idyllic India, I grew up in a village, but I know what a village is. So I don't accept the notion that living in a village is the best possible thing. But unless in-situ urbanization takes place, unless you create a large number of local magnets with all the amenities, and luckily we have today technology coming to our aid, television and mobile phone have reached every corner of the world.

Supposing quality education, quality health care, basic infrastructure, 24-hour water supplies, stormwater drainage, sewerage are also available. There's no good reason why there cannot be local urbanization with linkages with rural areas, and people are not emotionally dealing from their environments. And therefore, there's no alienation, and there's no distress in urban areas. Urban poverty is more form of grinding than rural poverty. For decades in India, we talked about rural poverty.

Today, I think the real challenge is urban poverty. Therefore, an in-situ urbanization, a model which is sensible without undermining big cities, I understand the cluster effect, I understand the power of big cities, I understand the importance of greenfield cities to attract investment, but alongside with that, Unless urbanization is managed well and unless we recover the lost ground on account of the farm sector reform, what happened was a very tragic thing. But much more needs to happen in addition to the failed effort in respect to those 3 laws. So these are the things which are somewhat not really partisan political issues, but they're not engaging the attention of the not only decision makers in politics, but even the elites in the media in the country. And in my judgment, politically speaking, they're harmless issues.

I mean, they're not controversial issues. I think we have to make an impact on each of these things. For instance, we have taken up the issue of education in an innovative way, how to use technology to improve the assessment, the quality of assessment, stress-free, not based on rote learning, but genuine outcomes that we require, namely ability to communicate effectively, ability to apply logic and come to reasonable conclusions in a scientific manner, ability to use basic mathematical concepts for problem solving, how to measure it, and how to remediate it. So, I think these are the issues that are bothering me right now quite a bit.

And I've obviously had episodes on both the farm laws with Ajay Shah, where we both kind of agreed that politically it was a disaster, but economically they were damn good and sort of discussing the tragedy of that. And I've had episodes on education, healthcare as well, I'll link them all from the show notes. And I have recently started like I've always been and remain a big proponent of urbanization, you know, the greatest migration in human history is from rural to urban and people do that because it can be part of larger economic networks and all the benefits that result. But I'm also beginning to see a silver lining beyond that, which is that urbanization to me is a technology to deliver greater connectivity, clustered effects, all these things you spoke of. But now there are other ways of also delivering some of those, thankfully, because of technology, because of ubiquitous broadband, some of it made possible.

And COVID has stressed us. Earlier, probably we would not have thought about it much.

Yeah. Correct. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the benefits from urbanization can actually happen via technology also, you know, and outside the ambit of the state, which is great. Here's a question I want to ask you.

You spoke about the importance of economic growth. And obviously, as you know, I couldn't agree more. Now, the general narrative I have been getting from many of the economists who've come on the show like Ajay Shah, Pooja Mehra and so on, is that, a, before the reforms of 91, there was a lot of groundwork which went in in the decade before, Montek was also on my show, so Montek spoke about it. A lot of groundwork which went on from the late 70s through the 80s of people within those elites, whether they were bureaucrats or policy people or whatever, you know, putting together a plan for where they would like to take India in terms of liberalization and a great opportunity happened. Obviously, it was partly the balance of payments crisis and the IMF intervention and all that.

But the point is, the policies were ready, everything was ready. And perhaps it was fortuitous that someone like Narasimha Rao, who was Prime Minister, was able to make all of that happen. And the way the narrative goes is that we have a 20 year period till 2011, which is almost a golden period where it doesn't matter which party comes to power, they are, they get it, and they're going along with that consensus. And you have the elites working within government throughout and you have different politicians and whatever else they might believe, they are on board with it. And for a variety of different reasons, which Pooja has written about in her book, The Lost Decade, around 2011 that kind of changes.

There is a downward trend. I mean the short story is Pranab Mukherjee is finance minister and so on and so forth and there is a downward trend and for a brief few months Chidambaram tries to reverse it and Jaitley continues but then that momentum also stops circa 2015 maybe and the disaster continues. So basically from 2011 till now, there haven't really been the kind of gains that we should have seen. And what people like, I won't name anyone, but different people also bemoan is that there is no longer even that consensus among the elites that we need to go in that direction, that liberalization is good, that free enterprise is good and so on and so forth. And of course, it's not there among the politicians as we can see, where everything is about optics and the general abstract principles of free market don't sell because you can't make them concrete, you know this.

Whereas, you know, giving freebies sells in the political marketplace even if it rebounds economically. So I want to ask you about that, that 1 would have imagined that, you know, since 91, since seeing hundreds of millions of people come out of poverty, there would at least have been a consensus on this among policymakers and among politicians, that okay, economic growth is a way forward, we want to deliver more of it, this is what we have to do. But increasingly, we find that that is not the case, that Modi has, in many ways, gone back to Nehru's top down thinking, as well as sort of embracing Indira's authoritarianism in some ways. And that's what I worry about, that we achieve this great success, we achieve this golden period of 20 years. And it's not golden, I say, in terms of abstract numbers, hundreds of millions of people came out of poverty, that's a big freaking deal.

That's a humanitarian benefit to mankind. What do you find of that economic way of thinking? Like, would you share in the pessimistic prognosis of my policymaking friends who say that it appears to have gone? Or would you say that that's true?

I'm much more optimistic. While some missteps were there, demonetization, the way it was done, and then I believe that no 1 dramatic fell swoop and something big will happen. Even if it was done right, for instance, you already printed the currency notes in time so that you can exchange them without any difficulty that is a logistical problem but even if that were done well if you didn't understand the the drivers of black money namely big corruption real estate and politics and if you did not have a game plan to address them systematically, sequentially, then all that is simply a signaling. They may have been political dividends, but I think they were devastating economic consequences. There's no question about it.

But barring that significant misstep, it would not be very accurate to characterize that the last 7, 8 years, nothing has been done. Banks were in a desperate situation. They are much, much more healthy today. Inflation was broadly under control, notwithstanding the global forces, etc. Ukraine war, the way I think our country and China managed the fuel situation, It helped us and it helped the world.

Western countries may criticize us if India and China did not take this stand, that energy cannot be held to ransom to global politics. I think global prices of oil would have been 160 to 170 dollars. I don't understand why the West was not able to see it so clearly, it was so evident. But that apart, whether bankruptcy court or accent on infrastructure, there's no question that infrastructure is improving. A lot more needs to be done.

Or some encouragement of manufacturing. I don't agree with the people who say manufacturing we should not even bother. We may succeed in some respects, we may not do as well as we want in some other respects. But in a country of India's vastness and diversity cannot ignore manufacturing. It's absurd.

Unless the low skilled blue-collar manufacturing workers increase in number. Only thing is I would like to see a lot more accent on labor intensive things like garments. We only have 1 or 2 units in India with 10-15, 000 workers working in garment sector, which they had 1 every district. China exports $323 billion of garments and textiles. India exports $41 billion.

Bangladesh, I can understand quota and all that. So we have really neglected that or leather industry or a whole lot of other areas where labor intensive things are possible. But otherwise, the accent is right in a broad sense. Promotion of investment. I think if we dismiss all of them as if they are of no consequence, we're not being very practical.

It doesn't matter which government, which party, I don't care who is where. Then about the optimism versus pessimism. It is very deeply troubling that the consciences is missing politically. I have no doubt. I don't understand.

I'm puzzled by that. When Vajpayee was doing the right things, he continued the policies of Congress. The reformist Congress of 1991 to

1996.

But it took him to logical conclusion. In some areas, there was a fresh opening up and so on and so forth. When Manmohan Singh government came, while they obviously paid more attention to the Aam Aadmi and the short term welfare measures. Dr. Manmohan Singh, Monty Singh Aluwalia, Dr.

Rangarajan, Chidambaram and probably to some extent people like the Chief Minister of Delhi, Shaila Dixit, they stood firmly for broad economic reform. While Congress DNA probably is socialist and licensed per mitrage then and now, these people, given the context and the importance they were given and the legitimacy they enjoyed, they held forth. Today in Congress party, I don't see any such thing and I find it shocking. I find it shocking that India's major national party for a long time, the party that built India as it is today, a party that gave us food self-reliance, a party that bungled initially on socialist policies, but ultimately recovered from that, is not able to think of India's future in an economic sense is to me utterly shocking. It is bankruptcy of leadership.

And I think we have to sit with all parties, in particular, Congress party and make them see it's in their interest and the country's interest. Because if a great party thinks that the country's interest and their political interests are disconnected, then you have a danger signal. Right now, it looks like Congress party believes in an economic sense, the country's economic growth and their own political future are 2 different issues. 1 is at the cost of the other. Then I think it's a very dangerous situation and it's not true.

And there is plenty of agenda outside of economic growth and economic reform where you can differ with the governing party with justification and provide an alternative vision and capture the imagination of the people and deliver for the country as Congress always strived to do. Right now, I think that bankruptcy is very, very clear. They are depending either on primordial loyalties just as BJP is accused of primordial loyalties. You are only provoking alternative primordial loyalties or short-term, I would not call it freebies in a pejorative way because we do have to take care of the poor, but complete emphasis and no other emphasis on anything else, exclusive emphasis only on the short-term delivery of immediate palliatives for the people. And I think that's an extremely dangerous thing.

You have to balance them. And that's the context in which I'm talking about, in particular, the World Pension Scheme, because that has a devastating consequence to the country. Other things can be retrieved tomorrow if you like. You know the data shows that in most states of India, salaries, pensions and interests already exceed the own revenues of the state. Without doing a rupee's work for the people, salaries, pensions and interests.

Pensions in the past 17 years, since 2004 to

2021,

the pension burden on the states increased 11 fold. Wow.

11

fold. From 2012 to 21, it increased more than threefold. So it's not a normal growth. It's way in excess of the tax realization or economic growth rate, including nominal growth rate. So the burden India is going to face 20 years hence, because it's 10 or 15 years hence, we are thinking it's not a problem, but it is real.

It is certain, it's not a conjecture. And we're not able to see that. And state after state, the dominoes are falling. But that apart, I think there's-

Can I interrupt you and ask you to elaborate on this for a while because I think many of my listeners would not have realized that there is a problem like this? And I've heard of it vaguely, but not in the detailed terms in which you were, for example, describing it in the break. And this seems to be right now the paramount thing that you are worried about. So please break it down for me, what is the problem exactly, what's going on, what are the incentives at play?

You know, social security and pension and retirement is something that we all should aspire for world over. World over what they did is a sustainable system. A, it's applicable to all the workers of the country. In the United States, 65 million retired people get Social Security, oblique pension, oblique disability.

179

million people contribute to that. The existing workers, they contribute and retirement from Bill Gates to an employee in government to private sector worker in an automobile company in Detroit. Everybody contributes, employer and employee, and everybody draws. So therefore, A, it is funded. It is not a burden on the future taxpayer.

That means if I get a service today, why should my children's generation pay out of their tax money towards huge pensions for the services they are not getting? At whose cost? I mean, no family behaves like that. Our families, we always create assets for our children. We don't create a debt burden and say, you pay up and that's the legacy.

That's exactly what governments are doing. First is unfunded. The pension system until now in India is unfunded. Without putting a rupee, you're asking the next generation to pay. Second is it is open-ended and index-linked.

That means if the pension today is X amount, within 10-20 years the pension is becoming 10X, 15X, not even 1.5X. There are people who retired at 10, 000 rupees, they're getting 70 to 80, 000 rupees pension with enormous increase in salaries of the pay revision commissions regularly, and the index linked thing with the DA etc. Is escalating dramatically. That's the reason why you have to go for Agnipath. This 1 rank, 1 pension, the moment you do it, you do it out of some sense of hype, government realize suddenly 1, 20, 000 crores is going only towards that establishment cost.

It is growing pension burden because if there are 15 lakh soldiers in the armed forces, there are 36 lakh people who are deriving pension because in army you only have 10-15 years career and the pension burden at the moment it went up so much it's exceeding salaries in some cases in army actually it's exceeding salaries. So that's therefore you have to go to Agnepath, government did not explicitly say so. There was so much of discussion and debate and agitation on that issue. But a similar picture is enveloping the whole country. Because of this index linked pension and because the dramatic increase in the numbers, right now,

15%

of all the government revenues in India, Union and the States, total revenues, are going towards pension.

15%. And your point also is it doesn't actually cover all workers, only 3%.

So, 97% people are subsidizing the 3%. In the US, for instance, the average pension received is 25 percent of GDP, actually 24.7 percent of the GDP per capita. They get something like $70, 000 per capita on average. GDP is $72, 000 right now, $73, 000. In India, take Andhra Pradesh as an example, this gives you an idea of the rest of the country.

They get 5, 40, 000 rupees average pension. In a country, in a state, for instance, in Andhra Pradesh, per capita income is 1, 90, 000 rupees, about 3 times, 2.7 to 3 times. It simply is unsustainable. Not only is it unjust and immoral and transferring burden to next generation, It's unsustainable, it's going to kill us. It did not affect us until 1991 because salaries were very low until that time.

Therefore, pension also was low necessarily. But with 1996-97, pay revision commissions, etc., dramatically escalated that. Luckily for India, in 1999 when Vajpayee came to power, he understood the damage quickly. And he really thought about the future. Then he came up with the national pension system, which is the exact replica of the pensions elsewhere in the world.

Every country in the world, they give 100% people the pension. India still did not go for that. But whatever pension is paid or whoever gets pension, in future they said let it be funded. Employer and employee put the money. In the government of India is putting 14% of the salary, employees are putting 10%.

States are roughly 10-10 model, Some states have a little more. Vajpayee made every state agree. It was an remarkable consensus, barring West Bengal, every other state agreed.

18

years we implemented it very well. Lakhs of crores is accumulated. Now actually the amount is increasing dramatically every year. Suddenly, governments or political parties are becoming panicky because they want to please the small group of 3% population. But they have the collective muscle, bargaining power.

They have the votes. I'm not opposed to pension. The national pension system that is created by Vajpayee gives them pension, but a sustainable model where it is fully funded. Right now in many states, governments are not even paying salaries on time. If employees think that they're going to get pensions 30 years since which is unsustainable, I can assure you they will get nothing.

The country will be doomed, employees will get nothing. But there's a belief that somehow they'll get a large moolah at the cost of the rest of the people that's sustainable. It's not sustainable. Not only is it unjust, it's simply not sustainable. Not only bad for the country, it's bad for the employees also.

All we require is preserve what is already there. And 2, wherever they switch over, some states have switched over, we discussed earlier. What do you do about them? Karnataka is now latest threatening to switch over. Majhya Pradesh elections are due.

Majhya Pradesh already Mr. Kamal Nath made a statement, we will go to OPS. And I suspect Congress party in the next election 2024 is going to say, we'll go to OPS even at the national level. It's going to be an unmitigated disaster. So, that means shall we take away the autonomy of the states or the elected government at any level?

No. I believe governments have a right to make choices if people vote for them. But you have no right to burden the next generation with a decision you make today which has 40, 50 year consequence, which is legally irrevocable, which does not create assets. You may say, what about a project being built for 20 years, which assets are created, that's a different thing. If it's a legal liability of a long term kind without assets created, I don't think any government has a unilateral right.

Therefore, if you want to switch over, switch over, but you provide the fund today on a discounted cash flow basis every year so that you account for it in the budget transparently. And the people immediately understand the pain. If you make a decision, then 10, 000 crores of my money in the state goes this year. And I therefore cannot utilize it for some other purpose. If the people want it, so be it.

At the very least, the burden is not transferred to the next generation, it's transparent. So, A, stop OPS or reversion to OPS, and B, if you do want to go for that, it's up to you. Then you provide the funding today in the budget transparently because it's for today's services, tomorrow's pension is provided. Because ordinary people don't understand most of them, don't understand intricacies in educated people. You know this is a classic case when Machiavelli 500 years ago said, a reformer must have a great challenge, a great difficulty.

When you want to bring about a change or improve things, the people who are likely to lose, their opposition is fierce because they know exactly what is at stake. They become your very powerful enemies. They'll use every means at their disposal to destroy you or your reform. The people whose interests you want to protect, the bulk of the people, they don't know what is at stake. Their support at best is lukewarm.

And this is a classic illustration. 3% of India's workers out of the 50 plus workers, 53 crore workers, 3% of the workers, they know exactly what is at stake, they are getting the benefit. And therefore, they become powerful enemies, they fight tooth and nail. The rest of the 97% most of whom are unorganized, largely illiterate, underfunded, low wage workers who are eking out a precarious livelihood. They simply don't know what is at stake.

At best, they vaguely support, you know, there are politicians who fought for the people at the, against the entrenched sections. Shanta Kumar and Himachal Pradesh is a classic example. He paid the price. Jaya Lalitha, whatever we have in the past, when it came to employees versus people, she actually stood for the people. She paid the price.

NTR, he paid the price. Sharad Joshi used to say even 30 years ago, the fundamental struggle in India is between the organized sector government employees because the British colonial practice, they think the government is for them versus the people for whom actually the government should work. And I think this is coming to a head. And unfortunately for us, the India's major political opposition party, the Grand National Party of India, Congress Party, and some new parties which are otherwise reformist have become so populist like Aam Aadmi Party. They're completely grown in the larger national interest and the public interest.

I'm saying this very deliberately, without any malice. I worked with both these parties very closely. I supported Aam Aadmi party openly and repeatedly. But if this is your notion of politics, if you think 3% people's collective bargaining power today when they're already well-heeled and well-paid, at the cost of the rest of the 97% to make India's finances unsustainable in future, economic doom is inevitable and growth project will come to a halt. If you think that is sound politics, it's a disaster for the country.

I cannot say it with any less emphasis at my command.

And what you've described and what Machiavelli described is a perfect illustration of that public choice phrase, diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.

You know,

except in most cases of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, the benefits don't harm the entire economy or put it at risk. And in this case, as you point out, you know, they are doing exactly that and it's kind of hard to get that point across. Let's also sort of, I want to go back to talking about the Congress, Because in the past, for example, you worked very closely with Sonia Gandhi, you worked very closely for that matter with the Aam Aadmi Party when they began and you supported them and you…

And Vajpayee's NDA government… And

Vajpayee's NDA government, you worked with all these people and by all accounts, they've all behaved very decently at different points in time. The Congress today, as we were discussing in the break, they completely seem to have embraced the wrong aspects of their legacy. Like Rahul Gandhi, who I think of as a well meaning buffoon, and I've called him a handsome village idiot in the past, but Let's go past all that. But his economic understanding is 0 to the point that he has repudiated at 1 point Manmohan Singh's reforms of 1991, you know, and see some previous vision as being better for India, which is just absurd and daft. You know, that is what you should own.

The 91 reforms is what you should own and really take credit for and go forward. Instead, they boast about things like Priyanka Gandhi boasted about how her father opened the gates of the Babri Malchit in 87 or whenever.

That's not

a thing you boast about. And 1 thing that really gets my goat so much so that when it, when I first saw it a couple of years back, I took screenshots because I couldn't believe it, where every Congress handle was putting out tweets on Sanjay Gandhi's birthday, celebrating our great leader Sanjay Gandhi. And I'm like, no, that's an embarrassment. You need to forget about that. You know, what values can you possibly stand for?

You know, when you, if you're going to accuse Narendra Modi of fascism at the very least, don't, don't, you know, promote Sanjay Gandhi in that manner. So what's kind of going on here? Because just a while back, it wasn't quite like this, you know. All the politicians you mentioned of the earlier generation seem to have greater sagacity.

See, I can only look at 2004 before and after. I have some understanding of what happened and what I see is happening as I prelude to 2024. I see some parallels and some stark contrasts. Congress party in

2002-2003,

they felt that perhaps they were not going to get power for a long time. Instead of getting desperate and frustrated, what they did is something refreshing. They went back to the drawing board, they were trying to figure out what's right, what's wrong, and they were actually trying to look at the country and then locate themselves in the country's context. And that's the right approach. They're trying to rediscover a vision for the country in the contemporary context.

And that's how some of us were working closely with the Vajpayee government on specific reform agenda. At the same time, we were willing to talk to any political party. That's how I got in touch with me or whatever. It was very refreshing, very open. There was a willingness to discuss, to debate, to interact, to engage, to learn.

That humility is there. Quite by accident in 2004, they got power. I don't think they imagined that they would get power. I don't think many people in the country believed that they would get power. We'll come to that a little later.

But because, A, they thought through at least some of the issues, though it was not a complete process. And B, they were very balanced and mature people with a deeper understanding of economics, who had a significant say and the party leadership allowed them to have the say. After all, nobody says Dr. Manmohan Singh was the leader of the Congress party. It's the leadership that allowed them for their own credibility and perhaps for India's economic future, they wisely decided to allow these people, the Monte Singh Alawalis, along with Dr.

Manmohan Singh, the Chidambarams and others, to really do it. And then they managed politics and they reconciled the short-term things that you have to do to get the poor into the mainstream and the long-term things you have to do to promote economic growth. There may be some minor glitches here and there, but broadly the trajectory continued. What is happening today? The fact that Congress Party won at that time itself is because India shining versus Aam Aadmi.

The moment an election is made a class election. However good Bajpayee government was doing, however good the long-term impact of economic growth is on poverty, as you said, hundreds of millions left out of poverty. These are things understood only over time. At a point of time, the feeling that I'm not getting what I want or a better deal, and of course the envy that you're getting something that I'm not getting. It's human.

They play a more powerful role. The moment an election is converted into a class election, and that's what BJP missed at the time. They were doing a good job in economic management, but they thought that that will appeal to the country. The moment you convert that into a class election, almost anywhere in the world, it's very hard for pragmatic economics to win the election. It's always populism that win.

In a country as poor as India, when the poor are so particularly badly served by the governing process for decades, there is not a ghost of a chance of growth meaning. I wish it's not true. I wish the rationality will prevail. What little I understand of public life and democracies world over and in India tells me for instance, the way Macron had to face the resistance when retirement age is sort to be increased for the same pension reason, by the way, to reduce the pension burden in the long term because France pays a much higher amount of pension, 21% of the expenditure is on pensions, including private and government. So France has the highest percentage going towards pensions for a variety of reasons.

And Macron, the kind of resistance he faced, and he's hugely unpopular right now. He used all the constitutional strategies to get the pension thing through after months of protest. France is a very rowdy nation like us. They just go on to the streets, paralyze everything, block the roads. Astaroko, I think they invented along with us or something.

They do the same way, unlike other Western countries. So that shows that it's very difficult politically to manage even in rich countries. In a poor country like India, there's not a ghost of a chance. But that did not hurt the country too badly, though there was interruption of the economic management and good infrastructure and other things because of Manmohan Singh and his team. Today, a similar situation might potentially develop.

Many people are very confident that Modi will come back to power if there are Modi supporters, they're saying. But I see another class election shaping up. Modi and his team are focusing on economic growth. You may or may not agree with all elements of it broadly about infrastructure growth, investment, so on and so forth. And some thrifty management.

Certainly the government, whatever it can be accused of, the negatives, 1 trade they must be given is thrifty management. Now, for instance, COVID management, while the rest of the world simply went gung-ho about excessive spending, while enormous pressure was there on the government, they did take care of the poor, at the same time, they did try to manage it in a thrifty manner. And that's, I think, saving grace for India, helping us a great deal today. All that part is okay, but a signal is being given that he's not in favor of the short-term welfare measures. While actually he's delivering short-term welfare, his power base in North India, to my understanding is, he delivered, unlike in the past, the freebies very effectively.

In the South, always there was a better culture of delivery. North, he delivered, therefore he strengthened his base. But somewhere, I think he's impatient. And therefore, they talk about slavery culture. I think that's the wrong thing.

A prime minister or a government or a major political party must reconcile the short-term individual welfare measures with the long-term growth. They cannot side entirely on 1 side, either only growth side or only welfare measures as Congress is now saying. So now we have a polarization between growth and the short term welfare measures. And without the kind of guardrails that we had in the form of Manmohan Singh and his team in Congress party, which is very strange to me. That Congress gives up on its own legacy of economic reform and its own legacy of so many good things, including food security of India, which was a legacy of Congress in 1970s.

Until that time, we were shipped to mouth in this country. While you own up your mistakes, if you don't own up your successes and then build on that, And if you believe that there are some distortions and the poor are not adequate to be taken care of, development should be done more decentralized. It's a very legitimate stand. You take that stand, but don't simply become a populist, completely destroying the future of the country. That danger is now very real.

A, the Prime Minister must now reconcile the short-term welfare delivery with the long-term growth and use that language to mobilize people. And B, Congress must rediscover the art of reconciling both these and rediscovering the importance of growth. Otherwise, this country is in danger. 1 additional point. I think Arvind Panagaria and some others made this.

It's very well known, but they gave numbers to this. The difference between the 7% growth and 8% growth, even that 1% difference, both are high growth. In 10 years' time, it's 50 lakh crore rupees in India. It is 600 billion dollars in 10 years time. Forget what it means in terms of jobs and economic growth and wealth creation.

In terms of pure government revenues, when the tax GDP ratio, that means out of the total GDP, how much money government is taking a taxes is about 19% or so in the country. That means about

9

to 10 lakh crores revenues are going to be lost every year because you compromised on 1 person growth. So even in terms of providing welfare to the poor, if you think a little ahead of time, not merely tomorrow, somehow getting power today, This is much smarter strategy. There cannot be an argument against growth, even from welfare point of view. I find it absurd that in this country, we're actually viewing growth as antithetical to welfare and welfare as an answer to eradication of poverty. N.T.

Rama Rao started 2 Rupees a kg program way back in

1983.

Do you know what the total subsidy at that time was? 330 crores. In the government of India and state put together. I simply took the market price of rice at that time and the price at which rice was supplied to the poor. Market price was 3 rupees 50 paise kg at that time.

People got it 2 rupees. There is subsidy of 1 rupee 50 paise. 22 lakhs tons of rice was distributed in a year. 330 crores. Do You know how much rice is being distributed now?

At that time if 1.3 crore families were given rice, this ration cards and rice, today in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana there are 2.3 crore families. At that time if it is 22 lakh tons, today it is 64 lakh tons. At the time, if the difference in price was 1 rupee 50 paise, today it is 30 rupees.

Wow. 30

rupees. Market price has raised. Everybody knows between 30 and 40 rupees, depending on the quality. People are getting it 1 rupee. The burden today is 20, 000 crores.

By your own admission, you have not reduced poverty. Though I know some of the numbers inflated many people are getting. Okay, but In what way has it really benefited? If that's all, I'm not saying we should not give rise at low cost. I'm saying if that's the only strategy, you have seen a classic instance, it's doomed to failure.

We are going to condemn generation after generation to poverty, pretending we are doing something good to them. That means we want the poor to remain poor for our political gain, or if I'm a charitable person to feel good about myself. I don't want them to rise to my level, compete with my children, get good education, good health care, get a decent job and go to middle class and have assets. What kind of a life are you looking at? If this is our vision as a political party, I think it's extremely sad.

If there's 1 issue that depresses me or makes me despondent today, it is this. That we are treating people as cattle. We're not giving them the dignity they deserve. We're not looking at the children getting an opportunity that that allows them to flourish to the extent that their talent and their hard work will allow them to do. And anybody who thinks of people as merely voting machines, you're no longer treating politics as a human endeavor.

You're viewing it as a quest for power on this ladder.

1 of my friends Kumar Anand uses acronym PPP for what you just described, perpetually planned poverty.

I think that is absolutely very much on the cards. It's a wonderful expression. I didn't know about it. I think I'll use it Yeah,

and all credit to Kumar and you know 1 of the things that gets my goat is how terms often, you know I mean the opposite or what they're for Like a lot of progressive politics doesn't lead to progress. A lot of people who call themselves liberals aren't liberal. Dietary fat has no connection with bodily fat. Sugar is poison. And, welfarism doesn't necessarily lead to welfare.

You said it. You said it, you know. In any country's title, if the word democracy or democratic or people, they occur, they're always dictatorships. Have you noticed it? There's not a single democratic country that called itself peoples or democratic.

Every country that called itself democratic or peoples is a dictatorship. North Korea, peoples of China, you name it. So like that, no, you, we confused by the titles just because I call myself progressive there's no progress there at all it's just a word we appropriate it.

Yeah I felt I wanted to dwell on this a bit because someone who doesn't really hasn't thought about economics much might be listening to this and saying hey what is wrong with welfare and the point is that what is really meant by welfare here is redistribution, which makes a mistake of thinking of the economy as a 0 sum game. How do you get rid of poverty? You take money from the rich and you give it to the poor. And you know, you're making the poor better off. But actually, it doesn't work that way.

The world, you know, works in positive some or negative some ways you know every trade like when you and I have a voluntary interaction it is what John Strossel calls a double thank-you moment. I buy a cup of coffee from Starbucks when I'm giving the money I say thank you and they're giving the coffee they say thank you or vice versa. You know both people benefit as a positive sum game. So it is growth. When the whole country grows as a whole, then the poorer get richer and the rich also get richer, perhaps at a greater degree.

But what matters is that people are coming out of poverty. My friend Nitin Pai once estimated that for every 1% growth in GDP since 91, 2 million people came out of poverty. And I think he recently named that figure as 3 million people came out of poverty for every 1% growth in GDP.

And Amit, none of us is arguing that the state has no role. State's role is doing its job well. Education of quality, at least at school level. There are so many bright minds whose gene pool is wasted, they're stunted for no fault of theirs because you have third rate education after spending trillions of rupees in this country. Improve educational outcomes, that's the state's responsibility.

No, we simply privatized it. And in private sector is not delivering education in most cases. I know any number of poor people who spend 30, 40, 000 rupees in a year for their children's education, they get nothing out of it.

I mean, I've had episodes in this pointing out they haven't even privatized it in the sense that even the market isn't allowed to function properly. That's another part, but you know, fundamental failures on the part of the government. Let's go back to talking about the respective leaderships. Like you worked as part of the National Advisory Council in between for a couple of years, but you interacted closely with Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh and got a lot of respect from them for the work that you did. Tell me a little bit more about that period and how they would respond to dissenting opinions.

And to me, when you talk about that period, like you were doing during lunch, it seems such a stark contrast from today.

1 good thing about the idea of NAC, there were some things wrong in practice, but the unhurried deliberation required in government from people of great credibility and who have no personal acts to grind, I think it's a good thing, whichever be the government in power, because people in government are very, very busy all the time. Because in a large country to manage this country or even a large state, there are so many political administrative complexities. There's no time for really unhurried deliberation. There's no point blaming them. In that space, NAC provided.

What is wrong with that was, instead of, when you call it a national advisory council, you should have a group of experts from a range of opinions and backgrounds and ideas, so that you get the distilled wisdom and synthesis and you thrash out the differences and you come up with the synthesis. Instead most of the members had identical views. It's no longer national then. If you have a genuine and healthy disagreement in terms of ideas and philosophy, you can come to an agreement. Whereas, it's all fellow travelers of a similar background, all well-meaning people sacrificed a great deal, men and women of unimpeachable integrity and personal credibility and compassion.

But that's not enough when you want to govern a nation. I happen to be almost the lone dissenter, at least the lone vocal dissenter. Maybe 1 or 2 others, they had their views, but very wisely they maintained silence. In our country, silence is always better than vocal dissent. But the beautiful thing was, the chairperson, Mrs.

Sunia Gandhi, she was extremely attentive to dissent, very patient, always gave me the space to express views. And I dare say most often allowed me to prevail as long as what I say is reasonable, backed by evidence, and it's not politically unparalleled. Obviously, political democracy is a political decision making. Right to Information Act. I am deeply committed, you are deeply committed, Aruna Roy is fiercely committed, She devoted her whole life for transparency and information act.

But some of the ideologues deeply committed to democracy, they don't understand the complexities of running a democracy. Ours is a cabinet system of government. While cabinet is composed of separate individuals, there is supposed to be collective responsibility speaking with 1 voice. As somebody said somewhere, it's actually a collection of warring tribes. In a true democracy, cabinet is a collection of warring tribes.

But you have to somehow figure out a way of reconciling all that and having 1 decision-making and finally collectively responsible. The moment that fails, the system collapses. Now, with good intentions, some of my very worthy friends, they insisted that every discussion made in the cabinet must be made transparent, instinctive to the public. I stoutly oppose. Then you're collapsing the government of this country, state and national level.

It just does not operate." And I prevailed. So much so, when the final law was drafted, in general, the NACC chairperson and the government said, if I agree, that would go through. Because they believed that there is a measure of balance, even if there is fierce commitment to transparency, a measure of balance required to practical necessities of running a democratic government that we brought forth. So that's to me it was an amazing thing. Similarly, in the Employment Guarantee Act, I fiercely opposed the approach.

I argued that a universal employment guarantee across the length and breadth of India, irrespective of 3 crop areas like Konasema in Andhra Pradesh, and desert areas and drought areas. And throughout the season, irrespective of agricultural operations, it's going to completely distort the agricultural markets and rural economy and do more harm than good. 7 months because of this single opposition, it was held up. Finally, Mrs. Gandhi expressed her concern that politically she made a commitment in writing, therefore, she has to enact some law.

And I agreed, after all, it's a political commitment. Political leadership is elected by the people and therefore, you must prevail. And I appealed that please do not make it universal and round the year. And that's how the bill was drafted. It will be in areas notified by the government from time to time, depending on the economic conditions and in seasons when there's no employment.

In Parliament, actually, Mr. Kalyan Singh, when he headed the Committee on Rural Development, When it went to the committee, Kalyan Singh, a BJP leader, along with communists, they made sure there's universal etc. But the point is, in the NAC, the chairperson listened. And many, many issues like that, there was patience, there was willingness to accommodate dissent, There was willingness to accept a point of view as long as backed by rationality and there's no political motive, etc. It was a very interesting experience.

Similar thing with the Vajpayee government. You could engage, you could discuss, And you could actually bring parties together. The political funding reform, I brought the parties together. I discussed with all the parties, including the former Prime Minister at the time, Narsimha Rao, the future President and the future Finance Minister, as you said, who did immense damage later, and the former Finance Minister, Mukherjee. And of course, Dr.

Manmohan Singh and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, and Arun Jaitley and others, and Ravi Shankar Prasad, and Arun Shaury, and of course, LK Advani. So, there was this willingness to listen and accommodate and also build bridges across parties that continued in both the governments of Bajpayee and Manmohan Singh to some extent. Manmohan Singh a little less so by that time, but still it was not entirely absent. I think now on both sides there's no willingness to listen to each other.

It's not a very good sign in a democracy. It certainly is not a very good sign in a democracy.

When you look at the political landscape now, you know, with elections coming out 2024 and so on and so forth, what is your sense? Like what is the direction it's going in? You've, We've already spoken about this sort of, on the 1 hand, the negative direction that the parties aren't talking to each other, it's very polarized, it's very tribal and so on and so forth. And that makes progress difficult. On the other hand, you pointed out the government is doing some things right, you're saying and I'll, you know, take your word for it.

But what is your sense of the political landscape as it is evolving? You know, Carl Schmitt famously used to say that politics needs an other, you have to make someone an other and only then can politics thrive. And there has been speculation about how, partly because of the first-past-the-post system, the BJP essentially demolished others. And therefore, this sense of the other could emerge from within the party, where there are extremist fractions within the party who will refer to Modi as Mulana Modi, because he hasn't done enough for Hindus apparently. I mean, there are even criticisms from the extreme right wing

of us. That's the price you have to pay with power. With power comes moderation. With power comes the need to reconcile conflicting interests. With power comes the need to enhance your legitimacy globally and domestically and therefore accommodating the other point of view.

But your constituency wants an extreme point of view. So it's always fascinating actually, how people change in power. And oftentimes for the better, it's not always for the worse. Particularly in a diverse country like ours, you have to accommodate, otherwise you cannot govern. And sometimes there's a price to pay if you polarize society too much or your party too much.

But coming to the next election, I think it's still not fully written, this story, it's an evolving story. It could be a repeat of 2004. Many people believe that Mr. Narendra Modi's or his party's election to power is an assured thing. Even globally, I keep hearing that.

I don't think it is that assured. Yes, they obviously have some advantages. But as I said before, if it's converted into a class election, there are some elements, there are some early indications that it might emerge as a class election. In Karnataka, it became a class election. Apart from the fact that BJP government in Karnataka was ubiquitously seen to be corrupt and didn't have any credible leadership.

Certainly, that was a factor. It's also a factor that it's seen as a class election. Then I think 2004 in some form could be repeated. Remember, BJP did not exceed 40% vote.

37%

or so they got. Others have not united. But if others really unite, partly because of Mr. Modi's, in my judgment, political mistakes apart from the moral or other things. If you drive the cat to a corner and beat it up, it will pounce back.

And Mr. Modi himself publicly stated, I'm uniting the opposition by unleashing the ED on them. It's not a very good strategy. In a system where cash economy is endemic, I'm saying it very, very deliberately. If you are even half sincere, you would admit that in India, you cannot survive without cash.

In real estate, in business transactions and corruption, and of course in politics, no party can claim, major party I'm talking about, traditional parties, No party can claim they did not distribute cash or they did not utilize unaccounted money. When that is the case, taking the letter of the law to extreme lengths selectively is wrong. That is a moral point of view. It's simply not pragmatic because that's only going to unify opposition. What happened in 1977?

Disparate groups from communists, CPM, at least CPI though it was with Indira Gandhi, to socialists, to old congress, to Janasang, They all were forced to come together because they really felt a sense of threat to survival, both politically and personally. And we've seen what happened. So, after having seen all that, people as smart as these people, I don't understand why they're actually going out of their way to unite the opposition politically. And if you do that, ultimately, you'll end up being in difficulty. So, for both these reasons, class election and the inadvertent unity of opposition created by Mr.

Modi's own approach and the desperation of the opposition. It means that it's still open. Now, will there be a... Will they actually win? I don't know.

But I'm saying it's not a given. And if indeed they win, will they last long? Probably not. I don't know. Will they be cohesive?

Almost certainly not. But I don't think it's an assured thing. Many people, they are believing, including those in opposition, that this election is over, the fight is in

2029.

But more important than that for us is, from citizens, We should not care who gets into power. But if there is a broad agreement at least on economic growth, a good part of it continuing. And if you redefine welfare increasingly as quality education and quality healthcare, health is hopelessly underfunded. There's enormous distress in the country. 6 crore people are becoming poor every year on account of inaccessible healthcare or unaffordable healthcare.

It is not only immoral to make so many people suffer. It's also detrimental to the economy because productivity is suffering. Ultimately, working population is simply not able to work because of low productivity because of bad health. And at a very low cost, India can dramatically improve health care. We are spending only 1% of GDP on health 1.1, 1.2, most of it by states, some amount by the union.

In the budget, I think last year or so, the finance minister did a arithmetic juggler. I was very disappointed. When she was reading the budget speech and suddenly said, the allocation for healthcare improved dramatically, I jumped with joy. That lasted only about 20 minutes until I went into the detail. They simply added expenditure on many other heads, including nutrition, water supply, sanitation, which is separately shown earlier, put it together and pretended as if it was increased.

That kind of jugglery will not do. You have to allocate more, but more importantly, you have to do it right. And luckily in India, with a small expenditure, just about a trillion rupees, almost half of, less than half a percentage of GDP, additional spent, but properly spent, will radically improve the healthcare outcomes and probably no other country on earth will be able to do it at such a low cost. Even then, you know, 1.5, 2% GDP and healthcare, India will be spending 1 of the lowest amounts in the world. We have a win-win situation here.

So unless you focus on welfare as quality education and quality healthcare with a sensible approach, not Right to Education Act, which is a bogus 1, not 1 word about outcomes, but a genuine focus on outcomes, Poverty is eliminated when the poor get quality education, not pretend education. It's eliminated when poor get genuine healthcare, not pretend healthcare. So the way you design it and deliver it is critical. And I hope the opposition has the wisdom and the imagination to see that real welfare is in education, healthcare, real welfare is in job creation, economic growth, and not merely short term amelioration of temporary needs.

Or maybe when, you know, as the Shashikapur and Amitabh formulation when the government stopped participating in PISA, maybe poverty is ended when you stop measuring it. So you spoke about how, as a people, we should not care so much about who is elected next.

I truly don't care. I'm totally agnostic about it.

And I sort of, and I get where you're coming from. And I want to share a formulation of mine with you and get your opinion on that, where I often say that to me, there are, to me, India has 3 major problems as I see it. 1 is approximate problem and that is of the party in power and that's just my opinion. Others can disagree and honestly, I must agree with you that I am as devoid of hope as about the opposition. So really, whichever the party in power is, 1 will have to oppose them.

But 1 is a party in power. But the other 2 problems are deeper problems that seem almost intractable. And the second problem is Indian society itself, which seems fractured in so many different ways. You know, the anti-Muslimness of this political regime does seem to have a larger resonance and that worries me a great deal. Even if these guys are out of power, we will continue to be a fractured society with these fault lines.

And as you pointed out in our last conversation, in many ways, the opposite also holds true. We are liberal, we are assimilative, we are tolerant. But right now I see these nasty or more toxic strains within us find expression. So that fractured society being problem 2 and problem 3 being something we've been really speaking about throughout today's episode, which is our dysfunctional state, you know, a dysfunctional state which is oppressive, which is too powerful, which is predatory, which rules the people instead of serving them. And to me, not enough attention is paid to these 2 problems.

Like the dysfunctional Indian state is something I've been writing about for 20 years. And it's like, everybody just wants to focus on who is in power, who do you want to demonize, who do you want to support, rather than look at these deeper structural issues. And I'm thinking of these deeper structural issues. Politics is constantly in flux. You know, we can agree and disagree and change our minds on which party is good, which party is bad.

We can all perhaps agree that there are plenty of decent people in the political landscape. Incentives are a bit messed up, but people who are trying for different reasons to do things. What do we do about society? What do we do about the state? Do you share my pessimism and concern?

About the society, I do not share the pessimism. Ours is a very complex society. Therefore, almost everything, anything you say can be true and untrue at the same time, as you said. But I think in a substantial measure, not so much because we are wise and wonderful or we're very moral or great, but because of centuries of need to co-exist moderated us. It doesn't mean that we always act in a moderate manner.

The way I look at it is, while there is a median, we stray from the median a bit but there is an inherent compass which tells us, you are not straying too far. Whether it is Godhra riots in Gujarat or something else somewhere else, we are used to many jealousies and pettiness and tragedies etc. The Telugu people call Tamilians Aarava, Tamilian language. Aarava means basically cacophony. We call habitually Muslims Turaka.

Basically, it came from the word Turk, which is an honorable word, but somehow over time it became a pejorative word. So, these are all very common. North Indians call South Indians something, South Indians... All these happen. But while they happen, fundamentally, we don't stray beyond a certain band.

That is, I think, a societal defence mechanism over centuries because we realised intuitively that there is no substitute to this. We simply are too diverse apart from the fact that culturally, we are capable of absorbing many faiths at the same time, sometimes contradictory beliefs at the same time. Otherwise, why would Charvaka be a Hindu saint, an atheist? Why would Kanada be a Hindu saint? Why would Buddha be elevated to a status of God who fought against Hinduism's excesses and all that?

I think it's inherent in our society. That's actually our greatest strength of the society. It doesn't mean that we are more moral. It doesn't mean we are Vishwa Gurus. It doesn't mean we are more noble.

It means we are more pragmatic historically and culturally. We are underestimating its importance. We are taking a few excesses in a very complex way. We are 1 sixth of humanity With the world's greatest diversity and with the most tortuous history, we are forgetting these 3 factors. You take a Europe, you know, a 10 million country, a 5 million country, you say, you know, so many things happen, but in India so many more things.

We are a whole system of humanity with so much of diversity and tortuous history. So if you don't give relevance to that, if you overreact, I'm not saying you should not be sensitive to what's happening. Overreaction is as bad as being insensitive. Because then you become pessimistic and you become fatalistic and all that. I don't see that.

I actually see a lot of positives in our society. Maybe I come from a part of the country where this sense is not so depressing also. Because again, India is continental after all. But if indeed everybody is becoming religious, Karnataka, the thumping verdict. Why?

Maharashtra, BJP is uncertain now about the outcome despite getting recognition. I don't know what's happening in the state, but certainly a fight is on. Bihar, we don't know what's going to happen. So I think saying that all Indians are Hinduized and their political instincts are based on the religious affiliation or something, I think it's too sweeping a generalization. What I think is happening is, apart from the normal right-wing problem, 1 is a right-wing problem.

World over right-wing has 2 elements. 1 is the cultural, traditional or religious combination of that. The other, they are the core support base initially. Christian Democrats in Germany, Republicans in the US right now, earlier right-wing party not became a right-wing party or others elsewhere. The other is the economic liberalism and conservative economic policies, etc.

Only when a party system matures are they able to reconcile. Even in the US, you can see the schism now between the 2. Trump is increasingly seen to be representing the cultural religious right wing as opposed to economic right wing, though he actually comes from an economic right wing class. In India, we haven't still mastered it. The second element is if a ruling combine wants to do what they believe is relatively unpopular but long-term economic growth, when there is a propensity to go for the short-term benefit, If they raise what they think is a bigger line and therefore unite the country on religion, and easily if you show a bogeyman, the Muslim as the enemy or somebody as the enemy is the easy way to unify.

It's a wrong strategy and wrong thinking in every which way, but if they think that way, I think it's more political positioning in order to achieve what they believe they should do for the country. So there's that element also. I'm not saying everybody in BJP is thinking that way, but there are quite a few who are thinking that way. Without going into the nuances, we are simply polarizing and saying, you know, this party is for this, that party is for that. I have seen at grassroots level, as a public official, and even early on in my training, I was shocked when the so-called secular politicians and secular leaders and parties, how they completely polarized people and communal alliance at the grassroots level.

As I said before, in a different context, they believe that BJP is for Hindutva and Congress is for secular market segmentation. In actual operational terms in practice, in political behavior, trust me, there's not that much distinction. And the people can be trusted to protect the broad, I don't want to use the word secular in a big way, but the broad plural fabric of the society. Even a state like Jammu and Kashmir, believed to be largely religious etc. I believe, I remember 1983 when I went there and That was the time when Farooq Abdullah, after his father's demise, was leading the party and he contested the elections and he won.

Somebody gave me a feedback that Mrs. Indira Gandhi polarized the society to the point that all the Hindus and Shia Muslims were voting for Congress. Polarization and religion did not come today. It's not invented by 1 party or the other. And all Sunni Muslims were voting for National Conference.

I wanted to test that hypothesis. So I asked them their preferences. After that, I asked them if they're Hindu, anyway, would know the name. I was in Srinagar and surrounding areas, mostly Muslims only. Then I asked, are you a Shia or Sunni?

You know, 2 responses struck me. Every 1 of them without exception said, I'm secular, I thought. Though their voting preferences were actually based on Shia versus Sunni. And yet they all claimed the word secular I never heard from ordinary people's mouths before or after. The second 1, once they asked them about their own antithesis, they asked me about where I am from.

I said Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Heart me loss of this and why? NTR. We are fighting from the center. See, even Kashmir, it was not about religion at the time.

It was our bad politics because we treated Kashmir like any other political theater in the country. We messed up in a variety of ways, tactically and strategically. And eventually it became Hindu, Muslim, Pakistan, etc. So I don't believe anywhere across the country religion is as profoundly important politically as it is made out to be. We made it that way.

Largely, it's a political bankruptcy and a consistent political failure, irrespective of BJP. When BJP was not a significant factor, also these things happened. We are forgetting that. I remember vividly in 2010 or 11 in Kashmir 78% people voted in the local elections. 78% it was a ringing endorsement at a time and 5-10% were voting in general elections.

I remember pleading with the government, the highest functionaries in the government, please this is an opportunity. It's a great endorsement of Indian democracy and unity of India. Give them money, give them power. Once they're busy with their school, their local road, water supply, drainage, etc., they'll forget India and Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim. We failed to do that.

Now we say Hindu Muslim. We draw a bigger line, make the people see the benefits of what they actually do locally in a manner that's tangible, not in a centralized system. I know it's my hobby horse. I always go back to decentralization because it is the heart of the issue. China is more decentralized than India, I feel ashamed about it.

And I'm saying it openly, China is more decentralized than India. Pakistan is more decentralized. Bangladesh is more decentralized. Brazil, Argentina, name it. For a country as liberal, as freedom loving, as individualistic as India, it's absurd that we centralize so much and we think it's normal, it's natural.

So it's much more complicated than religiosity, religious fundamentalism and secularism. This is very easy caricaturing and lazy caricaturing.

I completely agree with what you say about the parties being so alike in the sense I don't even think the right-left spectrum really applies to India at all because that economic right is just simply absent in India in any case. I think all parties are fundamentally alike in the sense that they are statist in their economics or left of center, and they are conservative or right of center when it comes to society. And both of those are exactly the other way around, because, you know, both of those sort of are enemies of individual freedom which is what I really care about. However, I'll kind of go back to that point you made about it being possible that this party or at least a section of it is using this Hindu Muslim thing as posturing to do the good work they're doing. Firstly, I'm not exactly sure of how I would qualify that good work.

I mean, I'll defer to your judgment. But when I look back at the year so far, I see the incredible humanitarian disaster of demonetization. I see the botched implementation of GST, I see a lot of other things gone wrong. But even leaving that aside, even if they had the best intentions, the means of, you know, polarizing society on the Hindu Muslim issue seems to me to have 1 danger and 1 implication. And the implication is that they believe that there is some constituency for it otherwise, they would not do it and empowering that constituency and making it vocal can have the effect of sort of awakening a tiger that you then cannot ride, you know a danger that

was expressed. You cannot legitimize it. I'm only trying to understand it and address it. There is a difference between the 2. There is no way you can ever legitimize.

The moment you divide people on caste or region or religion or language, the moment you arouse primordial loyalty, it's a hungry beast.

I mean, we saw this with what Indira did with Bindanwale or with what Zia did with Islamism. Absolutely.

People said in those days, I believe, the then prominent leader, later president of India, Ziauddin Ghani Jail Singh, he brought Bindanwale to Mrs. Gandhi and said, here is your answer to Akalita. It ultimately devoured her and the nation in many ways. You are absolutely right. So, it is a deadly thing.

What I am saying is, let us understand therefore, what exactly are the impulses and how to address it rather than demonizing it and pretending that by sloganeering, we're going to change it. You cannot legitimize it ever. There's no way any of us could use it as a caste or religion. But equally, Why are we using caste in such a pronounced and open and vulgar manner and why are we legitimizing it? How is it any worse than this?

In large parts of India, actually the caste divide is even more dangerous and more deadly than the religious divide. So, Let us expand the principle to primordial loyalties. Language, region. I have seen in Andhra Pradesh, Ashtavale, Andhra Pradesh, how for some time, the regional disparity... It's not disparity really.

It's more a sense of insult and injury. It was used to divide people in a very crude manner. Luckily, wisdom prevailed. Luckily, the very people who did it understood the long-term implications, they acted as statesmen. Luckily, Telangana people did not reward division of a state against the consent of the state by parliamentary fiat.

Supposing the people of Telangana rewarded such autocratic behavior by the federal government, by now in every state of India, the major political parties would have played the game and I think federalism in India would have been dead by now. So why is that acceptable? Why is caste divide acceptable? Why is linguistic divide acceptable? So you know, somehow we have blinkers.

There is a larger issue of diversity management of India. It applies to religion, it applies to caste, it applies to language, it applies to everything else. And the way I look at it, most Muslims, most Hindus are living happily without any serious thing. They understand they have a different God and different way of praying, but otherwise, it doesn't make any difference. All of us are living quite happily.

By political posturing on both sides, not merely on 1 side, we're accentuating a divide which did not exist or creating a divide that did not exist in most cases. Probably in a part of India which was directly impacted by partition and mass migration and the horrendous bloodshed at that time, they had these scars in their hearts. But 90% of India is not affected by that. And on both sides you are creating this. 1 side Islam khatrameh, which is nonsensical.

To say that Islam is in danger in India is absurd. It's absurd nonsense. Whoever says it, wherever they say it. There's not an iota of realistic evidence. Rhetoric does not make reality.

And to say that Islam is the cause of India's problems is absolute nonsense. Bunkum. So both sides are equally guilty.

In the late 1960s, Ehsan Jafri was caught in this religious riot and he had to go somewhere else and he insisted on going back home to where he lived which was a relatively cosmopolitan neighborhood and he was advised by his friends, why don't you shift to this Muslim neighborhood, you'll be safer there and he said no, that on principle I believe that I can live anywhere in India. I will not live in a Muslim ghetto. And props to him for saying that on principle, you know, and yet in 2002, he died. So my question is, was he right or was he wrong?

He was right. He was right. But it doesn't mean just because you do the right thing, you're always rewarded because society, the random things happen, stuff happens, sometimes we pay the price. But my only point is, Let us put it in perspective. Let us put it in perspective.

Again, 1.4 billion people, 1 sixth of world, more than 1 sixth of humanity with the world's greatest diversity possible and then see what's happening in the rest of the world. Who said human beings are utterly rational and balanced and sensible and moral and practical and nothing of the kind? We are human. In the large part, we are okay. But while we grieve the losses, While we acknowledge the difficulties and try to address them, let us not magnify and let us not pretend that these isolated incidents are global.

You know, I remember in a different context, you remember the Nirbhaya rape incident and so much thing? Because in India, we are very emotional on these issues because we cannot imagine the situation of a woman's chastity being violated. It's more that rather than the individual right. I don't know if you get it. So we were making quite understandably, you know, we were very angry and upset and all that.

What shocked me was BBC and CNN, BBC which I love, they ran stories, full-length stories saying India is the rape capital of the world. Absolute nonsense. You go into statistics, there is X number of rapes per unit population country-wise. Any rape, even 1 rape is unacceptable. But tragically, human beings are human beings.

UK, which has roughly 4.5% of India's population has 16, 000 rapes a year. United States, which has 1 fourth of the population of India at 96, 000, 1 lakh rapes a year. India has 32, 000 rapes registered. Let's assume that 4 times that number are there.

I'd assume many more times, but I get your point.

So, and BBC, a channel which is credibility is very high and I don't think they have any malice but we go by images and rhetoric rather than substance. Evidence, logic, look at the big picture. Millions upon millions are living in harmony in this country. We are pretending as if Hindus and Muslims are on a warpath. The person who cooks food for me every day is a Muslim.

She is a member of my family practically. There is not a moment when we felt, whenever my air conditioner fails, I call Yusuf bhai. He's like a brother to me. So, the notion that my God, India is now breaking up and somebody somewhere writing an article, somebody somewhere reacting fraudulently and giving all these statements, ignoring the fundamental realities of India, that there is mass poverty, that there is third rate healthcare, third rate education, people are suffering, Hindu or Muslim, instead of addressing them, we are now trying to do virtue signaling too much of that I want to show how wonderful I am how secular I am or how agnostic I am or how something else I am how pious I am that's not very productive.

So here's a question let's say and I agree with you on virtue signaling is 1 of the great torments of our age. And let's say we want to get past that. Let's say I want to avoid that even in myself, right? Now, there's 1 point of view, which you're stating is that, you know, we are a country with mad multitudes, the absolute numbers are huge. And by and large, we are peaceful, and we've learned to coexist.

And, you know, to those who say that no, that there is more polarization and Hindu Muslim violence has gone up, especially anti-Muslim violence has gone up, which does seem to me from my armchair to be the case, but perhaps you would argue that you're wrong because you're only you know you're taking these isolated incidents out of proportion. There have always been isolated incidents. There are no more so now than in the past and it's a danger to amplify these all the time and then of course the problem seems bigger than it is. So my question to you therefore would be that if I want to understand intellectually that is this religious problem, you know, greater or lesser? Is there an objective measure for it?

Is there a metric? You know, like, for example, I did an episode on gender called metrics of empowerment, where I asked these 3 wonderful women researchers on, you know, what are the metric, what are the non standard metrics of empowerment we can talk about for women and to me, 1 non standard metric was divorce rates. I thought if divorce rates have gone up, that's a great sign because it means more women are empowered to take their life into their own hands. So similarly, what kind of possible metrics would there be to sort of talk about Hindu Muslim harmony? And it's a question as much for you as for my listeners.

I can't give a definitive answer. Obviously. But in an instance, are Islamic people getting more, quote unquote, secularized? Are Hindu people getting more secularized? Population control, 1 of the great stories of our time.

In every segment of our population, Hindu, Muslim, upper caste, lower caste, north, south, east, west, the birth rates are plummeting. Yes, they're not equal because historically we are behind the curve. Some states are behind.

Also, poor people have more kids and Muslims tend to be more poor.

But even there, Muslims birth rate is falling. Exactly. Hindu birth rate is falling. Upper caste birth rate is falling. Scheduled caste birth rate is falling.

That means there is a certain modernization going on in the country. We're ignoring that. Second, I remember when I took the IAS examination, the civil service examination, I went with the curfew pass. Every year, clockwork like in Hyderabad city, there were communal rights and curfew every year. Who was in power?

Congress party. Other parties were not even known at the time. A non-Congress party came to power, instantly all rights came to a stop. So to pretend that there is somebody who is polarizing and we are secular, because people have short memories, It's easy to pretend.

My worry is not so much about a party as you know.

No, but more important, the more important positive thing is if indeed people are so communalized in Hyderabad, let us say, how could 1 new government instantly stop it forever. That means fundamentally it's a political issue, not the people's issue. As an administrator, I know, I was absolutely clear, and many of my colleagues across the country are clear. You restrain your hands when it comes to many other forms of law and order breakdown. But when it comes to communal right, use extreme force and as quickly as possible.

So, this country has the ability to handle that. If indeed it's in the people's psyche, no government, particularly a weak government, ineffective government, you mentioned dysfunctional government. Where is governance in India except in abuse of power? Do you have rule of law in India? Does the government have really the power to, ability to actually deliver anything?

We cannot. If the People do not allow us, we can't do anything. So, the fact that we can easily control communal rights in the country shows that it is not a people's thing, it's a political thing. It's a political failure, broadly speaking.

And it also means that when we cannot control a communal right in the country, that's also a political failure because the police is in the hands of the powers.

Yes, whether it is post Indira Gandhi's assassination in Delhi or it is in Gujarat, Mr. Modi has his own version, I'm sure. Mr. Modi believes that in the first 72 hours, within 24 hours, the army was brought. In the first 72 hours, 70 people died, most of them Hindu, in firings.

Whereas what happened in post-1994 Indira Gandhi assassination riots is his version. Another version is something, I don't know the full truth. Therefore, without knowing a full version and I have no patience or time to go into that. There's so much in India that we have to do. But the point I'm making is if the political will is there, in India, communal rights can be instantly controlled.

I am supremely confident about that. Therefore we are manufacturing a political problem and converting it into social problem.

You mentioned population before, let's talk about another potential conflagration that lies ahead of us, which is delimitation. So just for my listeners, delimitation basically, the principle in a democracy should be that everyone's vote counts for exactly equal. So X number of, you know, X number of people elect 1 MP and therefore their vote is equal. But what happens is that if population in some states goes up and in other states goes up less, then the votes of the people in the most popular state end up counting for less because they are electing a smaller fraction of their MP, if that makes any sense. And delimitation is supposed to be this exercise which has been postponed endlessly but is due upon us soon.

Whereas you actually increase or decrease the number of MPs from a state so that every vote counts for equal. But the danger in that in modern times is that the population in the north has gone up much more than in the south. And in the south has gone up less because the south has done better in economic terms, the richer you get the less children you have. So there's more population control that's happened there. And their point is just because we are successful, why should we be penalized with less of a political voice by having MPs taken away from us or more MPs allotted to the North States and obviously for the current regime, which is so powerful in the North, it would make a lot of sense for delimitation to happen because they control, you know, many more MPs in parliament.

And by the way, in the new parliament, the number of the seating of the Lok Sabha has been increased to 900 and whatever to accommodate the projected new numbers. And for the South, this is a complete disaster because in a central government sense, they lose a lot of power, you know, in that larger sense. What is your sense of what is going to happen? How does it change the incentives of the South states? We already know the incentives of the party in power will be to go ahead with it.

What are the best and worst case scenario of delimitation?

You know, the constitutional mandate is clear. And as is the democratic practice world over, that 1 person, 1 vote, and therefore, the number of seats should be in proportion to the population. And it's a reasonable 1. Mrs. Gandhi, she had done many things wrong, but this was not done with malafide.

Perhaps, in hindsight, not a good judgment, but it was done with good intentions. She decided to freeze as part of the amendment at that time, in 1976. For 25 years, irrespective of the population, the number of seats in each state will be remaining the same, which was based on 1971 population because census was

1971.

The mistake they committed, I'll come to that minor, this is a minor 1, but still important 1 is, even if you wanted to freeze the constituency's number in a state, there's no reason to stop delimitation of the boundaries because urban-rural, within a state, huge urbanization is taking place. If you believe in modernization, if you believe urban people are more likely to look at economic issues and more secular issues and not conditioned by their money power or caste, etc. It's not entirely true, but to a large extent, it's true. More enlightened electorate, hopefully. Not only is it democratically right that more urban population get more urban seeds, it's also politically the right thing to do because then politics will get better.

Foolishly, our bureaucrats, simultaneously while freezing the number of constituencies, also froze delimitation within the state. Come

2001...

Actually,

2002-03,

2 of us, K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, the former civil servant, retired civil servant and I, who took up this case, we held a round table in Delhi. We called all the state election commissions, the election commission of India, all the 3. Then Arun Jaitley as the law minister. And we went into great detail 3 issues.

1 is we pleaded with them. If you remember 1998 Pokhara, American sanctions, India's economic growth project, all kinds of... They said, look, do you want to open another front? We're not talking about right or wrong. You can argue both ways.

You can argue that 1 person, 1 vote is sacrosanct. That's the constitutional thing. It was a perversion. You must undo it. It's a very genuine argument.

You could also argue that a federal democracy requires complex arrangements. It's not always 1 person, 1 vote. You have to get everybody together. Both are reasonable arguments because these are not something which is mathematical. So, that's not important.

What's important is, should the government open up another front when there are so many crises? I think that appealed to them. And therefore, the freeze continued about the number. The second thing we argued, just as the states are building, the assembly constituencies are building blocks for local constituencies, Now that constitutionally mandated local governments are available, let the local governments as far as practical will be building blocks for assembly constituencies. It was also accepted.

That's how we brought in the state election commissioners. Third thing we appeal to them, within the state, allow redistricting, delimitation, so that the urban-rural things are there, and also reservation of constituencies. For 30, 40 years, there's all the resentment. If you also rotate them, there'll be less resentment and there'll be more democratic representation. See, if you say only a male or a female or only this caste can be representing you, after a point it doesn't become democratic.

You're limiting choices. So, while reservation is necessary, do it better. That was not accepted by all MPs across the aisle because they don't want to change their boundaries. Because they're afraid, you know, ultimately I'll get something I don't know, and they get something else. But they have the proprietarial interest, and government yielded to them because government didn't have a strong majority.

Therefore, they felt they yielded. Now, we thought 25 years, we kicked the can down the road, no problem. But 25 years came. As you said earlier, time passes. And I didn't realize that so fast 25 years will come.

It has come now. Even at that time, if you remember, Madanlal Khurana, who was earlier Delhi Chief Executive Councillor and at that time Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, he twice-thrice publicly stated, it must be according to population. So a section of BJP's mind was that. But watch pie decided you should not open another front, north-south everything etc. Now the situation has changed.

A, you cannot in perpetuity have this kind of a freeze. B, just as the southern states say, why should we or western states say or even Orissa, Orissa has done a remarkable job in family planning. Orissa is a great success story, you know, how a poor state with sound fiscal management, political popularity, reformist influences, population control. Orissa is a remarkable story. I think it's not told by many people.

We should talk about Orissa. So Orissa will lose too. Many states will lose. West Bengal, Maharashtra, many states now are coming down in terms of population. Therefore, A, there will be pressure on the BJP to get the political advantage.

No party wants to do something that is hurtful to its own politics, whichever be the party. Principles apart, I have not known any ruler anywhere in the world who has deliberately hurt himself. Rarely some people did, but they came to grief. Sadat of Egypt, when he made peace with Israel, it was a heroic thing. Ultimately, he paid the price with his life.

So, rarely do people do against their own direct political interest when it's very manifestly clear. It's not a conjecture when it's reality. To expect that to happen in respect of Congress or TDP or BJP or some other party is nonsensical. And I've operated on that basis so far. All my life, whatever little successes I achieved, I always tried to find the political benefit for those who are making decisions and the national benefit.

You try and combine both and come up with a formula. Ideally speaking about nation's good, but you lose and you commit suicide, it doesn't really work in real life. So probably BJP today will be quite tempted and they will not be wrong at all in doing it. If they want to do it that way, probably they can arrive at a formula which is not exactly proportion to population, but something else. The other thing they seem to be looking at is we'll increase the numbers anyway overall.

And therefore, while the proportion of certain states will decrease, the actual numbers will increase. Ultimately, the prospective candidates want more seats. They're not bothered about representation. That is for you and me. Most politicians don't care about that.

As long as my aspiration is satisfied, my ambition is fulfilled, I am okay. I think that's another thing that being played out. I don't know how it's going to shape up, but either way, if you don't build a consensus, if you make it a civil war issue for the country, it's going to be very dangerous. I deeply believe that the unity of India is paramount. Not because I have any Bharat Mata notions.

I have none of those. I genuinely believe that India, given its unique nature of history and the complexity, does not have the societal strength, let me choose my words very carefully, to be able to deal with a division. Even a division of a state within the Union of India, when nothing changes for the people, you have all the constitutional rights, You can travel, reside, do business, do work, whatever. I have seen in Andhra and Telangana for some years how much of a psychological and emotional strife there was. That's what we are.

That's probably what we'll do for the next 30, 40, 50 years. We have seen the untold damage done during the time of partition in

1947.

Given that I believe unity of India is what ensures in our society order and relate to peace and harmony. And unity of India is what ensures freedom. It's not the other way around. In Scotland, they can say, all right, you can have a referendum, you can have a peaceful division or something, but in India, it's not possible. Even in a country like Spain could not allow it.

Catalonia, the moment they all said in the Catalonia Assembly or whatever that local Basque Assembly, they all put them in jail. I don't think you can put anything above unity of India, not for unity's sake, but for the sake of freedom and for the sake of peace in this country. And therefore, anything that the government of India does, or the parliament does, unless they embrace all these states and sit with them and figure out an acceptable thing, if they do it perimetrically like they did the division of Andhra Pradesh, that could be counterproductive. Apart from that, BJP now has some aspirations to also expand in the South. So it will be politically prevalent on their part to also take them into context and figure out a formula which is reasonably satisfactory.

But having said that, you cannot permanently postpone this issue of division on the basis of population, electoral districting on the basis of population. We have to address that. But probably you can do it gradually, just as they kicked the can down. Now you do it maybe in 3 cycles in 3 decades, you do every time, 1 third increase. So the pain probably will not be that much.

So there are ways of doing it if you really have the goodwill.

I mean, on the 1 hand, I'd say that, given what you earlier said, and I kind of agreed with you about the resilience of Indian society and the ability to handle divisions like the Hindu-Muslim division, for example, I would imagine that the same could apply here too. I would also be wary of taking lines on a map for granted that this is exactly how a nation-state has to be, has to look how that a nation state is necessary in the first place, given that we've had a sample size of this particular nation state existing for 70 something years. And B as and C as far as freedom is concerned, I would say that most Indians in a real sense of the term don't have freedom anyway. Like if you know, you cannot have freedom really without the rule of law and we don't have the rule of law. So in that sense, it's, I mean, it's a different sense from the 1 you meant it in, but I'm just making that aside.

I hear you. But the point I'm making is, If we can be a European community, each nation being sovereign, but there's a common market and people can migrate anywhere, I have no quarrel. I don't think that's going to happen in the next 50 to 100 years in India, until that happens. If we lose the advantage of common market, if you're going to have soldiers across the border of each of the constituent, whatever becomes later, I think that's going to be a disaster. And therefore, I'm implacably in favor of unity of India, Because we don't have the capability as a society to be able to manage multiple nations with peace and harmony and common market.

The strength of common market we are forgetting.

No, no, I agree about the strength of the common market. But for me, anything that lies beyond a united India as it is today is in the nature of unknown unknown. So, I can't even imagine it and I don't, it's not necessarily that there'll be soldiers across borders, but I can't imagine how it could come about. But is there an optimal solution to delimitation? Because what it appears to me is that the incentives are so diametrically opposite each other, you know, in terms of anything that is good for the BJP will obviously be opposed by the BJP's opposition because it's obviously by the same

token not good

for them.

No, but BJP also wants economic growth of India, therefore a peaceful, harmonious environment for that. If BJP also wants to expand its electoral base to other parts of India, therefore they want to sort of harmonize it and do it in a slow manner. There's also an incentive to do it differently. So it depends on your long-term objective. And BJP is a party with a long-term ambition, 1 thing remarkable about BJP is unlike any other party, they look at the next 30-40 years.

Yeah, but at the same time, like we were discussing Rajesh's quote about how they think more like day traders and like Warren Buffet, which is in certain context but…

But in terms of politics, I mean, if you look at state after state, because whatever be the weaknesses, there is a long term perspective that a significant number of traditional BJP card has a share about politics and about India. And therefore, that also is a factor to be taken into consideration. I mean, otherwise, why will a man like Mr. Rajagopalan fight for 50 years in RSS in Kerala without any hope and ultimately after 50 years, he got 1 assembly seat. And yet there are people who are fighting.

BJP is the only party which can mobilize a million people seeking no money, not mercenaries, simply doing what the party tells them to do. That's because there are many many people while they are becoming increasingly like other parties, many carpetbaggers are coming in but the core of BJP still is very long-term and they're not seeking anything personal. Their vision may be right, may be wrong but they truly are card based in that sense.

What is the worst that could happen? Let's say the BJP gets a political calculations all wrong. Let's say that there is an argument there that yes, we are trying to expand our reach in the South, but only because we want a firmer hold on power, which this would give us anyway and blah, blah, blah.

The worst that would happen is you reallocate the constituencies based on population without taking the South into confidence, without sitting with them and negotiating and figuring out a way and eschewing some concerns and fears, etc. However misplaced those fears are, as long as the person who expresses the fears is genuine about them in a democracy, you take them into consideration, just like farm laws. Most of the fears and criticism is unwarranted, legitimate. But as long as the legitimate fears are there in the minds of the people, even if they're irrational fears, a democracy must address them.

And that's the worst case scenario as far as process is concerned, as far as outcome is concerned.

And if that happens in that way, once the seeds of anger and alienation are there, there will be always some people to exploit it. And when you have a coastline, when the global forces operate, eventually, they have their own interests. They may feel that they'll handle this part of geography better if they separate national entity or something. All kinds of things happen. I'm not taking and saying 1 day, 2 days, But over decades, you are needlessly sowing the seeds of a potential crisis, if not a conflict.

It's not wise.

So we've spoken enough about the state of India. Let's get back to talking about you as we kind of get closer to winding up this episode, in our last conversation you used the word alpasantoosh, satisfied with very little.

Our people are in the large part, that is my complaint. They are not expecting too much from the governments and the political process. And that's allowing the governments and the parties to get away with a lot. I don't know if I mentioned last time, you know, many of us eulogized for doing very little. While you know, right, it gives us some legitimacy, some validates our work and all that gives us some credibility.

But I'm very deeply dissatisfied with this easy contentment. Unless we demand what we deserve and what we need from the governing institutions, why will they perform any better? So yes, and far too many people are taking advantage of this because I do a little bit because it's better than others. I am now put on a pedestal and I put myself on a pedestal and I think no end of myself. That's not the way great societies are built.

We must have humility as human beings and societies must be demanding of their representatives. Not unreasonable, but I'm paying taxes and I have an expectation that these things would happen. In which other country will the poorest families pay 30, 000, 40, 000 rupees a year for schooling and get no schooling of any quality? In which other country do poor people have no access to healthcare and become paupers and their descent into poverty is monumental? And we don't complain.

Just not right. I'm not saying you should go and indulge in violence, but our voice must be heard. In which other country will employees get away with this? Try any other country, any other sensible democracy? If 3% people get the lion's share of the tax money and the taxpayers get very little out of it, any other country, the government will fall next day.

In which other country can demonetization happen the way it happened, causing enormous strife to millions of ordinary people, even dictatorship to the foreign. That's why I always say, if you blame Indian people as obstacles to bring about the changes that are required, then it's absolutely a lie. If they believe that the leader or leaders are doing something genuine, their heart is pure, even if they commit mistakes and even the people suffer, Indian people are willing to withstand that hardship. Demonetization is a conclusive example. You don't require further illustration.

You cannot blame the people of India for the failings of the governing classes of India. I'm absolutely certain.

But I... I thought the conclusion you were coming towards is you can blame the people of India because they're satisfied with too little and they should be more demanding. No, no.

I'm talking about enduring certain pain, if necessary, for the long-term good.

Right, right.

But that they're not demanding is a fact. These are 2 different aspects. But you're right, both coexist. If the garment of the day they perceive is attempting to do something that's necessary and desirable, they're willing to go to any length. But they're not demanding enough of the governments.

And it's a problem. As an administrator, I've noticed. I was in North Coast, Landhra. I was in Karimnagar in Telangana, and I was in South Coast, Landhra. People of course are wonderful everywhere.

I don't know why bureaucracy is so venerated and why they are so kind to us. I don't understand. But anyway, I'm the beneficiary so I can't complain too much. But I have seen North Coast Landhra people are wonderful, but they are not demanding. There is no fire.

So even if you really encourage them to make something of their life, they are not willing to. Very passive. South Coast Landra where I worked, people are unforgiving. Sometimes there are cases where some predecessors have to run away for fear of their lives. That I agree.

But they respond so magnificently to incentives. Any day I would prefer that. I don't want a passive docile people who make and control. I want people who if necessary are aggressive and sometimes threaten me but ultimately they want to take charge of their lives and make something of it if an opportunity is given. I think we have to develop that hunger.

We have to make something of our lives. We have to do more demanding.

We were having lunch with a third friend of ours who, you know, referred to Animal Farm by George Orwell and spoke about the Indian people as sheep. So, you know, maybe there's something there.

Not always. There are many, many dynamic considerations. Each area, because again, whether you're early or princely state or a state British India, right worry or gemindari, you know, all these things shaped at least the near history not long term trajectory, but 50 100 years, it made a lot of difference.

The reason I like the phrase Alpa Santosh or the word Alpa Santosh was actually I think at a personal level that's something I'd like to inculcate in myself where I'm satisfied with less at least in terms of outcomes but obviously demanding as much as I can on myself, but satisfies it less in terms of outcomes. So just from a point of view of personal contentment, you know, I'd like to, you know, take you away from the arena of India and our great democracy and all of that. And, you know, what, how, what gives you contentment today? Like when you think of contentment as opposed to 20 years ago, 25 years ago, you know, what is contentment for you today at this stage in your life?

1 is a belief that History generally moves in the right direction. There are some distortions from time to time. There are some glitches, but in the long term, not very long term, but even generationally speaking some significant things happen. The second is politics and governance important though they are, they're not the center of the universe. Thank God for that.

I mean, 30 years ago, if we were sitting here, I don't think that we'd have had power continuously anywhere in the country. Of course, there was no telephone. A hundred other things were not possible. Irrespective of how bad the governments are, technology and the human quest for progress is taking care of many things. We are forgetting that.

We are making politics the center of our being. Earlier also in a different context we discussed. If youngsters today have to do something other than politics and nation, etc., that's perhaps even more desirable. We should not even think twice about that. A third is That ultimately we have increasingly great opportunities for leapfrogging.

We need not always commit the same mistakes as others. The fourth is our society has incredible strengths, why we recognize the weaknesses, we forget the strengths. In which other country are you reasonably safe and comfortable without fear of being molested or raped or murdered or mugged? If my child is in New York City, I'm worried every day what is happening to her. If you're in Bombay city or some other city, in the most part, we're not really worried because the society has tremendous inherent strength, which we don't always recognize or acknowledge.

As long as that is there, if we do a few things right, and we have the genius to do things much better than others at a very low cost. Take our health care, your knee replacement, your heart surgery, other things we do at the lowest cost in the world to meet the best standards of the world. So we have immense opportunities and I feel we are blessed in many ways as a society And I think my generation, while we have failed in many respects, we are lucky to be able to live in this time and age to see sweeping changes globally and nationally. And 1 of the things that makes me particularly happy is look at electricity sector or power sector, energy sector. 30 years ago our fear was peak oil production.

Today our certainty is peak oil demand. Who would have imagined 30 years ago that we will actually envisage an age when oil is more or less not required? That in the face of a Ukrainian war, oil price would not shoot up dramatically. And even if Saudi Arabia or some other country cuts down production significantly, it doesn't make a serious impact. How much we have travelled as humanity?

A chap called John Goodenough, when we talk about contentment and age, John Goodenough, he's a Nobel laureate, he's 1 of the pioneers in lithium battery, He's 100 years old. You know what he's doing? He's still a professor. He's still working to perfect the battery. 100 years!

He may not live tomorrow. He's doing with great gusto. To me, that is more inspiring than all the political work and other things. I think some wonderful things are happening in the world. We are very privileged to be living in this time and age.

And we're getting carried away by certain minor distortions in the larger context. I feel good about it.

But you've given me a geopolitical answer to a personal question, which is a great answer and I appreciate it. But in your personal life, what gives you joy? Like, what

do you look forward to when you wake up? I have a certain sense of contentment in 1 thing. In the kingdom of the blind, 1 had to manage the king. In a country where accomplishment is so rare, even minor accomplishments appear to be big. So I was 1 of the lucky ones to get a few minor accomplishments and sometimes appear bigger than many others because I could traverse many areas from my...

1 of your finest achievements is your modesty, though I feel it's kind of uncalled for.

No, but in the larger context of what needs to be done, what we've done or what we're able to do is minuscule. I am mindful of that. At the same time, I'm confident that if you set your mind to it and if opportunity presents itself, if you know when to use that opportunity wisely, then you can get things done. To that extent I mentioned them, otherwise I recognize the limits. But 1 satisfaction I do have is some of us, not merely 1 individual or 2, we have at least intellectually we are trying to change the trajectory, the way we look at things.

The traditional modes of thinking about polity, about institutions and democracy and economy slowly are giving way to more rational, evidence-based, logical and best practices-based approach. I take great pleasure in that. It was simply not possible 25, 30 years ago. Third is, I certainly along with many others played some role in bringing the middle classes and the youth and the urban people into looking at politics much more seriously, instead of simply holding their noses and rejecting it and thinking it's all bad. And certainly, there is the degree of deeper political engagement.

It's never complete or adequate. But I think it's a good thing. And as I said before, while there are some distortions in our democracy, fundamentally, I don't believe that we will deviate from democracy in this country. I'm reasonably confident of that. So, a lot more needs to be done.

And there are some things which I feel are urgent, which cannot be postponed, they have to be done. Some other things if they're done now, it's good. If it's postponed a little bit, it's okay. Therefore, my only concern now is, can we help shape the minds of bright young people on sufficient scale so that the next generation strategic thinking and leadership beyond partisan politics and prejudice, rational and evidence-based way of looking at it and the smartness to seize the moment and strategically bring about the changes with optimism and with patience and perseverance because this requires a lifetime's patience. That is a challenge.

Well, I think we have to make the effort and I think some of us are making the effort and I hope it will be successful.

The last time we spoke, you know, after our recording, I think I asked you if you're writing a book and I tried to convince you, you must write a book.

Yes, I must write and that kind of discipline that you bring to the table, I'm not able to. It's also a fear. I write even now, not as copiously as earlier, but I write quite a lot. But to write a definitive book, there is a fear. I think I must conquer that fear and I must not have a perfection.

And I think there is something that people like me need to communicate what we learned in a lifetime, the mistakes we committed and the synthesis of learnings. And I believe there are some important things. The point you're making, the way things are happening, not because individuals are bad or politicians are bad, because there are certain systemic things and if you alter incentives, things change, just like in the economy and politics and governance also. I think that's the most important lesson. But we have to go into granular detail.

I think there's a lot we have to say. I hope I'll find the energy and the discipline quickly before, you know, the time runs out.

Inshallah, no, Inshallah, time will not run out anytime soon and you'll find the energy. I think part of the fear as a writing teacher, I think part of the fear may be just coming from your use of a definitive. If you're going to set that kind of a target for yourself, it paralyzes you right at the start.

Yeah, that actually is happening to me.

So I agree with

you, it's happening to me.

I would urge you to take it a chapter at a time, just share your experiences, share your thoughts. And once you have a first draft, then you can think about how to whip it into shape. But I think it would be a public service if you would write that book and it would no doubt feature then in the answer that future guests will give me to the next question I'm about to ask you, which is I'll ask you to share for me and my listeners, you know, books, films, music, which have given you joy or meant a lot to you and so on and so forth?

You know, I am fond of, increasingly I am fond of both history and anthropology. A book like For instance, Guns, Germs and Steel taught me a lot. Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond. Harari's books, a certain perspective, well, some of it may or may not be acceptable, but a broad perspective about human trajectory is both interesting and instructive.

I enjoyed it immensely. Increasingly, I'm drawn to a deeper understanding of economics because I probably many people like me 30, 40 years ago did not give economics the primacy that it deserved. Increasingly, I believe Marx was right that ultimately economic shapes your society, your politics, your everything.

But he was wrong on everything else.

Everything else was wrong, yes. But his basic idea of historical materialism, I think it was broadly right. And therefore, I enjoy immensely a lot of economic thinking and writing and research.

Any specific books or items?

A couple of books recently. 1 is... I don't remember the title, but The Crisis of Democracy in this context. Another 1, very recent 1, I think published only last month or so, economic governance from 1933 to

2023.

Basically, making the case that US and other countries, while they talk so much about free markets and global trade and record 1 comparative advantage. It's always held hostage domestic politics. Whatever is convenient they did, it's not ideological. So things of that sort. So I have 1 of my Strengths and perhaps weaknesses is inexhaustible appetite to learn and I try to absorb like a sponge.

But increasingly I realize that life is finite and time is a problem and you can't even expect everything. So, I'm discarding some things. But I love astronomy. I love anything related to energy and solar power, other things, various other modes of things, new technologies and stuff like that. I relish them, I enjoy them, I feel good about what's going to happen etc.

So it's an eclectic kind of reading.

What's the last book or film or song that made you cry?

Recently, I'm not able to recall, but just a few days ago, I did cry. Not necessarily a very noble book or noble film. If there is a genuinely emotional scene where I can put myself in their shoes, that empathy, I can easily cry. I don't cry normally in personal life, but I do cry in films etc. Sometimes rather easily.

It reminds me of what I heard about the Second World War. The British were very phlegmatic, but they went to the theatre and they cried copiously, I believe. The cathartic things. So probably I have that streak in me. So I can cry quite easily in a good film, even if the film is not too good in a particular context, when the actor is okay to and all that.

So it happens more often than I would like to acknowledge.

Why more? I mean, there's nothing wrong in acknowledging that I cry a lot in

cultural propensity you know

yeah macho macho man well hopefully the nation will get into a better place and not make us cry quite so much sir thank you so much for your time and insights. I always come away feeling both smarter and more optimistic when I speak to you. So, thank you for that.

I don't know about the first 1. If the second 1 has succeeded, I think I feel good about it. I truly feel optimistic and I think There's no reason for us to be unduly pessimistic as humanity. Wherever we are in the world, we yield to despair far too easily because we have no sense of long term history. The world is a good place.

Let's make the most of it.

Thank you for your wisdom, sir. You can follow JP on Twitter at JP underscore Lok Satta. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene and The Unseen at sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.

Unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go over to seen unseen dot I n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking

thank you