No More Hustleporn: Pratap Bhanu Mehta on Modi and Hindu nationalism
We pulled out the highlights from Princeton Prof Pratap Bhanu Mehta's recent appearance on the Ezra Klein show. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu 😄
Highlights
Lydia Polgreen: The Congress party, the party that was started by Mahatma Gandhi. And just give us a little bit of the history of the Congress party.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Well, it was actually started by, officially its founder is A.O. Hume. But it's Mahatma Gandhi that actually gave the party its modern form. He converted that party into a mass movement and really of extraordinary proportions.
What he managed to do, I think, quite significantly, was not just forge a mass movement, but create an imagination of modern India, where each of its constituent parts would find its fullest expression. So, for example, he was a political genius. Each state had a linguistic unit, which then became the basis for how India dealt with the language question. Later on, we created this brilliant compromise that there would be official link language, English, aspirationally, Hindi, as a kind of national language, but each state would be able to use their own language, so Tamil, Bengali, so on and so forth, you know, Malayalam. And it avoided the fate of so many postcolonial countries that experienced civil wars or got divided on the basis of language. And I think that really was an extraordinary political innovation.
It was an anti-colonial movement, but it was an enormously cosmopolitan movement in its aspirations, founded in a much more authentic conception of rights, free expression, recognizing individuality and dignity, and a pursuit of politics through nonviolent means, which is not an insignificant contribution in the context of so many postcolonial movements. I mean, India was one of the few nationalist movements that avoided both the extremes of kind of left violence and the extremes of right violence. And I think that Gandhi is an extraordinary contribution.
I think one of the remarkable things about the Indian nationalist movement, when I compare it to other nationalist movements, is it is a movement for self-determination, but it has very little resentment against the idea of the West. In fact, I sometimes feel that our post now carries much more of a sense of resentment than our anti-colonial nationalist movement did.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I'm glad you raised the issue of partition, which is, I think, one of the most decisive events in modern South Asian history. India always thought it could be the exception to the European experience. The process of the formation of nation states everywhere, including in Europe and North America, has been an extraordinarily violent, exclusionary and majoritarian movement. There is almost no exception to this, I think.
And the aspiration of the nationalist movement was that, look, can we forge a new kind of identity that doesn't repeat the mistakes of Europe? Now, partition was the first shock to this aspiration, because in some senses, partition was premised on something like the European idea for nation state. There must be some single identity that actually binds the nation. In the case for the demand for Pakistan, it's the idea of a kind of Muslim homeland in South Asia.
And so in that sense, Pakistan actually came as a deep shock to that nationalist project. I mean, that image of Gandhi, in a sense, grieving at independence, because he saw India's independence as a failure. It was born out of violence. He saw it as a rebuke to that extraordinary project that the nationalist movement had tried to create.
And it would have been very easy for India's founders to have said, look, India has been already divided on religious grounds. Let us complete the task of partition, declare India a Hindu state. And yes, Muslims can live here, but we should be absolutely no doubt that the logic of partition is actually the creation of a Hindu state in India.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I think the three most important things to bear in mind about Narendra Modi, who is an extraordinary political figure. I mean, just as an analytical proposition, you don't have to endorse his politics to recognize what a transformative figure he has been. So the first most important thing is that he is a member of and had much of his political and cultural upbringing in an organization called the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which was founded in the 1920s. And the RSS has had one core objective, which is the creation of a Hindu political consciousness, that India has been subjugated to what they call a thousand year period of slavery. They regard even Mughal India, for example, as a period of slavery. And their political commitment is to create a form of Hindu consciousness and identity such that Hindus are never subjugated again and have a political straight and instrument of their own. So this straightforward political objective has been Narendra Modi's guiding star. Everything he does, in some senses flows from realizing this political objective, even economic policy. Right. Making India an economically developed nation is in some senses part of an instrument to achieve this objective.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I think the second thing about him which I think in the Indian context is remarkable is he's a completely self-made politician and leader. Biographically, he's from India's less privileged caste and had absolutely no privileges either economic, social or political that usually mark the political careers of so many Indians. And what this allowed him to do was two things which are really quite central to his success. One is to produce a kind of instinctive identification with large masses of people. The political party represents. The Bharatiya Janata Party used to be accused of being largely an upper caste party of sort of privileged traders, privileged Brahmins. He single-handedly transformed that party into a party that has a much wider social base.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Now he managed to run and still runs on this plank that what kept India back, particularly over the last 20-30 years, was the fact that India was being ruled by something like a dynastic ancient regime. The Congress party was dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family in some ways. And so when he speaks of corruption, he's not just referring to the fact that there might have been sort of monetary corruption. He's actually just referring to the fact that Indian democracy had acquired the characteristic of being something like a closed club. And he has in some senses opened the gates of this politics to ordinary Indians, to languages they speak. So, for example, he's a very gifted orator in Hindi. The BJP is much more comfortable in the vernaculars than the Congress party is. So he could represent that old complex as a privileged elite with a narrow social base against whom his kind of persona stands.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: And I think the third thing about him which I think goes back to his days in Gujarat is in Gujarat. He acquired the reputation for both being an effective administrator on the one hand. And the second thing of course he was known for is his conduct during the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Full Transcript
Ezra Klein: From New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein show. Hey, it is Ezra. I'm thrilled today to have this fantastic conversation from my colleague at Times opinion, the co-host of Matter of Opinion, our cousin podcast Lydia Polgreen on one of the other foreign affairs stories we've wanted to cover more and that deserves a lot of attention, which is rising illiberalism in India.
Lydia Polgreen: 15 years ago, I moved to New Delhi as a correspondent for the New York Times. It was a heady moment. After years of uncertain growth, the country seemed primed for a kind of rapid economic expansion that could vault its billion plus people out of poverty just as China had. But unlike China, India was a boisterous beacon of democracy, secularism and freedom.
India today has fulfilled a lot of the promises I heard when I was there. It became the world's most populous country this year. According to the World Bank, India's economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. The country even hosted the G20 in September.
At the same time, there's been a clear erosion of democracy. The state has stoked violence against religious minorities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his administration have silenced both critics and independent institutions. And Indian government officials have been linked to two assassination plots against Sikh activists in Canada and the United States, a pretty stunning diplomatic scandal that puts new stress on India's relationship with the West.
So looking back in 2023, it's clear that India has risen, but not quite in the way we necessarily expected. So I asked Pratap Bhanu Mehta to walk me through what has happened to Indian democracy and what it means for the rest of the world. Mehta is a professor at Princeton University. He has written widely on political theory and is the author of The Burden of Democracy. He has a regular column at the Indian Express where he makes sense of Indian and global affairs. We talked back in early October, but I think his insights have only become more relevant. As always, you can email the show at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Here's Pratap Bhanu Mehta.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Wonderful to be here with you, Lydia. Thank you very much. And it's wonderful to see you as well.
Lydia Polgreen: So it's been a while. You know, I lived in Delhi from 2009 to 2013 and in that time you were really an indispensable guide for me in trying to understand the extraordinary place that is India. I'm just curious, how's life for you in India these days?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Well, there's never a dull moment in India, I think, that's for sure. It's a cliche about India that we always experience India as a paradox. And I think the paradox of this moment is clearly India's political significance, economic significance, cultural creativity is kind of as vibrant as ever.
On the other hand, the signs for Indian democracy are looking very ominous indeed. I co-edited a big Oxford handbook of the Indian Constitution. I have to say now when I go to class, I say, I cannot tell you what the Constitution of India is. I cannot tell you if you go with a habeas corpus case to the Supreme Court, whether it will be heard. I cannot tell you when opposition politicians are being targeted by the government for tax reasons, they will actually get the same fair relief from the Supreme Court. So there is a sense of kind of dread about where this democracy is heading. And I think we have to register both of those kind of emotions at the same time.
Lydia Polgreen: We're going to talk a lot about democracy. It's a sort of line that we all hear - India is the world's largest democracy. It's been a democracy almost without interruption since its independence. That sort of uniqueness and boldness of the experiment. I mean, you cannot visit India and not be profoundly moved by what is being attempted. I mean, I'm wary of exceptionalism, but, you know, I think never in human history has a more ambitious experiment in coexistence through government by common consent been attempted.
So maybe a good place to start is just to ground us in some history. Tell me a little bit about the history of India as a democracy and what India has had to learn from being the world's largest democracy.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Look, I mean, Indian elections were probably more important to us than religions, and I think they still remain. I mean, there's a certain kind of vibrancy, a sense of diversity dealing with difference. And I think India's nationalist movement's greatness was that it actually recognized that the only way you could hold India together was if it was a product of widespread consensus across religions, across communities, across castes, across classes. I think that was, in a sense, I think its instinctive grasp of what democracy is.
So one story you can tell about Indian democracy is that a lot of the constituent parts or groups in society don't actually have to be democratic. I mean, they can be internally sometimes quite intolerant, they can be quite conservative, and yet the balance of social power amongst groups, amongst castes, regions, is such that no single group or no single identity can hope to dominate without generating some kind of resistance and backlash. And we always used to say that India's politics was fated to a certain kind of centrism. Precisely for this reason, that there wasn't going to ever be a single identity force that could command sufficient power to be able to govern India as a whole. In fact, the joke used to be that any party that governed India would have to look like the Congress party, or maybe a better version of the Congress party.
Lydia Polgreen: The Congress party, the party that was started by Mahatma Gandhi. And just give us a little bit of the history of the Congress party.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Well, it was actually started by, officially its founder is A.O. Hume. But it's Mahatma Gandhi that actually gave the party its modern form. He converted that party into a mass movement and really of extraordinary proportions.
What he managed to do, I think, quite significantly, was not just forge a mass movement, but create an imagination of modern India, where each of its constituent parts would find its fullest expression. So, for example, he was a political genius. Each state had a linguistic unit, which then became the basis for how India dealt with the language question. Later on, we created this brilliant compromise that there would be official link language, English, aspirationally, Hindi, as a kind of national language, but each state would be able to use their own language, so Tamil, Bengali, so on and so forth, you know, Malayalam. And it avoided the fate of so many postcolonial countries that experienced civil wars or got divided on the basis of language. And I think that really was an extraordinary political innovation.
It was an anti-colonial movement, but it was an enormously cosmopolitan movement in its aspirations, founded in a much more authentic conception of rights, free expression, recognizing individuality and dignity, and a pursuit of politics through nonviolent means, which is not an insignificant contribution in the context of so many postcolonial movements. I mean, India was one of the few nationalist movements that avoided both the extremes of kind of left violence and the extremes of right violence. And I think that Gandhi is an extraordinary contribution.
I think one of the remarkable things about the Indian nationalist movement, when I compare it to other nationalist movements, is it is a movement for self-determination, but it has very little resentment against the idea of the West. In fact, I sometimes feel that our post now carries much more of a sense of resentment than our anti-colonial nationalist movement did.
Lydia Polgreen: It's interesting because for me, as a correspondent, I moved to India from West Africa. I had been raised in East Africa and had spent my childhood in West Africa as well. So I had this deep sense of India as this kind of beacon of what a large, polyglot, multireligious, multiethnic nation could be.
And it's worth just dwelling for a moment on the violence and difficulty of India's birth. It was born out of the partition of the British Raj. It was a colony of Britain at the time. Can you just talk a little bit about how these ideas came out of that experience of the horrors of partition?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I'm glad you raised the issue of partition, which is, I think, one of the most decisive events in modern South Asian history. India always thought it could be the exception to the European experience. The process of the formation of nation states everywhere, including in Europe and North America, has been an extraordinarily violent, exclusionary and majoritarian movement. There is almost no exception to this, I think.
And the aspiration of the nationalist movement was that, look, can we forge a new kind of identity that doesn't repeat the mistakes of Europe? Now, partition was the first shock to this aspiration, because in some senses, partition was premised on something like the European idea for nation state. There must be some single identity that actually binds the nation. In the case for the demand for Pakistan, it's the idea of a kind of Muslim homeland in South Asia.
And so in that sense, Pakistan actually came as a deep shock to that nationalist project. I mean, that image of Gandhi, in a sense, grieving at independence, because he saw India's independence as a failure. It was born out of violence. He saw it as a rebuke to that extraordinary project that the nationalist movement had tried to create.
And it would have been very easy for India's founders to have said, look, India has been already divided on religious grounds. Let us complete the task of partition, declare India a Hindu state. And yes, Muslims can live here, but we should be absolutely no doubt that the logic of partition is actually the creation of a Hindu state in India.
Lydia Polgreen: And Muslims are the largest minority, but they're very significant. Right. I mean, what is the percentage proportion between Hindus and Muslims in India?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: It's very sizable. You're looking at about 200 million, 200 million people. And I think what is remarkable is that despite partition, they actually, I think, continued with that project of trying to create an Indian exceptionalism.
I think Jawaharlal Nehru, he was India's first prime minister and really, in some sense, the founder of India's democracy. In some ways, I think the two deep ideas that he had, if you read his books, like Discovery of India and stuff, so one was this idea of India as a palimpsest of all of the world civilizations. India is a Hindu country, it's a Muslim country, it's a Christian country, it's an Asian power, but it's also an Enlightenment country. And that phrase uses over and over, India is a palimpsest, on which every civilization has left a mark, but a palimpsest, which is that transformed each of those civilizations and made it into its own. I think that was a kind of deeply philosophical and, I think, profound orientation to India.
But second, I think at a more practical level, that India has such cross-cutting diversity that if you privilege any basis of identity as the basis of nationhood, what you risk is a great deal of violence, expulsion and bloodletting. So I think, in a strange way, partition actually just reinforced the idea. Even what remains of India cannot flourish and survive unless it says we are going to create a kind of nation states that's very different from anything else that has happened in the world.
Lydia Polgreen: Yeah, you invoked Nehru, and I think one of his most famous and historic phrases is the tryst with destiny speech. What do you think was India's tryst with destiny? And what is it today?
Here is the edited transcript:
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The first and most important one was actually overcoming poverty and the extraordinary levels of human misery and oppression that this society had internally experienced, particularly through the institution of caste. This is the sort of the undergirding system of people being born into a particular community and that forming a social hierarchy.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Absolutely. A social hierarchy which you could not escape. A social hierarchy that was, in some senses, deeply oppressive, and particularly if you were at the bottom end of that social hierarchy, Dalits, untouchables, as they used to be called in those days, the bottom 20%, it really would rank up there with slavery. I mean, we can always kind of nuance these comparisons intellectually, but there's just no getting around what a moral abomination it was.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: So in some senses, the Indian state was embarking for the first time on this project of saying, look, we need a model of development that can overcome the tyranny of this compulsory identity that is called caste. And so I think this idea, which is important in the Indian constitution of liberty, equality, fraternity, in conditions that are otherwise were deemed to be inhospitable to them. India gained universal suffrage at a moment where it was one of the poorest countries in the world. So if you look at levels of economic development at which countries get universal suffrage, India gets it at the lowest level of economic development. It was one of the least educated countries in the world. And yet this enormous hope that through constitutional politics, you could actually overcome the scourge of poverty and at least social inequality.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I think the second thing that I think is very remarkable to me about the tryst with destiny speech and the Indian constitution and the preamble to the Indian constitution is God knows Nehru and the founding generation fully understood that God, history and identity matter to Indians. I mean, you can't imagine this country in some senses without a deep religious and spiritual engagement, without deep contestation over history. Identities proliferate. I mean, people wear them on their sleeves, but that in order for these identities to flourish, in order for that cultural heritage to come alive, it was very important that the political social contract not be burdened with the weight of God, history or identity. So people don't feel that they have to be benchmarked to a single identity or axis of loyalty. So yes, God will flourish, but gods will flourish. I mean, you know, India's idea of secularism wasn't that religion would be marginalized. It would be that it would be put on a basis of individual freedom such that all communities and all groups could enjoy it.
Lydia Polgreen: Just looking at the past few years and you see the way in which India is sort of meeting this kind of tryst with destiny, right? India is, by most accounts now the most populous country in the world, outstripping China, the economy, the GDP expanded by 7.8% last quarter. India hosted the G20, a very important gathering of global leaders. And you're seeing India kind of step up to its place on the global stage, but it's happening at a time when the sort of internal contradictions and tensions are, I think, really coming to bear. So maybe this is a good time for us to turn to Narendra Modi and spend some time talking about who he is, where he came from, and maybe focus on a couple of key moments. And I think one key moment for me certainly is the 2002 riots in Gujarat.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I think the three most important things to bear in mind about Narendra Modi, who is an extraordinary political figure. I mean, just as an analytical proposition, you don't have to endorse his politics to recognize what a transformative figure he has been. So the first most important thing is that he is a member of and had much of his political and cultural upbringing in an organization called the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which was founded in the 1920s. And the RSS has had one core objective, which is the creation of a Hindu political consciousness, that India has been subjugated to what they call a thousand year period of slavery. They regard even Mughal India, for example, as a period of slavery. And their political commitment is to create a form of Hindu consciousness and identity such that Hindus are never subjugated again and have a political straight and instrument of their own. So this straightforward political objective has been Narendra Modi's guiding star. Everything he does, in some senses flows from realizing this political objective, even economic policy. Right. Making India an economically developed nation is in some senses part of an instrument to achieve this objective.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I think the second thing about him which I think in the Indian context is remarkable is he's a completely self-made politician and leader. Biographically, he's from India's less privileged caste and had absolutely no privileges either economic, social or political that usually mark the political careers of so many Indians. And what this allowed him to do was two things which are really quite central to his success. One is to produce a kind of instinctive identification with large masses of people. The political party represents. The Bharatiya Janata Party used to be accused of being largely an upper caste party of sort of privileged traders, privileged Brahmins. He single-handedly transformed that party into a party that has a much wider social base.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Now he managed to run and still runs on this plank that what kept India back, particularly over the last 20-30 years, was the fact that India was being ruled by something like a dynastic ancient regime. The Congress party was dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family in some ways. And so when he speaks of corruption, he's not just referring to the fact that there might have been sort of monetary corruption. He's actually just referring to the fact that Indian democracy had acquired the characteristic of being something like a closed club. And he has in some senses opened the gates of this politics to ordinary Indians, to languages they speak. So, for example, he's a very gifted orator in Hindi. The BJP is much more comfortable in the vernaculars than the Congress party is. So he could represent that old complex as a privileged elite with a narrow social base against whom his kind of persona stands.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: And I think the third thing about him which I think goes back to his days in Gujarat is in Gujarat. He acquired the reputation for both being an effective administrator on the one hand. And the second thing of course he was known for is his conduct during the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Lydia Polgreen: What happened in these riots?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: This is very contested. And I think one has to go back to the late eighties, early nineties, where the Bharatiya Janata Party, which Mister Modi represents, launched an agitation for reclaiming what they called was the site of the birthplace of Lord Ram, where a mosque had been built in the 16th century. And the BJP's demand has been that this should in some sense be returned to the Hindus and they created a mass movement. Now, what that mass movement did was that it, in a sense, created pockets of Hindu-Muslim tension all across India. Because in some senses, these rallies were quite aggressive. They really were signposting the fact that a Hindu movement was arriving to claim India for Hindus. One of the results of that mass movement was the tearing down of the-
Lydia Polgreen: Babri Masjid, this mosque in Ayodhya.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Yeah, Ayodhya. Now this movement was actually trying to collect volunteers and collect actually literally bricks from different parts of India to take to Ayodhya as a kind of symbolic gesture of kind of building, you know, these. We used to build temple. Now, as this movement is going on and tensions are on the rise, a train in Godhra set on fire. And roughly around 50 of these volunteers, Hindu volunteers that were going to Ayodhya were killed. This immediately set off a set of now what the BJP would call retaliatory violence.
Lydia Polgreen: This violence was directed at Muslim residents in Gujarat.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Absolutely. And about 2000 people died. And it was absolutely gruesome violence. I mean, it really, you know, it's just very hard to describe.
Lydia Polgreen: Yeah. Neighbors set upon neighbors.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Neighbors set upon each other. Now, his role, so there is a range of positions in this. One, of course, holds him directly responsible for instigating the retaliatory violence. There was a commission of inquiry, and for what it's worth, that commission of inquiry absolved him of that charge. I mean, that's, again, for what it's worth. But we do know in India that if the state is committed to stopping violence, it can actually stop it fairly quickly. You can bring the law enforcement agencies out, the army can be called out. And I think the political question mark over Narendra Modi, whatever you think may be the direct instructions he may or may not have given is that this was clearly a massive abdication or responsibility on part of the chief minister of the state. This violence could have been stopped and there is no excuse. No excuse. No matter how deep the passions run, no matter how widespread the desire for revenge is, there is absolutely no excuse for the scale of violence that actually took place in Gujarat.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The fact that he was accused of fomenting this violence by the Congress party, he had been denied a visa to the United States, as you know, till he became prime minister. I think that convinced him that the entire world is a kind of gigantic conspiracy out to get Hindus. And that conspiratorial mindset is actually very, very central to the BJP analysis, thinking about the rest of the world, that somehow there has been this global conspiracy. Since I don't know, to keep Hindus as a political community down. And the fact that people were accusing him of fomenting this violence was just another element in that conspiracy. So it was completely turned on its head. And I hate to say this, but there is a sense in which I think there was a significant number of Hindus who began to subscribe to this much more radical and aggressive message, that the BJP was going to be much more aggressive in protecting Hindus, if you want to put it charitably or aggressively targeting minorities.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I think that message went out loud and clear from that Gujarat experience, the sense that violence can pay long term dividends for Hindu nationalism. As a movement, it became a central plank of the BJP. I mean, till 2002, there always used to be this sense that you could not win a national election only with the votes of Hindus, that somehow you'd always have to stitch a broad coalition. I think Narendra Modi managed to convince his party, and that has been their electoral strategy, that they could come to power only with Hindu votes. And in fact, you could actually increase your share of Hindu votes, consolidate a Hindu constituency if you were to clearly send a signal that you were going to politically marginalize Muslims.
Lydia Polgreen: But then 2009, there's another election. This is the moment that I land in India, and I think you're right that this fire has been lit around Hindu nationalism. But at the same time, there was this sense that India had a teetotaling economist as its prime minister, that India's tryst with destiny is about to be fulfilled. It felt like a moment and a thing that I remember particularly was a sense that these sectarian divides felt much less alive. One of the first stories that I did was I actually went to the city of Ayodhya, where the Babri Masjid mosque was. And it was striking to me how the temperature at that place was basically just room temperature. Had this kind of too busy to hate India. Moving forward, we're joining the global economy. And that was very much the vibe when I got there. And there was a sense that Narendra Modi, no chance he could be prime minister. The guy can't even go to the United States. And the BJP seemed like they were nowhere and Congress was ascendant. And boy, were we wrong. So walk me through what happened. How did Modi go from being an international pariah to prime minister of the world's largest democracy?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: I think, as I said at the beginning of the show, this sense we had of a kind of India, fated to a certain kind of centrism actually made all of us complacent that a force like Narendra Modi, or at least a very radical Hindu nationalist ideology, could never be dominant. Or if it even came to power, it would have to ally with other kinds of groups to moderate its stance. So I think what happened post 2009 is, I think, a bunch of things.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: So the first is, of course, the 2009 financial crisis globally, which is a pivotal moment in democracies across the world because India was growing at 8% and it was a nice place to be. You're growing at 8%. The state was getting enough resources to begin to build out slightly more ambitious welfare state, something Narendra Modi has then sought to accelerate. And yet what the 2009 financial crisis did, at least in the Indian context, was two things. One, it actually did expose the corruption at the heart of that growth regime. Lots of projects kind of suddenly seem unviable to people. And there is an anti-corruption movement which kind of paved the way for saying, look, this old regime, this ancient regime headed by the Congress, this coalition government, it may have done us some good, but now it is a corrupt, tottering regime. India has a moment, an opportunity here, but it is actually frittering it away because of a weak government. In fact, the slogan Narendra Modi used was policy paralysis.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: So, 2014, he ran largely on this plank. I'm going to overcome this paralysis. I'm a strong, decisive leader. Look at my record in Gujarat. And he ran against plutocracy. But plutocracy in this very generalized sense, this is a kind of old, corrupt, ancient regime. And like, I think, politics elsewhere, it was the implosion of the alternative, the internal implosion of the Congress party that created much more of the space that somehow it had lost this will to fight, this will to govern. There was very little communication mass, very little mass mobilization. It just had lost, you know, all the kind of ABCs of political mobilization.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The second thing that I think happened, and this may take some explaining, but I actually do think it is important. So the BJP's primary base is in north India. It has now expanded. So it is a genuinely pan-Indian party, but its core political support is drawn from north India, and particularly the largest state in North India, which is Uttar Pradesh, which is, you know, the size of Brazil. I think in terms of population or something. In north India, English does remain a language of privilege. So Hindi and the vernacular languages are important, but they are the languages of culture. They are the languages of the past. They might be the register of emotions in some ways. You know, we might kind of curse each other in the. We might, oh, you know, all the. But the language of the future is English. If you want to get access to social privilege and if you want to get access to the production of knowledge, and particularly future knowledge. Right. Science, technology, medicine, law, you have to have English or at least be fluent in it. And our education system actually produced large masses of students, young people who are kind of linguistically stranded. They're linguistically stranded in the sense that they're fluent in the vernaculars, but actually will find it difficult to compete in the cutting edge of English, that we have a form of language competence that does not make us full participants in this privileged social structure. What it has done is that it made it very easy to mobilize this kind of resentment against an entrenched elite. When you were in Delhi, you went to Khan Market a lot, I'm sure. I mean, it's a great place to hang out with bookshops, coffee shops, restaurants.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Yep.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Mister Modi frequently uses this phrase, "I stand against the Khan market gang." It's a brilliant piece of political communication because everybody instinctively recognizes that it refers to the narrow social privileges of an elite. And so I think what he was able to tap into, apart from his kind of caste identification, is that "I actually stand for something that is much more authentic and connected. Our heritage, our languages, do not just have to be about the past."
Now, quite what he does with his education policies is another matter. But I think that sense of resentment that India was being governed by a small, exclusive elite, I think he managed to give that voice and expression very powerfully. And because of his uniqueness, in some sense as a politician, his own biography, his own extraordinary communicative skills, I think he was, in a sense, able to tap into that. And I think more than the specifics of Hindu nationalism, it's this particular trope that "I am rescuing India from a small elite out of touch" that I think still resonates very powerfully.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Yeah. And I think it's not just an elite that's out of touch, it's an elite that is looking outward. And there's something about the sort of return to the vernacular that's saying, "No, no, no. The real strength of India lies within, and we will engage with the rest of the world on our own terms."
Lydia Polgreen: So Modi gets elected in 2014, his first term. To my mind, as I followed, it seemed mostly to be focused on these economic issues. There were some cultural issues focusing on hygiene and toilets. I mean, what a lot of people maybe don't know about India is that the lack of clean water and access to toilets is a huge public health issue, holding people back in a lot of ways. There were a lot of just sort of fundamental development issues that he focused on.
But it seems to me that it wasn't until he was reelected that his government was reelected in 2019 that you really started to see the claws come out. And you've written, I think, quite powerfully on this, on the government's policy in Kashmir, because there was a very sharp change, and I'll quote you, "The BJP thinks it's going to Indianize Kashmir, but instead what we will see is potentially the Kashmirization of India." So tell me about what happened in Kashmir and what you meant by that idea that Kashmirization of India.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Right. Gosh. So, you know, Kashmir has historically been one of the deepest failures of Indian democracy. So when India became independent, there was a whole bunch of princely states that had to take the decision of whether to accede to India, whether to accede to Pakistan, or potentially even remain independent. I mean, most of them weren't viable, but at least in theory that was an option.
Now, Kashmir was one of the last holdouts. It had a Hindu raja, but its population was majority Muslim. But interestingly, one of the most kind of secularized and led by a radical leftist, Sheikh Abdullah. And Pakistan decided to force Kashmir's hand by actually invading Kashmir. And India said it could help only if the Maharaja signed an instrument of accession joining India and Kashmir joined India. Pakistan never recognized the legitimacy of that accession. And there's a long history of Pakistan fomenting act, terrorist and militant violence in Kashmir for much of the 20th century.
Lydia Polgreen: And just to put a fine point on it, I mean, this Himalayan province, one of the most beautiful places on earth, I've been there many times and it's extraordinary. But you're talking about a flashpoint between two nuclear armed countries, right. Pakistan and India. And it's a very explosive situation. I mean, I just wanted to underscore how sort of tender and fragile the status of Kashmir is.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: It is. And unfortunately, I think it was also failure for Indian democracy. Kashmir also had special status in the Indian constitution. According to the terms of accession. The Indian state was going to conduct Kashmir's foreign policy. There'd be a minimum set of common laws, but Kashmir was supposed to have a great deal of autonomy in terms of governing its own affairs.
But unfortunately, I think the Indian state's relationship with Kashmir got securitized very early on. I mean, every political protest, every kind of political dissension was being looked at through this prism of "Are they really kind of coerced secessionists in place?" Right. Kashmir is the only state in India where there was a sense that the elections were not entirely free and fair. It's constantly interfering in elections. It is putting Kashmir internally under a state of siege. Pakistan is actively, in some sense, fomenting violence in terrorist groups. Even when it was open for tourism, it became an immensely militarized place. About half a million troops guarding kind of Kashmir security checkpoints. There was a great sense of siege about Kashmir.
Lydia Polgreen: Yeah. And it's, you know, this place, there's this beautiful lake and people stay in houseboats and you've got the amazing Himalayan skyline. But there was this sense that you were stopped and asked for identification, constantly flying in and out of airport. You felt a sense of surveillance. And this is for an outsider, for my many Kashmiri friends and particularly journalists, this sense of being surveilled and having your rights curtailed was really, really powerful. And so what did Modi do in 2019?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: So one of the artistess planks, the organization that Modi belongs to, was that if you actually wanted the integration of Kashmir into India, Article 370 had to go. That would be a constitutional statement that Kashmir is a part of India just like any other part. And it would also send a signal to Pakistan that we are not even thinking that this is disputed territory. I mean, just forget about it. And this has been part of BJP's manifesto forever. I mean, so at one level there was no surprise. I mean, I think we just never took, took them literally in some ways. Right.
So what they did was they basically revoked Article 370 and on the grounds that Kashmir needs to be a state like any other state in the Indian union, no special privileges. And the government's view was we are going to restore administrative order, so we are going to clamp down on militants, we are going to attract investment by creating law and order. And to be honest, it has had mixed results. I mean, the government can claim that at least the outbreak of violence has not been as bad as many had feared. Many of us had feared, actually. But it still remains the case that there are still pockets of militancy and there is still a significant clamp down on civil liberties, on reporting on Kashmir, on the free movement of journalists in Kashmir. If you're in a journalist in Kashmir, you really have an impossible task ahead of you. Even outside of Kashmir, most Indian mainstream papers will not carry stories critical of what's happening in Kashmir.
Now, what I meant by the Kashmirization of India, I mean, partly, of course, it's a column. It was sort of cri de coeur, a kind of provocation. But unfortunately, I think the grain of truth in this was that what the government was trying to demonstrate in Kashmir was that a strong, repressive surveillance state was going to be the more effective means of integrating Indian citizens into the state, rather than a faith in democracy, pluralism, and open society. And many of the practices that we experimented on in Kashmir, detailed surveillance, preventive detention, the idea of expanding the remit of who you hold under suspicion that those practices of the state would become much more generalized and be replicated elsewhere in India.
You can see that in a state like UP, where the chief minister is very popular, but one of his characteristic modes of governance is a form of vigilante justice. If you are suspected, and the key word here is suspected, and particularly if you're a member of the minority community of, let's say, even participating in a protest, your house can become bulldozed without due process. So this arsenal of repression and looking upon the citizens as objects of presumptive distrust, that's really what the Indian state did in Kashmir. At the end of the day, that is becoming a much more generalized practice of governance. I think across India.
Lydia Polgreen: It's interesting because I'm always trying to kind of check my own assumptions here, because the people that I talk to, my friends, they're journalists, they're people who are in activist communities or politics adjacent. And the report that I hear from them about the general mood across India is very much what you're describing, this kind of Kashmirization. Muslims have felt sort of the first brunt of it. But anybody seeking to live a different kind of life or to report honestly on what's happening in the country and, you know, is ultimately feeling the sharp end of that stick.
But the thing that you sort of balance that up again is the, I think, really striking popularity of Narendra Modi. And my friend, the journalist Mahir Sharma wrote in 2019, after Modi's party was reelected. He said, "We do not live in Modi's India. We live in Indians' India. And the reason so many Indian adore Modi is because he represents their preferred conception of the Indian state and the Indian nation." And it reminded me of something that you wrote, which is that "tyranny can be the stepchild of democracy," which is a great paraphrase from Plato. This theory that you could build a majoritarian project on the votes of Hindus alone, it's clearly working.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: No, it is clearly working. So, look, if you want to take a hopeful story and the opposition will keep reminding you of this. They will keep saying something like, "60% of Indians still don't vote for the BJP." First past the post system parliamentary system, roughly about 38% to 40% of the vote can actually get you a pretty dominant majority in parliament. But there is a lesson in there. And the lesson is that like everywhere in the world that ethnic majoritarian forces have come to power, it has largely been because the forces arrayed against them have failed to credibly unite on a coherent platform. So the center and left in India splits 20 different ways.
But I think more deeply, I think, and I actually do think the cultural transformation that I see of India is truly astonishing. Large sections of India's elites, in particular, those who are most powerfully placed to resist this, I think their ideological conversion to this project is actually quite significant. If you look at the Indian media landscape, it's one thing to say that the media does not criticize government. Maybe they fear reprisals. Often the owners of media might fear reprisals. But what you are seeing in the Indian media is actually something much more than simply complying with the state. It is actually creating and disseminating structures of hate, fully funded by the most powerful echelons of Indian capital. I mean, this is going way beyond. We fear the state and we will not criticize it. There is almost like a positive investment in that information order day in and day out. I mean, it's actually unbearable to read many of the regional papers these days. English media, you see somewhat little less of it, but it stayed there or on television media, for example. Right.
The Indian Supreme Court. Really an extraordinary puzzle. We used to say in 2009, the years you were here, that the Indian Supreme Court had become one of the most powerful courts in the world. In fact, the criticism of the Indian Supreme Court was it pretty much did what it wanted, meddled in whichever issue it wanted, far beyond its jurisdictional competence. One of the most disappointing things has been the near abdication of the Supreme Court in protecting basic civil liberties. The extent of it is so mind boggling that you've got to think that deep down there is some kind of allegiance to this project that is actually surfacing. It's not simply held together by fear of reprisals.
So for those of us who grew up in India, I have not seen an elite discourse that so openly participates, revels in disseminating hate, as I see at this moment India, not even at the height of the temple movement, Ayodhya in the 1990s. The one most important function of the leader is to be at least able to articulate a norm. This is right, this is wrong. This is what we accept, this is what we don't. It is a measure of how far India has come that the leadership is not only unwilling to articulate this norm, it is often dog whistling about targeting minorities. We had this extraordinary scene in Parliament where the senior leader of the BJP in Parliament said something of one of the few Muslim MP's in Parliament that you could not even say with censored speech. I mean, it's literally, I mean, it's the kind of thing you'd expect out of, you know, a text called Mein Kampf.
Lydia Polgreen: Wow.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: In the Indian parliament, senior BJP leader, he has been rewarded. You are now empowering a set of people, a ideology, and sending out a signal that if you want to move up in this political system, you have to engage in acts of hate or violence or commit yourself publicly to this project. I mean, this is completely unprecedented. This is, it's a shattering of the norms.
Lydia Polgreen: It's really striking to me that we've gotten to this place now where you have India kind of emerging on the global stage as such a critical player because there are big, powerful countries like the United States, but also others that are seeking India to take its place on the global stage as a counterweight to China. What recommends it for that role is precisely the fact that it sees itself, it describes itself and is seen by others as a secular, pluralistic democracy. So there's this tremendous irony that at precisely the moment you're seeking a democratic counterweight to China, the obvious candidate for that role, it's democracy, is, from what we've discussed, seems really deeply imperiled.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: No, it is. And you know, if you look at India's projection abroad, one of Mister Modi's favorite tropes these days, "India is the mother of all democracies." I mean, that's the kind of tagline and a kind of guru to the world. But it is a performance. This government's diagnosis and Trump's election may have something to do with it. The way in which the kind of world changed post Trump is that there is not going to be any penalty for India's actions domestically. And to be fair to them, their reading of the international system has been just right, that somehow they think, in the end, the United States strategic imperatives, rather than its imperatives in democracy and pluralism will actually trump their engagement with India.
By the way, it's also happening in a moment where the exemplarity and authority of almost all democratic countries around the world is also at its lowest. I can't remember a time where the prestige and authority of American democracy was so low. It's almost even in this state. Many Indians are willing to say, "Oh, now we can talk back to the United States." So there is no exemplarity and authority left to that idea in the international system.
I think, and this goes to one of the fundamental tenants of Hindu nationalism as an ideology. Their diagnosis of India's success and failure is very different from at least mine, possibly yours and most of the world's. The two figures in Indian history they hate the most, they revile the most, are Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. I mean, this is a party that openly celebrates Mahatma Gandhi's assassin. And there is almost this sense of embarrassment they have that somehow this whole talk of nonviolence actually made us weak. It made us less respected in the world. America took Pakistan more seriously because it created trouble in the international system. We never were taken seriously, which again, I think is a pretty bizarre reading of history, actually. But it is a kind of political style whose core is defined by a certain kind of fascination with violence and aggression. The other has to be created in order for this Hindu existential crisis to actually reap political dividends. So it can be Muslims, it can be secular intellectuals, it can be liberals, it can be George Soros. God knows why. George Soros in the Indian context, but.
Lydia Polgreen: Right there too, huh?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Oh, absolutely. In fact, today the BJP has just put out a big political ad which basically describes the Congress party as a film being produced by George Soros. So in that sense, the core of sensibility rests on the idea of a kind of perpetual Hindu victimhood.
Lydia Polgreen: One place where you sort of see this playing out, and obviously this has been very, very big in the news, is Canada's assertion that India assassinated a Sikh activist who is a Canadian citizen in Canada. There's a lot of questions about what exactly happened here. If India is actually responsible for this assassination, it's a huge violation of international norms. But even if they weren't directly involved in it, it almost seems to play the game that India wants to play on the global stage to create the perception that India has that capacity and will act as it wishes on the global stage without deference to the kind of quote unquote rules based order.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. But what is striking sitting in India looking at it is how much the political machine of the BJP is trying to milk this occasion. It's almost like we didn't do it, but right, we are capable. And it would be a great thing we did. It's truly actually astonishing how much it is being fed into part of that narrative of bravado in some ways.
Lydia Polgreen: You know, it's interesting. There's another narrative that I hear sort of bubbling along underneath all of this, which is, I think there's a sense in the United States that perhaps we were mistaken in how we managed our relationship with China. The idea that you bring China under your wing, you integrate them into the global economic system, you see prosperity rise, you create the linkages that make it harder for a country to kind of go off on its own. I think there's a feeling, well, was that a mistake? Did we sort of create the conditions for China to become this incredibly powerful country? And now it's, of course, our main geopolitical rival? And you hear in some quarters a question of, like, are we doing the same thing again with India? And I wonder what you make of that question.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: And I have to be candid. I think, sitting in Asia, this idea that somehow you could structure a global development process that shuts out countries like China or India just sounds so remarkably full of hubris and presumption. And, you know, I mean, the fact that China's integration into the global economy actually lifted millions and millions of people out of poverty, I don't think it's a human achievement to be sneered at.
But the idea that India and China could be shut out in some senses from being competitors or participating in the global fruits of science, technology, development, frankly, I don't think it's even practical terms on. In fact, that kind of assertion plays exactly into the hands of nationalists everywhere. I mean, even those who don't support authoritarian governments, you know, when they hear a statement like, oh, actually what the United States is going to do is structure the world economy in a way in which it retains primacy forever. It doesn't matter whether you're authoritarian or democratic. Right. You're not going to particularly push.
So I actually think for the United States own sake, I think this way of posing the question is, I think, a slightly self defeating one. I mean, the easiest way of reinforcing the conspiratorial mindset of Hindu nationalism is to actually prove what they have been always saying, that the world is out to get India and is to place it under siege.
And also, I think, particularly at a moment in world history where it's very hard for the United States or any other country to pull this policy off, as if this were a matter of principle and conviction. I mean, how many authoritarian regimes are you going to exclude, not do business with? Right? So I actually think if you make people's development and democracy a tool of geostrategic politics, you end up doing both geostrategic politics and the cause of democracy and development great harm.
I mean, many Indians often talk about this. Should the Biden administration be doing more? They don't have to roll out the red carpet. They can say the truth sometimes. I mean, it can be a perfectly candid relationship, but I don't think there is an option but to engage with India. And I think both in some senses will be better off it.
I also strongly believe that not to take away anything from American power, but I actually think the United States' role in how Indian democracy develops will be minuscule at most. This is a struggle that Indians will have to undertake internally. I mean, maybe most of us are still complacent. The way in which violence is being enacted in Indian democracy still feels like in drips and dribbles. I mean, most of us can still go around our daily business thinking this is not going to affect us, but most of us still hope and still believe. I mean, otherwise we won't even be having this conversation.
That, yes, the signs look ominous for Indian democracy, but at some point will come a threshold where ordinary Indians begin to say that, look, this is not us. Now what that threshold is is an open question, but I actually do believe that that threshold will be reached and you will find Indian society reacting appropriately.
Lydia Polgreen: I think that is a very good and hopeful note to perhaps wrap up our conversation on. And, you know, as a person who loves and admires India very much, I very much want to believe in that prognosis. And, you know, next year is an election year. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I think most people think that the BJP will, will come back, but lots of things can happen. The world spins on.
So at the end of every episode of the Ezra Klein show, we ask our guests to recommend some books. Could you recommend three books that our listeners could benefit from to understand India, democracy and the world better?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Okay, so I'll go with a couple of unusual choices. One, which is not recent, is, I actually still think, reading V. S. Naipaul's India trilogy, which is now one book, I think he, and partly because he himself was such a complicated and in many ways awful character, I think he actually saw the moral psychology of what's happening in various Indian social movements. I think much more clearly than I think many of us liberals and constitutionalists have recognized this theme of India thinking of itself as a wounded civilization and now trying to kind of claim something of that itself through this path of violence and Hindu nationalism. Besides, I mean, he's a wonderful writer to read.
I think the second book I pick is a recent book by Shiv Shankar Menon. The title is India in Asian Geopolitics, but it's really about India's place in the world. Incredibly well written, but also somebody who's both a deep historian and has had the benefit of having a ringside seat. I think it's the single best book on India's place in the world.
The third I would recommend, I mean, this is a sort of slightly more kind of quirky recommendation, is a book by Snigda Poonam called The Dreamers. This is a book that kind of captures the craziness and the contradictory textures of this kind of young, educated India. Right? I mean, some of those linguistically stranded people, we talk about the IT hackers, you know, the would-be Indian idols, which is the Indian version of American Idol. The music program, it does have kind of enough of those sort of quirky life biographies to make it an interesting introduction to India beneath the surface of these large themes of kind of politics and economics.
Lydia Polgreen: Those are all wonderful, wonderful recommendations. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, thank you so much for being with us.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Thank you so much, and good luck to both our democracies.
Lydia Polgreen: Amen to that.