3rd Indian Liberals Annual Lecture | The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal by Gurcharan Das

3rd Indian Liberals Annual Lecture | The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal by Gurcharan Das

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEM00CG7EeY Duration: 4333.9s

Speaker 1 (00:00): You know, with generous support from Frederick Norman Foundation for Freedom South Asia,

Speaker 2 (00:10): CCS started the Indian Liberals Project in 2015. Serving as India’s sole online digital portal, it offers an expansive and meticulous collection

Speaker 1 (00:20): of resources dedicated to the legacy of liberal thought in India. In November 2021, we also initiated the Indian Liberals Annual Lecture, which endeavors to bring the principles of classical liberalism to the forefront through voices of contemporary thinkers in India. We are very grateful to our long-standing partners and supporters at FNF.

Speaker 2 (00:41): In fact, we also have the honor of having Dr. Karsten Klein with us, who is the Regional Head of FNF South Asia. I would like to warmly welcome Dr. Klein to share a few words with us on this collaboration

Speaker 3 (00:53): and partnership.

Speaker 4 (01:00): Hello and good evening. It’s a great honor to speak in front of you, especially after so

Speaker 5 (01:09): extremely sophisticated and good evaluations on current issues in India and in South Asia. So, let me say first of all, Frich Nauman Foundation, we are extremely happy to have this excellent cooperation with CCS.

Speaker 4 (01:30): Dear Pat Shah, dear Gujaran Ghas and dear Amit Chandra, However, in a world of liberal values which need to be defended and more often and often

Speaker 5 (01:50): to be defended, where liberals in many countries are persecuted or intimidated or simply ignored,

Speaker 4 (02:02): It is very good to have a strong partnership with a very strong partner like CCS.

Speaker 6 (02:11): And let me also underline that for this partnership, you of course also need excellent projects. And let me just, as you already mentioned, say again that we are extremely proud of this internet website depicting liberal values and liberal ideas.

Speaker 4 (02:37): More than 70,000 pages to be published under Indian liberals. So it’s really an open source, an open book for everybody who is interested in liberalism in India and in South Asia. Let me just pick one, a number of this success story.

Speaker 5 (02:59): I find it extremely encouraging that especially younger people and also especially women are

Speaker 4 (03:07): participating and are following these websites. Let me just also pick one other field where we cooperate, and that is the field of education. I’m extremely happy that that, of course, is the core of every fundamental for liberal development. And we really made some excellent projects on that, starting through this terrible pandemic crisis. We started, for example, a training program for teachers, giving them the possibility to reach out to their students in a more digital form. We have just this and last year created a cutting edge curriculum on blue economy for selected BIMSTEC countries. And we have also addressed in schools critical issues like, for example, the question of gender identity. And not forget that we have also a very interesting window of opportunities showing South Asia, showing educational aspects from India to an interested audience in both Germany and Europe.

Speaker 5 (04:41): And that is also extremely, now I think it’s the sixth time that we had this webinar form where we bring together esteemed panelists, esteemed people from India, experts on the educational sector and from other countries in the area.

Speaker 6 (05:02): So, let me say again for this good, and let me also call it like the gentleman from Atlantic Council has rightly said, also for Frisch-Naumann Foundation, CCS is a strategic partner.

Speaker 4 (05:23): And why is that? It is, of course, due to excellent projects, but it is also that the management, those who give every day new ideas, are liberal and they follow a very clear liberal compass. It is furthermore that the cooperation extremely is lively and that we always have a very, very good accessibility to CCS. Not to forget perhaps one of the most elixirs of the success, which are networks.

Speaker 5 (06:07): CCS has excellent networks. I think most of you are just in the core, in the nucleus of these very, very good networks.

Speaker 6 (06:20): CCS, let me also not forget that point, also masters very well,

Speaker 4 (06:28): well, sometimes a little bit complex, difficult accounting procedures of German foundations. And last but not least, it is a partner which always stands to Frisch-Naumann Foundation in public interviews, in films, and in presentations. Thanks again, especially to you, the audience, those who are in the gist of the networks. Thanks to the leadership of CCS. Thank you very much, especially to the people behind the curtain.

Speaker 5 (07:14): Let me please say thank you very much to our senior program manager, Mrs. Nupur.

Speaker 4 (07:22): And don’t let us forget the dear friends and colleagues from CCS beyond Amik Chandra and, of course, Mr. Shah. It is, for example, Mrs. Sudeshna, Mrs. Shawaya and Mrs. Annamika.

Speaker 6 (07:46): So thank you very much for this excellent cooperation.

Speaker 4 (07:50): Without your personal commitment, all these projects never ever would happen. And let me please also underline a last group of people which we always have in our organization,

Speaker 5 (08:07): but much prominently, more prominently, CCS has, and that are interns, younger people who are bringing in their fresh ideas their deep convictions and those are the people and i said i see very many of of you of students of sophisticated people it is really very very good to have you here and you are also in the middle of the success of organizations like ours thank you very much

Speaker 4 (08:43): And I’d like to ask dear Mrs. Newport, we have got brought a little… Ah, it’s outside. Anyway, it’s a piece of cake and I’m quite sure that afterwards we always and we all would have the opportunity to have a piece of cake. Again, thank you very much for this excellent cooperation. More than 10 years now, within 26 years of celebrating the anniversary of CCS, and we will carry on on this successful path. Thank you very much. So finally, yes, I see. Thanks again. Thank you so much, Dr. Klein, for those kind words. And I must share with you, not a day goes by at CCS office when FNF is not mentioned.

Speaker 2 (10:17): So we truly do cherish this collaboration and partnership. Again, my apologies to Mr. Gurcharan Das. I know he’s also a strict timekeeper. Sorry that we were running on a delay. But finally, the segment that we’ve been waiting for eagerly. Today we have Mr. Gurcharan Das with us, who will be delivering a lecture on the dilemma of an Indian liberal. Mr. Gurcharan Das, a luminary in his own right, stands as a best-selling author, public intellectual, and former CEO of Procter & Gamble India. His incisive commentaries trace the pages of major national and international publications, often delving into critical analyses of India’s education system, education reform and policies.

Speaker 1 (11:04): A staunch advocate of classical liberalism in India, Mr. Gurcharan Das continues to wield his influence and insights to propel the liberal discourse forward. And as you can see today, he fills any room and auditorium that he’s a part of.

Speaker 4 (11:18): Sir, can we please have you on stage? Yeah. Well, my apologies to everybody for the delay. 6.30 and IIC usually means 6.30. But at least let me say that we.

Speaker 7 (11:55): The introduction that I got was accurate and quite different from the one of last week somewhere else where the person said,

Speaker 4 (12:08): well, Mr. Gurcharan Das, he’s well known. So the less said about him, the better. Anyway, thank you, CCS and FNF for for inviting me to me.

Speaker 7 (12:23): And so what is the dilemma of an Indian liberal? I could give you one a one minute answer and let you go off with your friends to enjoy chai and chaat and samosas.

Speaker 4 (12:37): in IIC’s inviting lounge at the back, surrounded by fountains of cool water in this heat. My challenge then is to entertain you for the next 40 minutes, which is the time I’ve been given.

Speaker 7 (12:58): To do so, I shall narrate a real life story about the making of a middle-class Indian liberal. Why a story?

Speaker 4 (13:12): Well, India is, after all, the world’s oldest storytelling culture. And our ancestors figured out quite early

Speaker 7 (13:21): there was more fun to learn from stories. So try and imagine that we are sitting under a great big village people tree. and I am the local Sutradhar.

Speaker 8 (13:37): I shall take you on a journey.

Speaker 7 (13:39): The hero will battle monsters and ghosts.

Speaker 4 (13:44): It is also my story. Why? Because one person’s life, honestly told, is the only true data of history we possess. In my journey, you will encounter many dilemmas. all going into the making of a middle class Indian liberal. But first, what is a liberal anyway? The word comes from the Latin liber, which means free. It also connotes an open-minded, generous person. a liberal political order provides maximum equal liberty to its citizens, placing specific limits on state power. When it comes to the economy, a liberal prefers market outcomes to state control. But the liberal landscape is confusing. There are classical liberals, left liberals, neoliberals, libertarians and more. Around 1900, the word liberal underwent a change as a result of serious depressions and mass employment in the United States. A group called progressives who advocated state intervention to fix this problem started calling themselves liberals. It is ironic. The enemies of economic freedom and limited government had appropriated the label. They are today’s left liberals or social democrats, whereas the old liberals are called classical liberals or libertarians. The libertarian is more absolutist about freedom, preferring a minimal or a night watchman state. Classical liberal is less extreme. He wants a state to ensure competition in the market, supports state spending for public goods, especially education and health, although the state doesn’t have to actually run schools and hospitals and also accepts a safety net for the poorest. I am a classical liberal. A neoliberal is not much different from a classical one, except it is often an abuse heaped on us, both by the left and the right. The left think we are more, we care more about liberty than equality and the right. Nationalists believe we have an excessive faith in free trade and globalization. Many think that liberal is a Western idea when in fact it’s a universal sentiment shared by all human beings. The Indian temper in particular has always been profoundly liberal. Hindu pluralism is grounded in the Rig Veda, originating in the charming humility of the Nasidhya verse, in chapter 10 which wonders how the cosmos was created maybe we should ask the gods they ask it asks but hang on the gods came afterwards says the other then let’s ask the brahmins oh no they’re always arguing with each other and we’ll only get confused So they conclude, maybe we don’t know how the cosmos was created.

Speaker 7 (17:52): Well, this is the origin of skepticism and the questioning attitude of this verse in the Rig Veda may have led to the invention of a God whose name was the interrogative Sanskrit pronoun Ka. The creator once asked Indra, who am I?

Speaker 4 (18:21): Indra replies, just what you said. Who? The creator wonders, am I only a question mark?

Speaker 7 (18:33): Here is the birth of Hindu liberalism reflected in the unassuming neti neti, not this, not that attitude in the mental experiments of the Upanishads,

Speaker 4 (18:49): when open-minded kings invited holy men of various schools to debate philosophical issues. The Arthashastra is at pains to remind the king that he does not own the land, but he has a right to one-sixth of the produce, Shatthabhaga. But that too is contingent on his providing public goods. Nor does he have a divine right to rule as in 17th century Europe. His right depends on upholding dharma for the benefit of the people. And the interpreter of dharma was not the king. But the Brahmin does early on. Early on, there was a liberal division of power that, in fact, put accountability on the state. It is the same liberal attitude that led to the sexual liberation in the Gupta period when the Kama Sutra and the Suns and Sanskrit love poetry was written. The truth is that when you have 330 million gods, no god can afford to feel jealous. And you acquire a liberal, tolerant temper. When European missionaries first arrived in Bengal in the 19th century, the reaction of the peasants was, no problem, we’ll make Jesus an avatar of ours. Who would you prefer, an avatar of Vishnu or Shiva? It is one thing to have a liberal temper and another to create a modern ideology of liberalism. And this was articulated for the first time in the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. It came to us via the British Raj and it created the modern Indian liberal in the 19th century. The list is impressive, beginning with Ramon Roy, Gopal Gokhale, Rabindranath Tagore, Veva Kananda, Aurobindo, then Ambedkar, Radhakrishnan and of course Mahatma Gandhi. for who perhaps was the greatest Indian liberal after Gautama Buddha. Only one, however, C. Raja Gopalchari, managed to found a true liberal party, modern liberal party, but alas, it died after soon from after more than a decade. Moving to contemporary times, my story of the making of an Indian liberal begins with a five-year-old boy’s first political awakening. Fleeing with his life in August 1947, he witnesses a killing on the railway platform in Jalandhar While waiting for his train to move, he sees from the window a handsome Muslim policeman standing tall on duty. Two sick teenagers emerge out of nowhere and stab him from behind.

Speaker 7 (22:39): Partition initiates him early to the modern idea of the absurd. A five-year-old who cannot make sense of a policeman’s murder leaves him suspicious of religion forever.

Speaker 4 (22:57): A liberal thought.

Speaker 7 (23:00): The young boy grows up in the age of hope in Nehru’s free India. His father is a civil engineer helping to build Bhakra Dam.

Speaker 4 (23:16): His hero, Pandit Nehru, gives a speech there. He says that for thousands of years, life in India was about privilege, power and oppression. But something changed in 1947. We became conscious as a nation. We realized that our rulers could only rule based on our consent. It was the boy’s second liberal awakening. Living in a country meant that you decide who ruled you.

Speaker 7 (24:04): In the mid-1950s, the boy’s father is transferred to America to negotiate the Indus Water Treaty. while his father sat down with a red pencil and a map of the Punjab

Speaker 4 (24:22): with Pakistani engineers to divide waters of Punjab’s rivers. The boy begins high school in Washington, D.C. They put him mistakenly in a vocational section where he finds his way ahead of his class after modern school in Delhi. His mother pleads with the vice principal to let him join the college prep section. But the vice principal refuses. Looking at the boy’s brown skin, he gives him advice. Leaning back on his swivel chair, he says in a sudden drawl, colored boy is not supposed to get too big for their boots.

Speaker 7 (25:12): If the boy stays out of trouble, he’ll graduate with a certificate and he will get a factory job.

Speaker 4 (25:24): Welcome to the American dream, son, says the vice principal. America was preaching integration, but practicing segregation. This is before the civil rights movement. The boy attends a class called shop where he learns to work with his hands, unclog a sink, fix a radio, make a table. All the things his mother tells him is what OVCs do in India. So the boy has gone to America to discover caste in India as he remembers the bhangi in his Nana’s home carrying on his head a basket full of shit. This is before they put in a flush system. Although American and Indian constitutions say all men are created equal.

Speaker 7 (26:28): Blacks and Dalits were not fully human. It’s a different story, however, when a white girl invites the boy to her integrated birthday party. After they sit down, after they eat, they sit down in a circle to play a game called spin the bottle.

Speaker 4 (26:51): A player spins a bottle where where it stops. He gets to kiss the person of the opposite sex to where the bottle points. He finds that black boys are only kissing black girls and white boys are only kissing white girls.

Speaker 7 (27:14): When it comes to his turn, everyone’s confused.

Speaker 4 (27:19): No one is sure what the brownie will do. He quickly solves the problem. He kisses every girl black and white. And he kisses and he kisses them so often that he keeps getting bonus turns. Liberal awakening in America. forward to the mid 1970s Indira Gandhi’s India. The boy is now a man working in a company that makes Vicks VapoRub. There’s a flu epidemic and sales go through the roof. At the end of the season a summons arrives from Delhi. The company has broken the law.

Speaker 7 (28:12): Sales have exceeded the un the authorized. Capacity production capacity in its license.

Speaker 4 (28:22): There’s a potential jail sentence. Associated with this crime. He attends a hearing before the joint secretary who treats him like a criminal. He explains the flu epidemic brought extra demand.

Speaker 7 (28:44): The company was only doing its duty, keeping pharmacy shelves stocked, helping millions of children suffering from the flu.

Speaker 4 (28:57): the official pronounces him guilty and now he says the law will take is its course or up jaya jaya throws him out but as the boy is leaving as the man now is leaving he reminds the officer to imagine how our country will look like in the eyes of the world when the news appears in the New York Times. It says that India, here’s a country that punishes a company for producing a product that alleviated the citizens misery during an epidemic. The government quietly He drops the inquiry. But Nehru’s license Raj has snatched economic freedom, the young man realizes. He abandons socialism to become a laissez-faire libertarian from that day and joins the Swatantra party.

Speaker 7 (30:10): Another liberal awakening. Fast forward now 20 years further to the golden summer of 1991 when India finally wins its economic freedom.

Speaker 4 (30:26): Our protagonist is now CEO of the company where he had started at the bottom. The government is led by quiet, dull, by quiet, dull Narsimha Rao. The Congress Party sees Rao as a steps, as a stopgap to head a minority government that no one thinks will last very long. But Rao surprises everyone, unleashing the biggest revolution in India’s economic history. his finance minister Manmohan Singh embarks on a bold program of liberalization. He opens the economy, dismantles import controls, abolishes licensing, breaks the public sector monopolies, lowers tax rates and duties. But no one in Delhi is enthusiastic about the reforms, least of all the Congress Party. There is no national soul searching about the failure of state socialism of Nehru and Indira Gandhi. The commissars of the License Raj quietly become liberalizers. Reformers don’t bother to sell the reforms. It’s all hush-hush for fear of the powerful left wing of the Congress Party, which vehemently opposes the reforms. And so reform by stealth becomes India’s mantra. Fast forward again to 2002.

Speaker 8 (32:23): Our protagonist has now quit his job at age 50 and is now a full-time writer.

Speaker 4 (32:37): A decade after liberalization, Indian liberals are divided. A minority are classical liberals who celebrate the reforms and push for more reform. The majority are left liberals, still suspicious of markets and capitalism. Both, however, are united on social and cultural issues. Meanwhile, every government since 1991 has reformed slowly, frustratingly slowly, incrementally and stealthily. And the reforms have made India the world’s second fastest growing major economy, which will go on to lift 375 million people out of poverty and expand the middle class from 10 percent to 30 percent of the population. On the morning of 27th February 2002, a train arrives at Godra’s railway station in Gujarat filled with Hindu pilgrims from Ayodhya. An argument erupts on the platform between the passengers and the hawkers. Soon it turns violent. Suddenly four coaches of the Sabarmati Express are burning and 59 people are trapped inside to die in the fire.

Speaker 7 (34:15): Then three days of Hindu-Muslim clashes ensue and for a whole year there is sporadic violence in Gujarat.

Speaker 4 (34:29): The death toll in the end is 10, 1044 Muslims and 254 Hindus, according to official sources. Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s state government is accused of failing to control the violence and the opposition is demanding the chief minister’s head. let me switch now to the first person this third person narrative I think is getting a bit bizarre

Speaker 7 (35:02): talking about yourself in the third person for God’s sake

Speaker 4 (35:06): my worst fears of partition return to haunt me

Speaker 7 (35:16): as I watch night after night scenes of horror on television

Speaker 4 (35:21): There are no moderate voices, only shrill, harsh, still harsh ones. Liberals blame BJP’s electoral strategy of polarizing Hindus to win votes. Hindu nationalists blame Congress’s strategy of appeasing Muslim vote banks. There is no Mahatma Gandhi to keep peace.

Speaker 7 (35:47): You may remember that Mahapadamal Gandhi in 1947 had trudged through the Bengal countryside, a one-man peacekeeping force, and Bengal had remained relatively peaceful, unlike Punjab.

Speaker 4 (36:05): Ever since the partition, India has experienced sporadic incidents of communal violence. In 1984, I remember our company’s employee, a Sikh boy, Sikh salesman, had got roughed up on the streets of Delhi. It had happened right after Indira Gandhi’s murder by her Sikh bodyguard. During the subsequent days, there were riots in Delhi in which Hindus had taken revenge. and in the end, 3006 had died. Rajiv Gandhi had justified it saying, when a big tree falls, the earth shakes. On this occasion in 2002,

Speaker 7 (36:56): I was equally disappointed with Prime Minister Vajpayee. He had preached the virtues of tolerance, but had failed to act.

Speaker 4 (37:05): Vajpayee had condemned the assault on Babri Masjid earlier, but on this occasion he failed. Where had the excellent idea of liberalism failed us, I ask? Why couldn’t it stem the tide of intolerance? Hinduism is, after all, a way of life, not a way of belief. It recognizes the truth of all religions, which is the basis of our tolerance. Moreover, Indian Muslims are amongst the most moderate in the world. So what had gone wrong? is it because many vocal left liberals had once been marxists who had contempt for all believers not only did they not believe in god they actually hated god they saw only the dark side of religion its intolerance forgetting that religion had given meaning to humanity since the dawn of civilization. The vocal liberals spoke a language alien to the vast majority of Indians. Hence, they were able to condemn communal violence but not stop it. English-speaking liberals and their siblings behave as though they are in an exclusive private club, snobbish about their secularism, treating religion not as a way of life, but as superstition. It is bad enough that only around 15% of India today understands their language, English. By incessantly parroting secularism, they have created an empty domain where ordinary religious persons are lesser human beings. This inability to speak to people partially explains the rise of Hindu nationalism. Today, there are no voices of moderate Hindus or Muslims, only shrill voices of extremists at both ends. Our parents and grandparents remember having listened to Mahatma Gandhi, Mulana Azad, Vivekananda, all of them steeped in religion, speaking with credibility to the masses. Today, that middle ground is empty. Our intellectual liberals were influenced by 19th century European thinkers like Nietzsche, who declared famously that God is dead. Feuerbach argued that God was a projection of the human imagination. Durkheim felt that religion reflected society. Its rituals and sentiments bound people. Freud said it was an illusion, but which made civilization possible. Marx said this illusion originated in the alienation of the capitalist worker for whom religion was like opium, a drug to soothe his pain. Once capitalism was destroyed, the drug wouldn’t be needed. Many, many liberals think of communal violence as a governance problem, failure of law and

Speaker 7 (41:12): order.

Speaker 4 (41:17): But surely it is more. Why did half a million people have to die in the 1947 riots? Why couldn’t we have prevented that tragedy? We still do not have an answer to partition violence. Perhaps one day it will come from literature.

Speaker 7 (41:40): Tolstoy’s War and Peace brought closure to the Russian mind, uneasy from the tragedy

Speaker 4 (41:48): of Napoleonic Wars. While we wait for our own war and peace, let us remember that communal harmony will not come from weaning people away from religion. It will come from, sorry, it will come from reinforcing Gandhi’s or even going back to Ashoka’s ideal of respect for all religions. It will come when moderate leaders seeped in religion raise a public call to privatize religion. Fast forward again to 2013. My worst fears about Congress’s UPA, Congress led UPA government proved correct. The reforms, even though we had a great reformer Manmohan Singh as the prime minister, the reforms practically came to a halt. Everyone knew that Sonia Gandhi was the real power. Like her mother-in-law, she was forever ready to make a false trade-off between growth and equity and launch the next vote-winning welfare scheme. It was disheartening for me personally, week after week, to write my next column about the next reform, but that reform never came. It was after all the same, this same party that had snatched our economic freedom during the License Raj, sacrificing the hope of two generations. Always ready to take the moral high ground, choosing always equity over growth, not realizing that jobs and growth are the only moral answer in a poor country.

Speaker 7 (44:10): So, despite the lack of reform, the decade after 2003 ironically turned out to be India’s

Speaker 4 (44:25): best in economic terms. The economy grew at 7.5% a year for a decade and the average. And at the same time, the population growth slowed down from 2.2% to almost now 1.5%. I mean, India performed like an Asian tiger. The governments, that government, UPA government’s best achievement was a welfare program offering 100 days guaranteed employment to the rural poor.

Speaker 8 (45:07): Its worst achievement was to waive loans to farmers in order to which ended which ended

Speaker 4 (45:15): in punishing the honest farmer who had dutifully repaid his loan. What an immoral way to win the 2009 election.

Speaker 7 (45:28): Almost as bad was that government’s Food Security Act.

Speaker 4 (45:34): It guaranteed almost free rice and wheat to 67% of the people at a time when India was the second fastest growing economy in the world. You could have justified this step. For the money to be given for the for the benefits to be given to the extremely poor, which were then around 19% of the people. And that too you would justify during an emergency like covid. Anyway, as the years went by, corruptions, scandals erupted in UPA2, decision making was paralyzed, investors lost confidence, inflation rose. At this time, I became deeply pessimistic about India’s politics.

Speaker 7 (46:43): I was disgusted with Congress party’s corruption, but I was equally turned off by BJP’s Hindu nationalism. Beyond my pessimism lay a nagging sense of guilt.

Speaker 4 (46:59): Had I taken the easy road in life offering armchair commentary on politics and policies? shouldn’t I jump into politics and do some heavy lifting work of changing policies

Speaker 7 (47:13): at the university I’d learned from Aristotle that civic action

Speaker 4 (47:20): was the high road to virtue in fact ancient Greeks called a person idiotis origin of idiot who did not engage in politics. Amartya Sen had once urged me to start a liberal party or revive the Swatantra party. I told him that I didn’t think a liberal stood a chance to get elected on a purely liberal agenda. across the world liberals had been forced to join traditional parties such as the republicans in america or christian democrats in germany the fact is that adam smith’s invisible hand is invisible also to the voter given a contest between a liberal reformer and a populist candidate, the liberal reformer will always lose because the populist candidate will offer free electricity, free food, free this, free that. So the only hope I felt was to join a mainstream party and subvert it from within, pushing it towards the center. get BJP to become a modern conservative secular party or get the Congress to trust the market. So I went to meet the leaders of both these parties. They had no use for an unelectable liberal. So, by the way, I have recounted this, these bizarre, almost comical encounters with Sonia Gandhi and L.K. Advani in my memoir that’s coming out soon. It’s called Another Sort of Freedom. End of commercial. During this decade, I saw prosperity spreading in India. but also corruption. India seemed to be rising also despite the state from below. So our story of our country was a tale of private success and public failure. Two towns, Gurgaon and Faridabad, both on Delhi’s outskirts. captured this story. Faridabad had all the advantages. An active municipality, fertile agri…

Speaker 7 (50:24): I’m talking about the 1980s now.

Speaker 4 (50:27): Had an active, fertile agriculture, railway line to Delhi and a host of industries in its industrial estate. Gurgaon was wilderness. A sleepy village with rocky soil, even the goats ran away. But 25 years later, Gurgaon became the Millennium City, a symbol of rising India with 32 million square feet of commercial space, home to the world’s largest corporations,

Speaker 7 (51:04): fabled apartment complexes with swimming pools, spas, saunas, dozens of skyscrapers, 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and countless showrooms of the world’s most luxurious brands.

Speaker 4 (51:22): And Faridabad was still mired in red tape. How did this happen? Gurgaon’s advantage turned out to be an advantage. It was ignored by the state. Not have not having a municipality meant less red tape, less corruption, fewer bureaucrats to block things. And seeing this miracle. People asked, why do we need a government at all with corrupt politicians and unresponsive bureaucrats? Shrugging their shoulders. People said India grows at night when the government sleeps. I thought this was a nifty title for my next book, but my publishers alack, alas, nixed it, thinking it too insulting. There was a downside. Gujarat’s, Gurgaon’s, less affair model lacked basic public services. There was unreliable sewage system, unreliable water supply, no reliable electricity, few decent roads, no public transport. Now all this has changed, but I’m speaking about then. All these, I’m speaking of when it was Millennium City,

Speaker 7 (52:58): All these were provided, all these were privately provided until the state government finally woke up.

Speaker 4 (53:07): The moral of my tale, it was, is not to celebrate modern India’s heroic rise from below. Not to celebrate that, not to celebrate India grows at night when the government sleeps, but the need to reform the state. India had to learn to grow during the date, during the day. We don’t need five crore or is it five million?

Speaker 7 (53:38): Sorry, under trials right now in the country. That’s a symbol of I know some lawyers, some very distinguished people from judiciary are here.

Speaker 4 (53:50): And I will just say that you’ve let us down. And so neither Faridabad’s nor Gurgaon’s model is the right one. And this is when I shifted from a lesser fair libertarian ideology of my of the previous decade to become again an old fashioned classical liberal. Fast forward a year later. India in May 2014 was a discontented, politically troubled nation, similar in some ways to Britain in the late 1970s. Britain yearned for a strong leader and got Margaret Thatcher. Sick of the drift and paralysis in their own governments, Indians got Narendra Modi. There’s always a trade-off at the ballot box. The question in my mind was, should I risk secularism and we started late? Yeah. Should I risk? Where was I? Yeah. Should I risk secularism and pluralism for the sake of prosperity, jobs and clean government?

Speaker 7 (55:13): Revolted by the paralysis and corruption in UPA too, I was clutching at straws, willing to try anything.

Speaker 4 (55:23): In the past, I had voted mostly for the Congress, albeit reluctantly. The other parties were regional. A startup, Am Admi Party, had risen out of the ashes of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement.

Speaker 7 (55:42): But it wasn’t at that time yet a serious contender.

Speaker 4 (55:47): In this unhappy situation, rose Narendra Modi of the right wing BJP and he caught everyone by surprise.

Speaker 7 (55:58): His campaign speeches with a single minded focus on Vikas, which was a code word for investment, jobs, skills and growth. This was fresh.

Speaker 4 (56:11): His slogan of minimum government, maximum government was music to a liberal, to the liberal in me. And yet I felt nervous. Modi was supposed to be authoritarian, polarizing, and he carried the stain of the 2002 riots in Gujarat. But there had been no further incidents of communal violence of such, of this nature for more than decade in India. Perhaps I thought he had turned a new leaf. It was a conflict in my mind between economic freedom and religious freedom. I agonized for weeks and then decided reluctantly to vote for the BJP. I was amongst the first liberals to publicly endorse Mr. Modi in my column in the Times of India.

Speaker 7 (57:28): My friends on the left thought I was either blind to evil or swept naively by the Modi wave. The ones on the right were still suspicious of me ever since I had publicly rebuked Mr. Modi for the 2002 riots. Anyway, as you know, Mr. Modi won the 2014 election decisively.

Speaker 4 (57:54): my hopes however faded with time it began with the bizarre and botched up demonetization of the currency in an attempt to control black money in untaxed money as you know untaxed cash economy

Speaker 7 (58:13): the government withdrew 500 and thousand rupee notes instead of trapping rich tax evaders the measure, I’ve hurt small businesses and the poor in the country, where 90% of the transactions were

Speaker 4 (58:31): in cash. Hindu nationalism began to polarize the nation, making Muslims feel insecure. To its credit, however, the government enacted significant reforms. For example, the goods and services tax that started that start that didn’t start too well but it has succeeded in making India one market and we’ve got rid of those trucks at octroi narkas and all and also this government ushered in a digital revolution that has almost doubled the banking population But the government but. But that government failed to deliver the promised jobs. Yet Mr. Modi remained hugely popular. He was reelected in 2019, partly because of a for because of a very efficient way to deliver welfare benefits to the poor. Also because Achaiwala’s son at the helm had given dignity to the lower middle classes, the Kiranawala, the auto driver, the carpenter. The Congress Party under Rahul Gandhi seemed to self-destruct, failing to offer the voter a coherent alternative. I had grown up believing in Nehru’s idea of a plural India.

Speaker 7 (01:00:07): The opposite of the 19th century European nation state, which was based on a single religion or single language or a single ethnicity.

Speaker 4 (01:00:22): But Nehru’s lot failed to appreciate that India also had an ancient civilizational unity whose values resonated with the masses. It is these values that Mahatma Gandhi had tapped into during the freedom struggle. This failure, I believe, has helped to revive Hindu nationalists who claim that Nehruvian pluralism is merely appeasement of minorities and boat bank politics.

Speaker 7 (01:00:58): Unfortunately, though, while dreaming of a grand civilizational state,

Speaker 4 (01:01:06): Hindu nationalists are, in fact, trying to create a narrow minded identity based. Your 19th century European nation said a sort of Hindu Pakistan. So what is the dilemma of the Indian liberal? In the past 40 minutes, I have told the story of the making of an Indian liberal and the many dilemmas he faced on the way. Liberalism is indeed a lonely road.

Speaker 7 (01:01:46): I lost my friends on the right when I spoke up on Gujarat riots and criticized demonetization.

Speaker 4 (01:01:56): I lost my friends on the left when I voted for the BJP in 2014.

Speaker 7 (01:02:01): Sadly, I’m today a man in the middle, disappointed with both sides, with no one to vote for.

Speaker 4 (01:02:09): I can’t vote for the authoritarian identity politics of the BJP, but nor do I trust the redistributive populist and state economics,

Speaker 7 (01:02:22): statist economics of the Congress party,

Speaker 4 (01:02:25): which is always ready to trade off equity against growth. Plus, I find the party’s attachment to a dynasty of foreign

Speaker 7 (01:02:39): Offensive to my democratic instincts.

Speaker 4 (01:02:44): Both parties are statist and rampantly illiberal. I have little faith in the INDIA alliance.

Speaker 7 (01:02:56): There are too many generals there and there is no army. They are old and tired.

Speaker 4 (01:03:05): And last week as they arrived in Bombay, Mumbai, they were dragging their democratic dynasties along with them. In the past 10 years in the opposition, they haven’t come up with a new idea to solve India’s real problems. Problems such as jobs, air quality, education, health care. Handing out pocket money to women in Karnataka or free bus rides to women in Delhi will not cut it. The liberal always has to balance the demands of liberty and equality. Both are good things. But as a classical liberal, I place liberty higher, unlike left liberals. Perhaps it’s the result of the scars left behind by the License Raj. And yet I know that unfettered liberty and equality both create problems. Absolute liberty for the wolves is death for the lambs.

Speaker 7 (01:04:21): Absolute equality kills the human need to excel.

Speaker 4 (01:04:25): The Soviet Union’s collapse taught us enough that the human ego will not shrink that far. My life now is closing on a liberal age, which began at the end of World War II as a revulsion against the senseless violence of fascism, nationalism and dictatorship. the hopeful age that it gave birth to and to the supranational institutions like the UN and the UN and the resulting spread of liberal democracies globalization and welfarism but that age seems to be coming to an end as the world is relapsing into illiberal nationalism autocracy and fundamentalism I have always been a free trader, a global enthusiastic globalizer all my life. I even wonder sometimes why my love for my country has to stop at the border. I regard all wars as civil wars because we are human beings first and citizens of nations afterwards. Let me close then with another story. As an agnostic, I offer this story as the proper attitudes that we should have. Liberals should have.

Speaker 9 (01:06:08): Atheists should have towards religious people.

Speaker 4 (01:06:12): Once I found myself having to kill a few hours before my flight and I decided to visit the Madras Museum in Egmore. While I was admiring a chola bronze from the 11th century

Speaker 7 (01:06:31): created in the once great city of Tanjore, a middle-aged barefoot woman in a six-foot

Speaker 4 (01:06:40): South Indian sari was standing behind me. I made way for her. Without self-consciousness, she came forward and placed a vermilion mark on the Shiva Nataraja. I was appalled. Didn’t she realize this was a museum, not a temple? But soon I realized that we lived in two different worlds. Mine was secular, hers was sacred. Both of us stood before the bronze statue with different expectations. For me, it was a 900-year-old object of beauty. For her, it was God. Mine was an aesthetic pleasure.

Speaker 7 (01:07:31): hers was divine darsana she didn’t see what I saw a brilliant work in bronze by an early chola artist I admired the weightless joy of the dancer so skillfully captured by the sculptor I moved

Speaker 4 (01:07:51): along, passing by others’ bronzes, getting irritated when the figures were dusty or ill-lit or poorly spaced in the museum. But just as quickly, I felt embarrassed with my petty concerns,

Speaker 7 (01:08:11): my niggling mind. I looked for her for a while. She was still there, absorbed by her light-footed,

Speaker 4 (01:08:20): Tireless prancing God whose dance actually brings the universe into being. Without missing a beat and in the fullness of time, he dances it out of existence. there was there was luxuriant richness in her sacred world compared to the poverty of my weary feeble and secular existence to her the drum in Shiva’s right hand the drumbeat announced the momentous event the flame in his left hand telling her that the universe was about to be created his lower right hand bestowed on her freedom from fear

Speaker 7 (01:09:16): his raised left arm was a symbol of her release

Speaker 4 (01:09:20): for someone carrying out such a momentous mission her god looked cool athletic and debonair my modern secular English speaking life in comparison looked empty I would never know the depths the opulence of her world my secular friends were quick to brand her superstitious illiterate and cast this but she was probably more tolerant more accepting of diversity because she was capable of seeing God everywhere. She thus had something to teach both secularists of the Congress Party and Hindu nationalists of the BJP. They might even learn the real meaning of secularism from her.

Speaker 7 (01:10:23): In my world of museums, concert halls and bookstores,

Speaker 4 (01:10:27): there is plenty of search for beauty but no place for the holy. When Nietzsche taught us that God is dead, he meant that modern secular individuals like me had lost the possibility of faith.

Speaker 7 (01:10:49): The meaninglessness of a non-believer’s life has brought us to an absurd situation.

Speaker 4 (01:11:00): Although Sarth and Camus had offered consolation, saying that man creates his own meaning, they had said, but that is easier said than done. her life on the other hand held the possibility of fullness and wholeness of being I turned once again to look at the statue of the Shiva Nataraja he was still unperturbed absorbed in the serious business of creating and destroying the universe there was something new However, under his right raised right leg was a marigold flower. I decided the next time the world gets too much for me, I shall go and visit a museum. If I’m not careful, I too might experience eternity. So, my friends, what is the dilemma of the Indian liberal? Today, it is my fear that one of them will get elected in the 2024 election.