 It's the 26th of June, 2021 today. 46 years ago, the Congress government at the center imposed their emergency. 46 years later, probir, how does it feel? Well, one part of it is that we had hoped this would be just a bad memory. Unfortunately, what's happening today is also making this memory relatively much more alive. At least for those of us who passed during that phase. So I think we have to also recognize that that period of emergency was not just a temporary aberration or a blip, but it is something which is inherent in the possibilities of a state. And it depends really on the political dispensation at that time or this time to take society in a particular direction. The good part of the emergency, and I will say it's a good part of the emergency, is it was 19 months after that people expressed their opinion. And it is also true that Mrs. Gandhi, who perhaps did not listen to anything which was critical of her before imposing the emergency. And that's a problem with when you have a strong leader, you get psychofence around you. And this time, the problem that we have is the psychofency seems to be much deeper. So criticism of the leadership of what is happening, what are the problems, don't seem to percolate to the leadership. And this period seems to be in for a longer phase. So it's not going to be that simple, that easy to change the direction in which we are going at the moment. So I think that while remembering emergency, we also have to remember what happened then and what is happening now. What are the similarities and what are the dissimilarities and I think both are important. Of those 19 months, you were in jail for 12 months. That's right. I was arrested in September because if you remember the incident that led to my arrest, it was Menaka Gandhi who is currently in the BJP. She was a student of the School of Languages and I, Dev Prasad Tripathi, who was in JNU. I, Dev Prasad Tripathi, who was in the NCP and in Rani Bazum, the three of us were there on our duty at that day. Of course, we didn't expect Menaka Gandhi to stroll into the School of Languages and we had stopped her. Now if you read the Shah Commission report, it gives you the rest of the story, which is Bindar used to go and meet Sanjay Gandhi every morning and he was given a fire. He was DIG range at that time. So he promptly came to the university with some police constables and I think one DSP and virtually kidnapped me from the spot because I was still standing there and in Rani was still standing there. Dev Prasad Tripathi had left for some other place at that point, some other spot. And this was a three day strike and this is the second day of the strike. So that after having picked me up, they couldn't find anything they could say about me. So MISA became the most easy instrument to use. And the Maternal Security Act is supposedly a check and balances. People talk about checks today as well. One of the checks was there will be committee which will see that what is the record and then take a decision based on that, whether the person should be kept more or not. And of course, as you know, none of the MISA warrants that were executed. No body which examined the quote unquote evidence ever said the person should be released unless the government itself said, let's release him right now. And what prisons were you in? I was there in Tihar for about six months if I'm not mistaken. After that, we were transferred to Agra. There is also a little bit of a story behind that. That why were certain prisoners transferred as a claim because of overcrowding? Because I think there was an attempted prison escape at the time the jail authority said we overcrowded. But when the transfer orders came, the orders came for all of that who had filed the habeas corpus petition on what is now known as the Idiom Jabalpur case. And the Supreme Court, as you know, with the 421 verdict has given and given the verdict that fundamental rights exist, but they're not just receivable, which is you have it and you don't have it. So that was the judgment of the court. So therefore the court said whatever it is you have the right, but you can't come to court and ask for its implementation. So you have the right to free speech, you have the right to freedom, et cetera, et cetera, but you still stay behind jail. That's the stay inside jail. So almost all the people who were transferred were the ones who had petitioned in the case of Jabalpur. That's what we checked. And we found that all of us were petitioners who had moved the Supreme Court on this and moved the High Court to the Supreme Court. My case was also in the High Court. Then it was Supreme Court. Incidentally, N. M. Ghatate, who was Atul Nihari Bhashmi's biographer and he was an RSS person. He was my lawyer because at that time the people who would senior councils would take up these cases were very few. So he was taking most of the misadventure cases. My case was one of them. And in jail you were there with some prisoners, I guess, who were from the left, but also those from the right? Yes. In fact, those stories are interesting in themselves but not so much about emergency per se, but about social life in jail. And we had in the larger ward that I was in, there was Namaji Deshbukh Arun Jaitli. But there are two blocks which were separated by gate. The gate used to be open, which was in a larger compound. And in this block there was essentially a non-vegetarian block and a vegetarian block. With a few of the RSS people who were non-vegetarians also coming over and joining the mess. So it really got adjusted more on the basis of food, I guess, rather than anything else. But politically it meant the Jamaat and the left were in one part. And the other part were the vegetarians but also incidentally RSS. So of course it is not that they were the only ones. There were a few smattering of others as well. So the socialists were with us. And some of the people who were picked up and were non-vegetarians were with us. I remember there was a newspaper vendor in Connor Place who was picked up because he had a couple of publications which the government didn't like. So he went into the Mesa as well. Well all these stories of course you have to save up for your book which I hope you're writing. Yes, I was in flow when as you know certain disturbances took place in NewsClick which led to my being a sort of housebound for 112 hours or so in the August company of the Enforcement Directorate. But that has sort of disrupted the flow a bit and I hope I'll be able to get back to it soon. Yes, we are looking forward to that very much. But tell me something, at that time of course you had no idea that the RSS Chief, Barasai Devras who was also in prison, had written really supine letters to Indira Gandhi and others essentially saying that we will do whatever you want but let us out. Right? And he was released as it happens. And all of this of course came out much later. At that time you were not aware of that. What did you see in jail about how, what is now the BJP? At that time was the Jhansank. How did they behave in jail? You know I don't think we can really generalize at large about everybody. Within the BJP there was a whole section who in the 1940s had also been in jail. Gandhi's assassination, as you know a large section of the left was also in jail at the time. The Langana armed struggle was on. And they would have been at that time people who not have compromised and they themselves, some of them were with me in jail. They said at the time we and the left couldn't convert each other. So they were, that said they stood their ground. But you know the situation in the 70s, the generational change is one part of it. But that generation had also become relatively different. And there were, a lot of them were really pining for how to get out. Now again in the leadership also some I'm not going to name them because it's unfair today they're not there anymore. And some who were not. So you had also that distinction. But again I was taken to Ilhabad central jail in Naini for my viva, my master's viva. That also was under the court order. One of the very few court orders which gave some quote-unquote relief that I should be taken to attend my master's viva otherwise my master's degree was in danger. So there I met some of the senior leaders of the BJP and one of them in fact told me that I should tell Nanaji Deshbukh also gave me a letter to carry. And you know that kind of at least sympathy was there for fellow jail inmates that you would do this for them. That somehow we should get out of jail. And Nanaji Deshbukh said, Avarat mani tabna. I wasn't aware of this letter. But let us also be fair that there were people who stood their ground even with the BJP and RSS. But a lot of them were desperate how to get out. Again as I said naming names is not an issue. If you take a larger question you know the jail affects people in two ways. Those who think, when will I get out? Given the uncertainty of emergency what did you know whether we would be getting out say the next month or five years later. So 10 years later you didn't know anything about what could happen because you know individuals cannot be predicted. You can predict a larger course of history but what a person will do this becomes the unknown. So what Mrs. Gandhi would do was not clear to anybody. So those who thought about how long this will continue are the ones who broke. So you have to encapsulate your mind and say okay that question I'll leave for whenever it happens. How do I adjust to it today? And what do I do today? So how do you encapsulate your mind? So Mr. Gandhi's book is there and he writes about his jail also and he says that is one of the defensive mechanism that he also adopted. The interesting part for me is these are the two responses that I saw in jail. I was very young at that time compared to what I am today. But I do see that my response was at that time encapsulating the options, minds and not thinking about it because that's the easiest way to break. But those who said when do I get out? Those are the ones who broke. So I think there's a larger story about how you approach it. And it is of course your commitment that you drive this, there's no question. But it is also the personality of the problem. So I have a personality of the person. So I'm not going to make easy facile generalizations on this except to say that this is a complex question and at the end of it it's a larger political question. But it's also an individual question. And I really salute all those today like for instance, Divangana, Kalita, Natasha, Narabal and of course her father, Mahavir that how they have stood up to the kind of oppression that has been visited on them and the way they have fought. And I think that is the how we link that struggle to also what is happening today. Could you give us a little bit of a sense of what jail life was like? And the reason why I bring this up is if you read accounts of people in jail in colonial times as part of the freedom struggle, they were able to write books, Nehru and others wrote all their books in jail because that gave them the time that they had access to other books that they could read, they had access to writing material and so on and so forth. They could also meet people in jail. I mean not just fellow prisoners but you know I had visits and so on. What was your experience like? Because I'd like you to reflect a little bit on how much the condition of political prisoners has deteriorated in today's time. Where for instance, you know, a father stands for me for instance is denied access to even something as simple as a sipper. So could you speak about your time in jail from that perspective? You see the issue of political prisoners was particularly post independence was an important one for all political parties who became ruling parties as well because they are all in jail. So even if you take for instance UP, Charan Singh would become the chief minister. He relaxed the jail rules to make the conditions of political prisoners much better. Why? Because he was also in jail. So there was that history and it's not just the British issue that you are raising because a lot of the people during that time what you are referring to Nehru were also in preventive detention and preventive detention conditions in British jail so different from those who were not. So that is a part of the story. But during emergency the jailers were also clear that you do not know when these people will become our rulers. So therefore that there was that thing that we have to treat them differently and the Congress government, Mrs. Gandhi's government also accepted these are not run-of-the-mill people we have to break. We are isolating them. We will take control of external society. We will control the media. We will control the messaging and after that we will marginalize them. That was the attempt. Here the attempt seems to be how do we break people who are standing up to us? How do we remold the state without this kind of dissident voices that there should be nobody who should be able to stand up to us and therefore the pettiness of the issue as you say. These are petty provocations that you give just to tell the people we can do anything we want to you and as long as the courts do not give the protection that they should be giving the prisoners and those who are being charged all kinds of ways. I think this is going to continue. The good part of it is that slowly I think this is becoming more and more visible and therefore the legitimacy of these measures are slowly being questioned and the first break of this will be visible in the way high court seem to be taking up some of these cases. The Supreme Court still seems to be shall be extremely reluctant to come and say things about what this government is doing and it's more by inaction than by action but I think slowly the ice seems to be breaking. Whether it will hold again, whether it will post this particular second wave crisis which has questioned the legitimacy of the government in much larger ways whether that will stay and that's where the high courts really become active. That we have to see but there is no question that I think that the attempt of this government is not only to use the draconian laws that exist which unfortunately have continued from post independence era some lot of them introduced by the Congress as well but remold this laws to make them far more draconian they initially were and also finding out how many ways they can be used. So now you have eight agencies of the state going after people. So you know you can have the NIA, you can have the ED, you can have the CBI you can have the central excise and customs, the central excise separately, customs separately so you name the agency of the state income tax all of these can go and they can go even simultaneously. So this ability to really try and silence people in a much larger sense is also there but it is also the indication that there is a much larger set of protests taking place or articulation, resistance taking place and you know during emergency you have to silence the printing press and you could silence the resistance, the voices of resistance except to personal communication. Of course personal communication is also very, very powerful. Let us not forget the 1857 revolution attempt at getting the British kicked out of India took place through the post offices which the British had introduced but also through personal communication. Those are also instruments which existed just as social media exists today and of course amplifies that much more and it is much quicker. So I think that the kind of resistances we see today has an impact which is going to remould what even the judiciary or the other agencies do in spite of the government's desire as you said to use all these instruments to make people far more isolated inside jail and try and break them. Well, one difference between let us say 1995 and today is that as soon as the emergency was declared in 1995 large numbers of people were rounded up and put behind bars hundreds, thousands of people, right? Virtually all opposition parties had their top leaders or intermediate leaders as well as the lower level carder in jail. That is not the case today. It appears as if a few selected individuals are picked up and they are made examples that you are basically unleashing a reign of terror just scaring people into silence. But there is also this larger atmosphere that is being created where you have to double check yourself on every front before you even utter your mouth, open your mouth to say anything whether it's film censorship, whether what's happening with the web-based social media or OTT platforms, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a larger effort it appears to control thought itself and the instrument of that is not to put large numbers of people in jail but to control it at the source which is every individual who would say something should think twice before speaking. I think it operates at three levels. One is of course you have to make examples of you otherwise why should people self-censor themselves? The second is that the numbers of FIRs being filed anything that you do, you pick one or two prominent examples of that then file FIRs against them. We have seen the Ghaziabad case, the cases against wire, each of these cases. And even if you wanted oxygen and wanted to write on social media please I need oxygen for my father or mother. The Yogi government could file an FIR against you for vilifying the government. Actually there is also an interesting issue here people do not realize. Under the Disaster Management Act and the Epidemic Act, both of these acts the state has an emergency power. So we have not a de facto but a de-euro-emergency as well at the moment. Any of these can be used and Yogi government is of course using some of that so is the settled government. So these are acts that you have to do. One is pick up a few and make examples as you say. Others that you intimidate with FIRs and harassment which is also part of what you do and they can also be arrested. Kappan was going to Hatras and is still in jail. So this is the example of that. And third of course is that therefore the self-censorship people exercise and you have to think three times before you write something in social media and each of the news platforms today whether print or digital platforms, digital platforms particularly because they are much more in number and they have also been much more vocal. At least some of them have been much more vocal. So they then need to exercise self-censorship continuously. So the chilling effect and that's why these words are important because that's what the judiciary said. The chilling effect of you know silencing news platforms, digital platforms, people's voices. This is what is the freedom of speech. Of course there are reasonable restrictions that catchphrase which can be used or misused. But the point is the intent of this is to not to have this chilling effect. But unfortunately as the state's agencies multiply their FIRs, the chilling effect is certainly taking place. As the founder editor of NewsClick which is an alternative news platform. I don't want to call it alternative. It's still alternative in the sense of not backed by let's say big corporate money in that sense alternative in the way in which it functions. It is an alternative and it certainly is an alternative source of news for millions. As somebody who founded this platform, how do you see the larger media scene in the country and particularly if you were to compare it to the emergency of 1975-77 of that period and now, could you make a comparative analysis? You know I have to go run one year on this famous quote but the press was asked to bend the crawled. So that is a good test of the press then and the press now. The difference is now you have also those who are acting as not as simply as the voices of the people and so on speaking truth to power but they are speaking power to truth. So this has also become the inversion of what is supposedly the role of the media and you have a number of platforms. I don't have to name it here but they are known for what they are doing. Of course, Mr. Arnab Goswami seems to have disappeared for a few weeks but I'm sure he's back or he's going to be back and continue what he was doing. So you have all of that in front of us. But I think the issue is that today it's much harder to control the platforms, control individual people because of the existence of social media and this is really a technological change that has taken place which makes the task of old-fashioned muzzling of the press and censorship different from what it is today. If you want to muzzle 1 million people or 2 million people the instruments cannot be that of what the emergency instrument was which was direct censorship. So I think that is why all the things that you were talking about earlier the kind of self-censorship model is making examples of people and of course the continuous harassment by filing FIRs all over the world. This is what used to be called law fair in other jurisdictions which if you remember started against MF Hussein who cases were filed against him all over the country and he actually left the country because he couldn't take it anymore. He was quite old at that time so I don't blame him because my age is slowly going towards that direction as yet already. So given all of that I think there are different instruments and here there is one distinction I have to make for the Youth Congress at that point of time and the Sanjay Gandhi did do a set of things but the kind of organized compliment to the state power that from the Gaurakshaks to all the Bahinis, Senas that the BJP has or the RSS has at its command all of them also act as an adjunct to the state. Quite often in fact as a compliment to the state to be the spear point of the attack so that FIRs are filed by a huge number of people and the police is then told okay look at these but not at those. So those are the kind of things which are there. So at one level there is a much more pervasive resistance but there is also much more pervasive attack and I think that's a distinction between emergency then and emergency now. Also it seems to me that while the attack is more positive. It's also lowered the level of social discourse significantly. I remember for instance when Saptar was killed, I was witness to that and there was not a single public statement that said that what happened to Saptar was right even from people who opposed him politically. Today that's not the case. When somebody is attacked, somebody is killed and so on. There's a chorus of voices around saying that what happened to this person or this institution or platform or whatever is right, is correct and much worse is said. So there's an overall decline and not just a dumping down but actually a pernicious sort of poisoning of the social discourse. What role do platforms like NewsClick play in that sphere? Really two questions. The nature of the discourse changing and I will say this is organized for a very long time. And I will say this is an organized force, huge amount of resources. We know the electoral bonds for example and basically what would be called the Troll Brigade. We have a book, I was a troll which has come out as part of the BJP Troll Brigade which talks about how it happened but the N number of other material which is public now and it is also clear that what Amit Malviya himself writes are extremely problematic for somebody who is supposed to head the IT cell of the major political party in India today. So that's one part of it. And it is also true that there is a possibility for anybody who has resources to mold the conversation in one way and that conversation is appealing to hate and hate has immediate traction in social media. It lasts for three minutes and then it goes to another hate message and therefore the chain of hate continues. This is not something that I am saying. This is what for instance analysis of Facebook on what would be called the QAnon or the white extremist forces in Europe and United States studies show. So this is the same phenomenon that of course we are seeing here and we have talked about it earlier if you remember in Sadar's Memorial lecture we talked about the lynch mobs then lynching then in the United States and lynching now. What are the instruments that have changed but how the underlying issue is really the same how to organize these kind of groups around hate. I think the analysis of this should lead us to the point can hate be stopped by countering it emotionally or countering it with sober reasoning and appealing to the instinct of reason that human beings have. So I think both are there. Both instincts are there in human beings. We have a sense of fear and hate which moves people very quickly but you have also the longer acting part of our mind which looks at reason. So I think our instrument has to be reason and not hate. It has to be love and not hate. It has to be solidarity, not hate. So these are the instruments that we have to use and you know what is the biggest instrument that we have? It's our creativity, empathy for people and I think these are far more powerful in the long run that the temporary amnesia you can create by the kind of hate politics we see in play today. I think that's the larger message we have to go and why I said, I didn't want to call you usually called it media because I believe we are the real media today because this is what is emerging and our competition is not with other digital platforms. It is with what you call the corporate media or what is called otherwise the mainstream media. I believe we are the ones who are becoming increasingly mainstream but that's the real battle and how do we do that? What should be our instrument and how do we change the thinking of the people? I think hate can survive for short term. It cannot mold society for long-term purposes and that is the strength that we have who are standing today against this irrespective of the attacks on us which of course as you have already said are there. I think one of the ways in which NewsClick has stood out even in this space of web-based news platforms is the way in which you have reported people's movements on the ground and there's been sustained reporting, excellent reporting, superb reporting. I don't think that the farmers struggle for instance to just take one example. I don't think their message would have come across to urban India in quite the same way had it not been for NewsClick. Stiller role was played there by NewsClick. Now my question is how do you see the future of people's movements in these times where there's what generally gets called an undeclared emergency where there's so much gagging of free speech where it's very hard for you to find any space in the corporate media and so on. How do people's movements then amplify their message? How do they get them across to people? How do they bring people onto their side? There are again two questions here. How do the media does it and how do the people's movements do it? So there are really two parts to this question. I will answer the media part first. I think there were critical media if you call it. There are lots of critical media voices in the news platforms today, digital platforms today and some of it are being done even in mainstream news platforms. Particularly we saw for instance when undeclared COVID deaths were there that how this was exposed by even papers which are pro-government earlier in Gujarat and UP. So we have that example in front of us where even the mainstream media of course Indian Express plays the double role of giving the government voices but also giving news. So all of this are there in front of us. So I'm not going to aggregate to ourselves as a sole voice of creating this kind of news or reaching this kind of news but what we did see that in spite of the critical platforms which existed movements were sort of ignored and that there are various reasons for it because of the shift that has taken place over the last 10, 15, 20 years. We don't have in the media today what would be called the working class, the unions, workers' beat, the farmers' beat. Instead of it will become agro-industries' beat. Farmers' beat, the industry beat is essentially about the industries you talk to the management, you talk about the finances of the company. So this whole shift from the people to the owners and to the industry, agro-industries is a shift that Sainath points out that you have 40 people covering fashion shows but you have only one person covering rural Maharashtra and looking at debts, if at all. I was including Sainath in that. So if you take that kind of figure, this is the shift that has taken place and that was something I felt needed a voice that we need to cover these because this is something important that's happening. We should look at it from the middle-class angle if the farmers or the workers come to the city that they are creating traffic jams which looks at it from the point of view of the middle-class either in the cars or buses. So that is not the way we should look at it. We should also look at it via the here. So I think that is something that we, as you said, is a particular area which was relatively less covered. So we thought that that is something we should really cover. The second part of it is the issue that you raised about movements. The movements are not used to this current generation social media that is there. I think social media is like, say, 150 years back, 100 years back the print media. I remember my grandmother's mother's generation and I'm already a grandfather's generation right now. So you can understand how old that is. It is to say if it is in print, it must be true. So now at least my generation of grandfathers when they see anything on WhatsApp believe if it is in WhatsApp, it must be true. The younger are a little more discerning. They know what it is. But our generation, a lot of them first-time WhatsApp users or Facebook users. Younger people tell me that Facebook is now apparently the place where the older people go, not the younger people. I don't know because I'm not going there anymore or if I ever did. So this is the undiscerning social media users at the moment we have. So I think it will take 5-10 years before you get what I will call a social media literacy just as we got it in the print. Remember print is to sell what is called snake oil. So there are a whole lot of laws that have to be passed to protect the consumers from this. So I think those are the kind of steps we are moving. Now breaking up the power of big monopolies, the United States, the arch capitalist country in the world is now talking about how to reduce the monopoly power of big tech. I thought this was our preserve. We talked about it. But suddenly the US is also talking about it. So I think what you are seeing is that the social media is coming under the much more critical lens. So how the literacy of the people improves and social media literacy improves. So I think the movements also have to gain social media literacy and they can't gain it the way for instance all the various organs of the BJP and the RSS are gaining which have money power behind them, people who have technology because lot of them have migrated to the United States, learned the tools and are helping people over here. As you know once you become a US citizen or you become an NRI you become far more chauvinistic and nationalist over there than over here. So that kind of support which is also there. I think all of that has to be countered by essentially again what I was talking about. What are the right messaging? How do we increase social media literacy and how do we increase social media capabilities in the movements? And that's a challenge in front of all of us because it changes so quickly and making people understand this, adopt it, adapt it. These are hard tasks. But you know when you have numbers it happens as we saw in the farmers protests that they found their own voices, they found their own media and it was sure news click played a role in that but they were huge. So I think those are the kind of things that is there and at the end of it it is movement that shapes societies. Astroturfing, creating artificial voices through social media, do not create social movements of the kind that we are talking which have the capacity to change society. If finally I were to zoom out a little bit and make the point to you that you know there's a way in which when one thinks of the emergency whether in 1975 or now it tends to get reduced in popular discourse to the issue of personalities that you know it was Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi then that's Modi Shah now and so on and while of course you know personalities do play a role there's no question about that but also if I were to ask a larger question a larger historical question in terms of the ruling class and the trajectory of the ruling class then how do you see that? How do you see what are the tactics that the ruling class is using, was using, is using now and how do you see the future unfolding in a larger way I'm not talking about you know like tomorrow and day after but really in a larger frame where do you see this going? You know as far as Mrs. Gandhi's emergency was concerned I think it was a more of an individual reaction to rising movement some of them quite retrogressive like for instance in Gujarat the Navadirman movement so those and she felt insecure the Allahabad High Court judgment didn't really act to her comfort level shall we say and therefore there was a reaction to that thinking that if she tamps down these voices will fall silent and then she'll be able to reorder society in the way she wanted without too much of a change but there's also the railway strike and so on railway strike of course big working class actions because that you know just three years after her sweeping victory that they should be from the working class movements to retrogressive movements all kinds of movements student movements also that were there the JP led movement which had again it gave legitimacy to the RSS because it came into it all that is there so I'm not going to really do a quick one minute summary of all that was happening but it did make her feel insecure and it was a part of her insecurity that she thought she could tamp down and reorder it in a way she wanted I think she also understood after the 77 elections that this is something the Indian people will not accept that the middle class talk which existed before the emergency that we need a period of dictatorship to settle this poor people who are raising their voices money, equality how dead they have the same voting rights as we have we know society they don't we know what should be done they don't so this whole contempt for the masses which is what the middle class elite in India had at the time they learnt the lesson in emergency that you know the police constable is more power than the guy sitting in the car being driven somewhere so all of that was a lesson and somebody mentioned this to me that you know that when our panchayat leader is arrested by police constable or the daroga that we understood is how the power equation has changed that we are not going to accept so they understood the value of vote which you see the poor consistently vote in India much higher than the middle class does because they know that's one time they have a voice so I think Indian democracy got electoral democracy if you will there is a piece of life through that that suddenly people discovered the power of what they had and it only taking that away made them aware of it I think this one is a nation's attempt at the remaking of India and this is in that sense deeper roots which failed in the national movement because they were not willing to go against the British their battle was still against the Muslims the Mughal rule of the Sultanate and all of those things so they are fighting their battle in the past which of course is what they are fighting today you know renaming streets pulling down monuments making mandits this battle is basically a battle over the past so it's not a battle over the future it's really a battle over the past and to make India different from the trajectory we attempted in 1947 which had by and large the differences of the people that we want a secular, nationally economically independent India so that I think is the battle which we are now fighting that is it the battle for a different trajectory of India which will be a battle which will be one religion one people others have to become second class citizens unfortunately this is so fraught with danger for the kind of country we have the fault lines are not one as the BJP or the artists assume Hindus and Muslims this is how they perceive of it but the fault lines are many you have caste you have language you have also certain amount of ethnicity in what the people perceive so the fractures that can take place of a nation of this kind of this complexity is something which they don't seem to understand they believe that what used to be the slogan when I was young which they have tapped down somewhat Hindi, Hindu, Hindu Rasht so that seems to be the subterranean slogan that resonates with them and this is the direction they seem to want to go but as I said this is already creating fracture lines that you can see and those fracture lines worry me because unfortunately it is not a one-dimensional country that we inherit and that is why kind of hatred, fissures which are being sought to be created I think need a much larger coming together of people but hopefully what they are doing is going to energize that indeed and thank you so much Praveer it's been fantastic talking to you and as always very inspiring thank you