 So, welcome once more to the audience here, to the audience online, to Keira who's helping out here, to Farida who's helping out somewhere else to make it all work. And of course, to our speaker, Hashmander, who today will talk on the crisis of ingest democracy. I'm Jens Lerke, I'm from the Department of Development Studies and this is a joint seminar organized by the Department of Development Studies and the South Asia Institute here at SOS. And I'll start by briefly introducing Hashmander, and then it's for him to deliver the main talk after which we will have a hopefully long and interesting question and answer and discussion session, and that is the plan for this evening. Late afternoon. Okay, Hashmander is as we probably all know, a human rights and peace worker. He's also a writer, columnist, researcher and teacher and he works with the survivors of mass violence, hunger, homeless persons and street children. He's the, he's the chairperson of the Center for Equity Studies in Delhi. And he's currently a Richard von Weitzegger fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. He from really University in Amsterdam is a distinguished scholar with the initiative of political conflict, gender and people rights, people's rights at UCLA in Berkeley, and he regularly writes for concerned media outlets in India and has written more than 25 books. He actually retired from the civil service in 2002 in protest against the role of the state in common, in the criminal massacre in Gujarat and that he went on to find a man. He's also a writer, a people's campaign for secular peaceful, just and humane world as a reaction to the common carnage. In 2017 he established and let the important national initiative caravan, the Mojabad or caravan of love, which tries to counter rising hate and fear in the country with love and solidarity. And then visits the families of those who lost loved ones to hate violence and lynching for atonement, solidarity, healing conscience and justice and to provide goodwill and trust between communities, not the least. He's a founding member of the National People's Rights to Information, and he has held several positions at some more official level he was a member of the Prime Minister's National Advisory Council 2010 to 12 and he was a special commissioner to the Supreme Court of Human Rights to Food case from 2005 to 2017 is also made many significant interventions in India's high courts. And through that he has had a direct impact on many aspects of some of the most pressing social issues in India, including begging the impunity of perpetrators of violence in Gujarat and citizenship related citizenship rights related cases. And that should come to as no surprise that the Peace Research Institute in Oslo included him in his 2022 short list of people recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize as well. So this is just a very brief introduction, but I think it is. And as I said we probably all know a lot of this already because Hashemander is a well known activist and and so that engages on so many different fronts, but this is nevertheless just a brief introduction to to enable us to understand the gravity of what we're going to, to, to listen to soon the presentation on the crisis of injustice democracy as we get here is from someone who has, who has worked in this field and been active in this field and whose voice has been hurt, both nationally and internationally in so many ways and taken seriously in so many ways up until now and so therefore it matters over to you, Hash. For those generous words and thank you all of you for for gathering here. I was terrified that this would be an empty hole, but it's nice to see many of you including dear friends. What I have to speak about is extremely grim. I prepared for this conversation, just putting down my thoughts, the enormity of what we are confronting sort of came back to me. I hope I ends is going to discipline me by keeping me in time, and I hope we have enough time for a conversation as well. There are signs all around us of our world in tumult. Democracy and fraternity are being slowly but surely snuffed out in many parts of our world by a rising politics of hate. Leaders in both electoral democracies and authoritarian states are increasingly legitimizing hatred and bigotry, thereby hollowing out democracy and eroding the ideas of equal citizenship and fraternity. If you're a minority of any kind, religious, racial, ethnic, class, gender, class, a life with dignity and security has become increasingly precarious in most parts of our world today. We today inhabit a world in which the odds are high that your neighbor will not look like you, worship like you, speak your language, eat, dress, sing, dance, love like you. The question this raises is how will we respond to people we feel are different? Are we welcoming, curious, friendly? Or are we fearful, resentful and full of hate? Few countries in the world today are immune from the rise of far right leaders who encourage the second path, who foster fear and hate against people of different faiths, skin colors, beliefs, ways of life. I sit here today to talk to you about my own country, India, and its many crises of democracy. India's democracy was never perfect, but even with its flaws, it was robust, vibrant, colorful, assertive, with largely free elections and independent judiciary and press, strong and assertive political oppositions and a vigilant civil society. However, we have reached a place in the journey of the Indian Republic after seven and a half decades when democracy and democratic freedoms have never been as hollowed out and freedoms as threatened as they are today. The freedom institute rings alarm bells by categorizing India as an electoral autocracy. We should look at some of the most dramatic and worrying of these signs of collapsing democracy in India. The first, the most visible is probably the crushing of dissent in politics in civil society and in academia. Freedom House in its 2020 report decries the traditional basic freedoms in India. Just some examples. The use of the anti-terror law, the UAPA against dissenting voices, intellectuals and activists of impeccable integrity, both seniors and young activists for years without trial or bail. To give you many examples, but let me talk about Father Stan Swami, a Jesuit priest, one of the bravest people I've met. I met him some months before he was finally put into prison. He had devoted his life to the rights of indigenous people in the state of Jharkhand, living in a small room. And he was charged with, with most violence and very far from the kind of politics and ethics that he stood for. He was clearly being targeted because he was opposed to the displacement of Adivasi people and their jailing in thousands for the establishment of this large super thermal power project by Adani who's now become India's richest and the world's fifth richest person. But why I wanted to talk about him was that he was completely unafraid and unbent when he was taken to prison. It just didn't make sense. He had Parkinson's. If they needed to interrogate him, he was available for interrogation. There was no reason to put him into prison. But they insisted. Once he was in prison, they were not even willing, because he had Parkinson's, he needed a glass and a zipper to be able to drink water. The jailers refused to give it to him, the lower court refused, the high court refused and they had to go up to the Supreme Court to get him a glass with a zipper. People from around the country mailed zippers to the jail, but they didn't make it available to him. His last letters to the only family he had, which was his brother priests and to the young Adivasi's are beautiful to read and heartbreaking where he said God had ensured that in these months of his life he met these impoverished persons in prison who actually took care of him because he couldn't even dress and undress and bathe alone. Like his own sons, they took care of him over those last months. Finally, he and COVID was at its peak and it became clear that he was likely to die. And in this last hearing of the court online, he came on and said, you know, just let me send my last days with the only family I have my brother priests and the adivasi young people that was refused and a couple of weeks later he died. And I think India and its democracy were diminished greatly with that passing. But that is only one of many stories. This similar use of the colonial era sedition law against political defend different dissenters. It's interesting that this was a colonial law which was used famously also against Mahatma Gandhi. And he was charged for disaffection against the state and he said that affection is something that is earned and not forced. Many, many years ago. It's interesting that 97% of sedition cases filed after 2014 have been against citizens who criticize the government. There's the massive and brazen misuse of premier institutions of the state. The Central Bureau of Investigation, the enforcement directorate economic events has been income tax authorities against a whole range of both political and civil society persons, including myself in order to try to silence them. There's very little debate in Parliament. Most major decisions are now taken without any pretense of public consultation or consultation in Parliament, whether it's demonetization of 86% of India's currency overnight. The farm laws, the citizenship amendment law, the country will look locked down and so on. We see other sciences where we see the crackdown on funding for civil society, the foreign FCRA, which is the licensing to receive funds. The reasons to, to this make compliance harder and harder. And the power of the state to non transparently without giving reasons to deny suspend or cancel licenses is being used again to frighten NGOs into self censorship. A thousand licenses of, of, of NGOs were cancelled recently and others stand on the end bill. The pressures on even Indian funders. You can't see foreign funds Indian funders are pressurized not to fund anti government NGOs. Environmental anti displacement labor rights and use are treated as anti development, therefore anti national. There's also the rapid willful destruction of the liberal arts university. And the national university is a prime example but it isn't alone. There's a still popular discourse from leg from the top that equates the Supreme Leader, the ruling party, the government, the majority religion and the nation, all as one. The criticism of the Supreme Leader is against the nation. And then media reporting the world press freedom index 2021 published by reporters without borders ranks India is 142 out of 180 countries. Describes it bad for journalism and one of the most dangerous countries for journalists trying to do their job properly. In quote from the report, journalists are exposed to every kind of attack including police violence against reporters ambushes by political activists and reprisals instigated by criminal groups. The coordinated hate campaigns waged on social networks against journalists who dare to speak or write about subjects that annoying Hindu followers are terrifying and include calls for the journalist concerned to be murdered. And the campaigns are particularly violent when the targets are women, where, where the attacks are sexualized, very intimidating. And we have examples like gory lankesh where where they've actually been murdered journalists who dare to criticize the government abandoned as anti state anti national or even pro terrorist. Now, once again, one story will perhaps illustrate this, this is a city couple of Muslim identity agendas to simply was coming from Kerala to report on the gang rape and murder of a teenage dalit girl in other British. And he was arrested in October 2020. He remains still in prison, charged with a terrorist conspiracy link to the ISIS. Even when he was. He got covered he was very sick. His hands were tied to the hospital bed a chain to the hospital bed, and he remains in prison. And of course, falls into yet another category political leaders, including almost all the former chief ministers were kept under arrest months year longer. Kashmir also saw a seventh month internet shut down the longest in any democratic country. You know, in this first picture that I'm trying to portray of the crushing of descent. I want to end with the story of bulldozer justice. For many reasons it's something that is unfolding today and something that the prime minister of this country seemed to celebrate quite recently. What we're seeing is, is actually what is happening is, is that typically a bunch of go Hindutva goons go and gather outside a mosque and start raising the most insulting slogans, including and I'm sorry, say women around but like Muslims are motherfuckers, and you're shouting that, and you're shouting that outside mosques as a celebration of Ram's birthday for instance. And, and then at some point, somebody gets provoked which they shouldn't somebody throws a stone and that's precisely what you're waiting for a skirmish breaks out. There is some violence. And the next day or the day after that, the government decides to bulldoze the homes of people that it has decided were responsible for the violence, all Muslim. Firstly, there's nothing in the law that allows you to demolish people's homes because they committed any crime including rioting. Secondly, you have to have some sort of process by which you establish people's crime. None of that is done. There's no pretence of doing that. And, and bulldozers and they break down their homes, their shops. And the day this was happening in, in actually a Muslim settlement in, in, in a slum in Delhi. Boris Johnson chose to go to inaugurate a factory which produces the same bulldozers and he was posed with sitting on that bulldozer himself. And, and then we had, we had journalists, we have this journalist who actually jumped on top of a bulldozer and reporting live on top of the bulldozer as, as the bulldozing was going on. And now it's become like a cult. I haven't been in India for a bit and I'm buying to return but I was just talking to friends and they were saying now, it's become fashionable to wear caps with bulldozers t shirts with bulldozers. You know, just celebrating this way, you know, even the pretence of constitutional justice of rule of law is, is, you know, I think it's crossed yet another line, this bulldozer justice because they, you know, nothing, I mean the state is reeking violent revenge, destroying the homes of, of people of one community with no pretence of any constitutional process at all into what you like. And sadly, till I speak today. The higher courts have not stayed this process. So this is one story. The second, you know, illustration of what is happening to India's democracy is the targeting of its religious minorities, especially Muslims but also Christians, they feed into worship but even more importantly, the rights of equal citizenship. Since the last few months in Germany, trying to study what happened in Germany in the 1930s, leading up to the shore, the Holocaust, and also what German society has done since to rebuild itself into a human society. It's terrifying. And you know, now that I've seen it so closely is how close step by step by step. What happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s with the Jews and what is happening in India today. I sat on and listed points of similarity and reached 23. It cannot be just a coincidence. I mean it is, you know, it's obviously a playbook that you're following right up to even having a particular film like Kashmir files, an anti Jewish film which was encouraged by Hitler himself, and shown to the army, and so on. I mean, there is step by step by step, a similarity. History of Germany in the 30s must always remain a reminder to us that democracy is not just the rule of the majority, because that can mutate into fascism. We have to recognize that democracy is at least equally the protection of every minority of all their freedoms, and ultimately their freedom to be themselves, and yet be equal citizens in every way. In more these eight years we have witnessed to the state, openly now at war with its Muslim citizens, more covertly with its Christian citizens freedom of worship. India today is ranged by the tumult of a state led campaign of open hate directed against its minorities. I feel a kind of sickness that has set into the soul of our people. Vicious hate speech lynching attacks and livelihoods and cultural practices of minorities have become a normal routine part of public life. So much so that Gregory Stanton founder of genocide watch predicted that India under Modi shows early signs of an impending genocide. Holocaust Museum estimates went much further it estimates that after Pakistan, India is the country most likely in the world to see a genocide. Yet the world doesn't seem to worry or to notice. I agonized to witness so many similarities as I said between what is unfolding in India today and hate campaigns against us against 1930s just let me list only a few run away hate speech by senior political leaders in the media in popular culture and by ordinary citizens. These serve to manufacture popular hatred and legitimize this hatred and bigotry. In the TV does a tracking of what it called VIP hate speech hate speech by senior leaders led by ably by the prime minister, the home minister chief ministers, union ministers, etc. Found found in 1130% rise in VIP hate speech. And the most recent case of the national, the national spokesperson of the BJP. Insulting the prophet. And, of course, nothing happened to her she she continues to represent the BJP night after night. It was only when a group of 15 Muslim Muslim majority countries protested and that for the first time there was some response. And it was declared that she's a fringe element. I mean she's a national representative of the BJP. And she's followed by the prime minister on Twitter. So are most of the people who are the most hateful in the in the hate speeches are followed by the prime minister. Even more violent and hateful are other people, including those in tech and you know hi tech and and corporate senior positions really punished. They get bail quickly. We saw something called the Durham sunset, which made open calls for for genocide mass killings of Muslims and mass rape reminder once again from Nazi Germany, something that I think is really important to remember when they say the Holocaust didn't begin in the gas chambers, it began with hate speech. Each speech led by Adolf Hitler himself. I mean I've been reading some of his writing about the Jews. And yeah, there's so much in similarity if you look at Mr Modi speeches through the years that he was chief minister of Gujarat. Then. Secondly, there is targeted heat violence against minorities by citizen vigilante groups and individuals and the permissive role of enforcement agencies and the courts. I think that I see as an epidemic of lynching, which broke out across the country in the name of the cow protection of the cow and the name of love jihad and so on. It's sort to make a response with what we call the car one a moped. If you have time at the end I'll show you a short clip about the car but basically what we resolved was that I made a call for a group of citizens to be made a promise to go to every home of any person who has suffered lynching. And we would go not as a human rights worker or as a reporter, but like you would go to your family or to a friend and to do four things to say, we want you to know that you're not alone. There are people who share in your pain and to cry together. Secondly, to say we seek forgiveness for what we have become as a people. Thirdly, to say that we will be we pledge to be with you in the months and years that lie ahead as you pick up the pieces of your life again as you fight for justice. We will tell your story, we will not allow the story to be forgotten. And we try to do do this it became, you know we started with one German journey and we found it meant so much that we made about 30 such journeys to far corners of the country. It was a month until COVID happened, and there's been an interruption and I'm longing to go back whatever happens to me, and to restart our karma. And it's a promise to myself that the first caravan that we will take after my return is to every home, the family of every home that was demolished. The second journey would be every person who is, I mean, who is in prison was speaking out in defense of our Constitution. Then we've seen the altering of India's citizenship laws. And I think many of you are familiar with this but the whole idea of of of India through its freedom struggle was that we would be a humane and inclusive country. No matter which God you worship or few worship no God, what your caste what your religion what your language what your identity gender, you would be class, you would be an equal citizen in every way with equal rights to be yourself. And it is this that that the Hindu Hindu right always opposed. They were opposed to our Constitution they were opposed to the freedom struggle. I believe that India is a Hindu nation and the majority will allow you Muslims and Christians to live here, if we wish, but as second class citizens and the passage of a law in 2019 which basically said every Indian will first have to produce documents that can go back 70 80 years to prove that you're an Indian citizen, I would not be able to produce documents which showed that my, each of my grandparents and their siblings. I don't know the names of all their siblings but and all the documents with regard to that so you have to produce these documents but if you cannot produce these documents and you belong to any other religious identity, except Muslim don't worry. We will presume that you are a persecuted minority from some neighboring country, but if you're Muslim we won't have that presumption. And so the first time actually region became the basis of of the right to citizenship and it, it meant the end of, of the idea of, of, of a humane inclusive country for all people of all faiths. Then legal and social barriers to interfaith, romantic and sexual relations and marriages and the bogey of love jihad which again is such an extraordinary idea that good looking Muslim boys are picked up in madrasas and trained to attract Hindu girls who obviously have nothing in their heads, and so on and then equipped to do this for which they have nice motorcycles and wires coming out of their ears or whatever and you know it's it's such an absurd idea at one level but you're killing people for that idea. All of this I mean, I'm not going into it but each of these you look at the Nuremberg laws on citizenship on interface relations etc. The targeting of cultural and religious practices of targeted minorities using both the law and with violent vigilant action with vigilante actions attacks on Christian shines priests and nuns, which is massive across many states. Tamil Nadu has been good for Hindu Muslim in terms of Hindu Muslim violence but probably the largest number of attacks on Christians and places of worship has actually happened in Tamil Nadu. The mosques where you're saying that mosques were built at sites in which temples existed in medieval times and therefore we have to avenge this by breaking down the mosque and building temples in that place. It's a hugely problematic idea in multiple ways but to me there's also the question, you know, if you want to if you feel that this kind of correction, retrospective correction of harms of and violence of history then then how far back should we go to stop there because India actually after a shock became a fully almost fully Buddhist nation and Buddhism was wiped out with great violence and Brahminical Hinduism was restored so maybe we should break down all temples and build Buddhist but actually before that there were indigenous populations and their forms of worship so let's break down the Buddhist stupas and restore in this forms of worship etc so how you know where is this taking us. Likewise the rewriting of history in ways that demonize targeted minorities and valorize the role of dominant groups so there's a history in which Muslims are evil people everything that they did was evil and so on I mean. When the British came to India to conquer India, India was seen as one of the richest and most industrialized countries in the world, this was under Mughal rulers. So but no that's a completely dark time of history and in a strange way this is also the colonial story of because the colonial story is that there was this golden ancient period of Hindu India then there was the very dark medieval period of Muslim India. And then the British came in and brought us civilization. Amidst that darkness and in a strange way that is sort of coming back to us renaming cities and roads again anything that has suddenly a campaign that 40 roads in and locations in in Delhi need to be renamed because something has more than something like Sarai and and so on rewriting school textbooks again to exclude and demonize minorities. And not just this I mean, even even the Holocaust incident please described in, you know, is not described Hitler is described as a great nationalist leader in in the Gujarat textbooks. Then the targeting of the economic base of minorities, their livelihoods and properties using both changes in law and violent vigilante actions and there's a whole range of actions that attack the livelihoods of and break the back of their notice and then forcing separate living and get ghettoization and so on I could go on. You can see terrifying echoes not just of Nazi Germany in the 1930s but also Jim Crow's America and the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. It's not so obvious but I think it's really important to talk about when I talk about the crisis of India's democracy and that is crony capitalism and the abandonment of the state's responsible to the working poor. We see the hubris of highly centralized opaque decision making that in effect abandons the poor and is worryingly crony capitalist. The pandemic is of course a dramatic example which lays bare with ruthless moral clarity, the catastrophic public costs of inequality. Thousands even millions of lives could have been saved if we had made much greater investments in public health provisioning in labor rights. But when the Prime Minister announced with four hours notice on television, a nationwide lockdown, despite everything I couldn't believe, he was saying everybody stay at home. Okay, I have to have a home. What about if I don't. Everybody keeps social distance 60% of Indians live in one room or less. How will I keep social distance work from home. Nine out of 10 workers in India are informal workers who have no social security who eat what they didn't think about them. Hands regularly running water. If you go to any slum you'll see people gathering around the tank, they spend it out a quarter of their earnings on a good day to buy this pot of water you're asking them to wash their hands regularly. So, so you didn't even imagine or think about the poor. When, when, when this happened there was an explosion of mass hunger joblessness mass dislocation of millions of working working poor people. And 20 million jobs were lost in just 2021. 92 million of these were in the informal sector, 84% Indians suffered a significant fall of income. Many fell into deep and stubborn property. But, but what is extraordinary. And I'd like to underline this is that for India super rich the pandemic became a time to swell their wealth disingling. The birth of Mukesh Ambani who was then India's richest man, double to 85.5 billion dollars in 2021, the year that we had people dying on the streets. And the buyers, it rocketed him for that period into from India's to Asia's richest man before the army overtook him. I was looking at data that Mukesh Ambani added 900 million rupees to his wealth, every hour from the time that the pandemic was the lockdown was was announced every hour. Gautam Adani of course is somewhere else. He's wealth in 2021 multiplied 10 times from 8.9 billion in 2020 to 89 billion in February 2022. It is past Ambani became Asia's richest man and the world's fifth richest man. The proximity of these two billionaires to the present ruling establishment is not secret. But the surge in the wealth and the numbers of dollar billionaires in India extended well beyond them. In the worst pandemic year of 2021 the number of dollar billionaires in India expanded by 39%. India today is home to the largest number of dollar billionaires after the US and China, more billionaires in France, Sweden and Switzerland combined. And in all of this, I took a petition to the Supreme Court saying, you know, you, those of us who are in the formal sector are getting the equivalent of our wages. It is only just that informal workers should get the equivalent of minimum wages. And of course, it wasn't agreed to with Prabhupada Jyothi Ghosh and I wrote a series of op-eds on this. They calculated would have cost just 3% of GDP to do this. And of course the impact on the economy would have been much less devastating as well. But there's no, there's no place for this discourse and I thought that there'd be one corrective after the pandemic. There was some token improvement in public health provisioning on labour rights protection, but actually the reverse has happened. And finally I'll talk about the infringement of most institutions of India's democracy. The election commission, for instance, the kinds of people who have been appointed are so openly partisan and weak. Interestingly, they changed the law to allow legally anonymous donations to political parties, just reversing the idea of transparency. And surprise, surprise, the large majority of these huge amounts of funding have gone to the ruling party and we have no way of knowing legally who has funded them. The higher judiciary, you know, through all of this was some, you know, we could turn to them for justice, but through all of this, the Central Amendment Act, Kashmir, human rights abuses, all of these people being arrested and detained for years without trial, none of this are we seeing responses from the higher judiciary. There's the abject caving in of the civil services. I spoke about the media, but one thing that is important to compare with the emergency in the emergency formally media freedoms were taken away, but there was a, they were chaffing for that freedom. Today we are seeing nobody's formally taken away of freedom, but you have the large majority of the media now acting as vocal cheerleaders of this majority in anti-Muslim. And if you look at most television channels every night, they seem to be just propagating extreme hate, nobody's, you know, obviously forcing you so. So you've seen completely when people compared to the emergency, that's, you know, the emergency was terrible, but it was not a hate campaign. And that's what makes what is happening now even more terrifying. The opposition has had a lot of problems as is somewhat intermediate in the silence but the idea of this clueless opposition and Rahul Gandhi is this fool and whatever he says is presented as as if he's some kind of clown fool, etc. So it's all something that again being manufactured by and on social media, you know, do you expect me to vote for the village idiot. So somebody then responded yes I would vote for a village idiot over a mass murderer. But, but, but that's, that's where we become. Finally, where do we go from here. And I, I strongly believe that all is not lost. However, since this is not happening only in India we finding in country after country, more and more people are opting for rulers for leaders. Francis is, is, is, is the nearest example I mean, a significant section of the electorate seem to be wanting leaders who promote hatred against minorities. What do we do in this time of challenge. And I believe that somewhere we have to think about how do we build a humane society founded on the idea of in a radical new imagination to imagine and build a social contract around fraternity and what I call radical loud. The idea of the word, the idea of fraternity is problematic because it is brotherhood. It excludes sisterhood. But in India actually the Hindi word for for fraternity is a lovely one. It is Bandhuta Bandhuta is derived from Sanskrit, which is literally the idea that we are bound to and with each other. You know, in a sense, if you're in pain, I feel your pain. If Pellukhane is being lynched in being beaten on his back, I feel the pain on my back. To me, that is the idea of Bandhuta. I think the closest bond that two human beings can have is what in Hindi I would call Dad Karishta. A relationship of pain. I feel your pain is mine. There are many sibling ideas of Bandhuta. Let me speak of them in empathy. But empathy again, you know, I've learned is not just the idea of that I feel your pain. I think there has there has its first act of imagination. Then an act of feeling we're living in a world where homeless people I see very dramatically because we see homeless people every day if you live in any city, except during the lockdown maybe there isn't a day when you won't see homeless people. But we know so little about them and we care even less. I remember the first time when we opened the first shelters for homeless women, I sat with them and said what has changed most in your lives. And women stood up and said for the first time after 20 years or something, I can sleep at night and be sure that no one is going to leave me until the morning. Now as a man, I don't think I'll ever be able to imagine what life would look like to me in these circumstances but even for a woman. For the women sitting here, one act of sexual violence, even harassment and you have to struggle with it. Sometimes for four years for a lifetime, what would life look like to you if every night, night after night, you were exposed to sexual violence. And there was nothing you could do about it. There was no police station where you could go and complain where somebody would pay attention to it. There's no place of safety that you could go to tomorrow to ensure that it doesn't happen to you. And no NGO is going to come out, no civil society is going to come out with candlelight marches to protest. That is the act of imagination, then the act of feeling. So empathy, compassion. Again, I like the idea of what I would call egalitarian compassion. There's one idea of compassion that you are here, I am here and I'm giving you my compassion. I like to think of egalitarian compassion that we are actually standing together like this. And I recognize that you are suffering greatly at this moment, and I'm reaching out to you because we are people of equal worth. But a day can come when I will be suffering and you can reach out to me. That's egalitarian compassion for me. There's also the idea of caring. And here, I'd like to quote Noam Chomsky, where he was talking about social protection. He said social protection, what is social protection? Social protection is ultimately the idea. And please hear this carefully. It's again something I love a lot. What is social protection? It's the idea that we should take care of each other. Some of the most profound ideas in the world, I think, are the most simple. Can we build a society where we take care of each other? And Banduta sort of gives us clues about how to resolve all of these crises that those of inequality, imagining a new social order where we take care of each other. We have many hugely problematic aspects to our civilization, history in India, inequality of caste and gender. But there are a few things that I think we must reclaim and offer to the world actually. The first is the idea of equal belonging without conditionalities. So I'm living in Germany and there's much that I admire. But the idea that if you want to belong to Germany, you must learn the German language. You must learn our culture. It's our country. You have to qualify to be part of this. But can we imagine a country where it belongs to all of us? And you can be yourself. You can dress, eat, speak the language, love, whatever, in the way that you choose. And all that is binding on us is a set of constitutional values. So in Germany, when I say it's Islam part of German culture, people fall off their chair. But actually, 20 to 25 percent of Germany is now immigrant populations. Much of them are Turkish people. And why is there not, I mean, why should the Turkish people only have to learn from us? Why can't we sit together and say, wow, you know, they're beautiful things that you are bringing in. They're good things that we can bring in. And can we, this is our country together. That idea of equal belonging without conditionalities is one idea. The second is, is an idea of secularism not as the denial of religious faith, but actually equal respect for every faith, including the absence of faith. And here I think the Abrahamic religions will have to have some rethinking. And, you know, I mean, this idea that ours is the only path. If you believe that, then where is the space for equal respect? And I think, again, in the civilization experience of India, one of the finest things we have is the notion of doubt. I'm not sure. Doubt skepticism. Amartya Sen's written a lot about this in the argumentative Indian. To give an example, the rigway. This is beautiful. You know, poetry, which describes the creation of the universe. It's like the book of Genesis. You have this beautiful description of how the universe is created. What is the last, last verse. After you've done this discussion, it is. But who knows whether the world was actually created this way. I don't know. You don't know. Only God knows. Maybe he also doesn't know. Full stop. I think, I think that's a clue. That's a clue into how we can. So I've chosen my part, but actually yours is equally good. So that idea. Thirdly, that hatred cannot be fought with hatred. If there's darkness, and I want to fight darkness in this room, and I fight it by making everything else dark, I'm only going to deepen darkness. Somehow, even if there's a tempest, you know, can I light a candle? Likewise, how do I, how do I fight hate? Why do, how do I find a new idiom of resistance? And if you could do the film, I just thought it'll just give you an illustration from the Karwane Mohabbat. And then I'll just end with one last idea of radical love. If I'm not even looking at you. You're fine. Peace. They have a sense of, a sense of sensitivity and numbness. For us now, the news of a lynching on the fourth or fifth page, we read it like this. We've been traveling through these memories for the last one and a half years. People's homes. The ones who don't forget their faces are the parents of those old parents who lost their young son. They don't complain about why they killed my son. They have come to this stage and say that they would have shot him with a sword. Why did they torture him so much? No one is being beaten because they did something. That's why they are being beaten because they did something. We have seen how people are not only beaten but also scared. So the whole atmosphere of fear, the whole generation of fear has been created along with this hatred. It is said in the threatening voice and it is said that say the praises of the mother India. Say the praises of the people. Prove that you are not Pakistani or that you don't support Pakistan. Prove that you want this country. We should not need to say that to them in the future. But they say that we are not by chance but by choice in this country. We love this country a lot. We do this and that too. But they are being asked to prove that they are a national republic. I think the majority of the people in this country are not going to be victimized. No one will pull me out of my house and say the praises of the mother India. So what country do we live in? What country do we want to live in? What constitution have we inherited? What is our responsibility? How can we be unknown? This should not be possible for us now. So we have decided to save our countrymen from this silence. We have told them. But we will keep telling them. We will write, speak, make films. We will keep telling them that until we reach your land, we will not be able to do anything. So we are not only in your sorrow but we also want to apologize. That our country has reached this state. The state where hatred has spread so much that your family has to be killed in this manner. When I'm speaking about a new idiom of resistance, which is founded on greed, courage, but also on love. And many people sort of think this is like a, okay, but it's a very idealistic idea. Where does it really happen? And I thought I'd end with a few examples from recent times and in slightly older times. There's a tech city just next to Delhi, Gurgaon, where this, you know, and it grew very, very fast. And it's the highest tech, highest per capita income city in the country now. And because it expanded so fast, they just two mosques. And a large number of the workers who came in were Muslim. They needed a place to pray on Fridays. So they were praying at about 108 locations. Suddenly they became a campaign. We don't want them to pray. So it came down and then they negotiated, negotiated and came down to 30. And I told them this was about two, three years ago that, you know, this is not something that you should give into. But people felt we have to have fine peace. So they agreed to bring it down to about 30. Now suddenly it became another new that no, we don't even want them in these 30 places. And it's strange, just like these gaps with bulldozers. You suddenly have people who just decide at, you know, 12 o'clock at one o'clock on Fridays, they suddenly want to you have this group of young men, young boys who say we want to play cricket, just at one o'clock on Friday afternoon on that ground where you pray. Or somebody else does, you know, they suddenly have Hindu prayers at that very site, etc. So, but in the middle of this, we suddenly had a call from the Sikh Gurdwaras saying, you need a place to pray. What's the problem? Come and pray in the Sikh temples. And then you had many young, many people saying, I have a factory, come and pray here. I have a terrace in my house, come and pray here. It might seem like a small thing, but to me it was very significant as long as we have enough people who come out in, you know, in the city amendment act happened. I had feared that there would be again this silence, this silent acceptance. And I wrote out a tweet and an op-ed saying that I've learned from Mahatma Gandhi about the importance of civil disobedience, which means that you must publicly disobey a law that it considers unjust. So I announced that if this law is passed, and if I'm asked to produce documents, I, you know, to prove my citizenship, I will refuse to produce the documents. But there's something else in civil disobedience, another requirement is that you must demand punishment. Now my problem was that I am not a Muslim. So the law is produced that even if I don't produce documents, actually I won't be punished. So then I thought about it and then I put out saying that if this happens, then at some point they'll ask you your religion, I will register as Muslim. And then I won't produce my documents. And then if my Muslim brothers and sisters are denied citizenship, I will demand that the same happens to me. Of course, the trolls have never stopped, you know, forgotten this. So whenever I say anything they want to ask about whether I've been circumcised yet and so on. But that aside, I never said I would convert to Islam. I said I would register in official documents as Muslim and then refuse and then demand punishment. But what actually happened was a nationwide spontaneous response of the kind that we have not seen since independence, where Hindus came out in campuses across the country in places for about 100 days I was almost every day addressing crowds of maybe 100,000 people. The constitution was the symbol of the protests, the national flag, it was really beautiful to watch. You know, and it was a display of Hindu Muslim unity, the greatest since Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. And some of the slogans were lovely in university they were saying you divide we multiply and so on. And so that gave us hope. Germany never saw this incident. I mean, this is the one reason I can still hope in the hijab when hijab controversy happened these girls. And as we know, suddenly, the boys students got radicalized and this, they wore the saffron scarves and wouldn't allow the girl in hijab to come into the school. And this happened and this young woman, young girl of young woman of 16. She walked in with great difficulty through all of this. Somebody asked her now will you register police complaint against the boys who who hected you in this way. She said of course I will not. They after after all my fellow students. They like my brothers. I don't want harm to come to them. Sheinbar became pretty famous because it was a place of resistance in the sea a protest. Many things happen there. Let me tell you one story again. This cap was a union minister and still a union minister raised slogans, these traitors of the nation shoot them down. And somebody then came a few days later and actually took out a gun at Sheinbar. The women of Sheinbar decided that we must give them a reply. And this was a reply that the working class women of Sheinbar gave. And it was. All the love of the nation. Oh, you beautiful people of my country. Addressing the same people pool. Shower flowers and all of you. You might think it's insignificant. I think it's huge. I think this is the paradox of love that the reply of love that I that I'm speaking about. You know, Gandhi's. Last month. Let me tell you one story there and and then I end with one. Yeah, one or two more stories. Okay, so Gandhi, when India's was celebrating its independence, Gandhi was not in Delhi. He was in Calcutta because people were killing each other. The slaughter was Hindu Muslim slaughter was an ending event on this fast and said I will not eat anything until the last violence ends. And the stories to many stories are told one of them is this Hindu man who comes in really furious and angry saying what you're doing is terrible. He tells Gandhi and he says I had a little boy this small. The Muslim mobs killed him. How do you expect me to forgive and not to feel hate in my heart. And Gandhi replies. I understand your pain but find a little boy this small. A Muslim boy whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Adopt that child as your own raising like your own son in his own faith. And maybe you'll find the spaces to heal. I'll talk one example from outside India. There's one Prime Minister who might buy above all, and this is a woman called just in the ardent in New Zealand. For many reasons, but you might recall that Christ Church in 2019 there was this young white boy man who went in and live streamed while he shot down 50 people in the mosque. How did she respond. Firstly, she said I refuse to ever name. He said he is not us. The people he killed is us and they were just 1% of New Zealand is Muslim and they're all recently and she said they are us. She did exactly what we do on the karma she went to the families and shed their pain and in cultural respect she also covered her head. The next Friday prayers all across New Zealand. She responded on all television and radio channels. Women newsreaders police women spontaneously covered their heads to show solidarity. People gathered outside the mosques and put their hands together and said, we will stand in protection you pray. Of the mosque said at the end of it. He said, what has happened. We are broken hearted, but we are not broken. The people of New Zealand has showed us what love is. It's happened. It's happened just now. And the very last story something that also reminds me of Gandhi's story. It's a whole town in in in Bengal, as in so we've gone there in the karma. So typically this same provoking sort of happened it was again Ram Navani. And finally this violence broke out between the two communities. And a situation was reached which was which is typically curfews imposed but by then to Muslim to Hindu children. Boys were caught up in the Muslim area and one Muslim boy was caught up in the Hindu area. So standard sort of hostage situation you return our boys will return the Imam of that area said this is completely wrong. Think about the parents of these two Hindu boys would be going through we must return them with no conditions in safety. And he did that. And then they waited for this boy, the Muslim boy, the Muslim boy was his own son. He didn't return. Around midnight he gets a call from the police authorities saying, we sorry we found your boy and he's dead. He's been killed. And the Imam's spontaneous responses. Don't tell anyone. I will announce it otherwise the city will build burn the next morning when there's the prayers people gather. And he says, at the end of the press you notice my son is not with me. This is what has happened to my son, but the loss of my son is is a huge tragedy in my life. But if you harm any Hindu in revenge, even by your, your thoughts, your tongue, or the actions of your hand, it will be a much greater tragedy for me. When I went to the boys, the young men were crying. And I still feel a little emotional when I remember. And they said that we've grown up as little children we've heard this Imam. And when he said this, if you hadn't said this we'd have gone out on a killing spree. Instead, we went out and guard the Hindus who were in our area, we protected them. The city came into calmness. And, and I think it is, it is, it is through actions of what I call radical love, love based on enormous courage that we probably have an answer. I don't see any other in the world that we are seeing where more and more of our leaders are pushing us into hatred and fear of people who are different from us. Can we respond to them with with friendship with curiosity with respect with love. Thank you. Thank you so much for this, which is so much more than an academic talk. It is mostly vocative, as well as analytical. And, and, and, and it's actually, I feel it's, there's something in me that maybe would want to stop here, because this is a very, very good ending. But, but I think we should also take our duty as academics and activists, serious and discuss the issues you put on the table here. The purpose not organized for organized a, a, a discussant for the talk, because I thought that there would be enough people in the audience that would like to both raise questions and make points so that instead of taking the time through proper discussions, I wanted to go on as quickly as possible to a question and an answer session. And of course, both the audience here can ask questions. And there will also be people online, people online can type in questions and and then we will, we will collate them at a certain point and hear from them. So, also comments, I think comments questions. And of course, it is such a huge field, you have covered from, from your analysis of the from facistic tendencies chronic capitalism, in a permanent impairment of democratic institutions and to where to go from here. So much in here. And I'm sure people will cover many different aspects but I will simply hand over and I will have questions as well in case no one else will have but I've seen. So, let's start with, with James. I mean, you know, this entangling the state and society and looking at civil society in India as shaped by position and by centuries of position. But my feeling is someone who's lived in India and so on is that cast has a hell of a lot to do with what's going on in the country, often in very complex ways, for example, and remind you of something that I'll get to say in the, the only way in which society seems to be able to transcend the kind of division division itself is by unleashing common violence. As if the, as if one function of common violence, apart from teaching the Muslims a lesson is to somehow create this artificial solidarity. If that's the case, then communism and caste are very closely linked. So, the other thing completely unrelated to this is scam of the scam or potential scam of the scam that emerged since 2014. Why is it that Modi seems to have this death long voting on that? You know, he never seems to emerge from any of this, you know, in any way, diminishing scale. Is it just that we have this kind of a psychophantic media, which is completely changing and survival, which is of course true. Is it just that or what is it about? I mean, you know, I mean, a friend of mine tells me that for example, most of the money that Adani manages is actually Modi's money. I want to say that on food, right? I want to say it to an indefinite audience that the money that Adani is managing is Modi's money. Okay. And vice versa. Yeah. So, clearly, you know, why is it that every potential scam seems to just in the end be forgotten and the courts never agreed to anything decided about. I mean, we have to depend on some judge, some magistrate in France to tell us what we know about the Rafale deal. But that hasn't come out yet. But I mean, you know, it's so well known that Adani is has a whole money laundering network, which is run through his model. His name is nothing has been done about that. Despite all of Modi's hypocritical talk in 2014 about black money and black money and so on and so forth. His closest public buggy is neck deep in what someone has called archival capital, capitalism or offshore networks. Basically money. Thanks, we often try to take only one one speaker at a time to so we can get a proper answer discussion going on with different questions. So I'll hand over to you. I mean, I need a long time to answer but I mean I resonate a lot with everything that you asked. I wrote a, you know, a book called looking away inequality prejudice and indifference in New India. And, and I, I suggest that the Indian region middle classes are among the most uncaring in the world today. And I've tried to understand why it is and you know what is the moral landscape that makes us so uncaring. And I suggest that it is a combination of this history of caste, the idea that the accident of your birth, legitimately determines everything in terms of your life possibilities whether you live at all what kind of life you'll have what kind of education you'll have what kind of jobs are open to you etc etc. So, so that's one idea. And then we've combined it with the British idea of class, which unfortunately, you know, the good family persons with old wealth and, you know, and, and so on and even sometimes my, you know, somebody says this person comes from a good family and I say what you exactly have a lot of character or what what are you really talking about. And then I think what was the tipping point was the neoliberal light moral idea that greed is good. And I think the combination of caste class prejudice and neoliberalism has been lethal. And we are a particularly uncaring set of people. And I've heard over and over again, I mean, like in the pandemic. How did middle class people not, you know, when they were listening to the Prime Minister, why did people not react. And when 30 million people then ended up walking highways during the hot summer hundreds of kilometers. And people said, Oh, you know, where have all these people come from. And I was asking them just look at one day in your life. You know, who is it that provides a newspaper at your house who provides the milk at your house who comes in and cleans your floors who cooks the food so that you can work who looks after your house who drives you to work and so on. Our entire lives are dependent on workers whom we don't even see as human beings. I sometimes think it's almost like an Aladdin lamp we wish we had an Aladdin lamp and you rub it and these people should appear and serve you. And then you rub the Aladdin lamp and they should disappear. I don't see them as human beings with legitimate needs, dreams, aspirations, etc. So I totally agree with you. But, but the still the question is that during the freedom struggle. And, you know, I couldn't speak more about his. What I think is his finest moment either huge problems with Gandhi as well, especially his defense of caste. I feel that we are very fortunate in the legacy that we have of those last months of the freedom struggle where think of a million people who've killed each other in Hindu Muslim riots. A new country has been constituted on on the basis of religion, rivers of blood are flowing my own family was one among those who were displaced from what is now in Pakistan in really bloody circumstances and so on. It's easy to see at that point of time that, you know, this country has been constituted on the basis of Muslims have their country. This is Hindu India, that it didn't happen. What's to me, the ultimate example of radical love and he knew that it would, you know, it would cost him his life, he was ready to do it. So, but again, the important thing is not Gandhi as much as it is not Hitler and Germany. It is that the large majority of Indians supported him. So we are a society quite paradoxically which, which, which could love and adore Gandhi his last fast actually just two weeks before he died. This is perhaps the most extraordinary when, you know, the refugees had come in tens of thousands into Delhi, there was so much anger. And they were forcefully converting mosques into the Dargah, etc by putting idols in there. And he said, you know, it cannot be a place of worship, a true place of worship which is based on this desecration of other religions. The one was that it must be, we must return with respect, the Meroli Dargah and we cannot place mosque, etc, etc. He demanded Irfan Habib has written about this as a witness. He said that the only way as a refugee who came from Pakistan was to get a house was that by driving out Muslims, people were driving out Muslims. He was saying, go back to the Muslims you've driven out and tell them to come back to their homes. Don't go to Pakistan. This is your country, which means you then go back to a refugee camp and to even make this demand was extraordinary. And, but the important thing is that, and this was one time when even Nehru and everybody advised him this is not the time to make this demand, he said I will make these demands. The first day 10,000 people came out in his support by the 50 or 100,000 people on the streets, supporting this demand. So I think we have a complex civilization history I somehow sense that we have our best selves and our worst selves contained within us. The purpose of Gandhi was to bring out our best selves, the genius of our present rulers Mr Modi in particular is to bring out our worst selves. It's a little complex. I can't explain it. And the solidarity across I mean communism as being the answer to cast inequality I think is is a profound recognition. Political scientists had told us that it is impossible to get a majority in India on an openly anti Muslim platform in elections because there are a number of constituencies in which Muslims form a significant part of the population. The BJP under Modi said that we will prove you wrong. And the only way they could do it was to unite everybody across gas but also across religion against the one common enemy, which is the Muslims. In 2019, every third Dalit actually voted for the JP. The Christians. All across Northeast India actually voted BJP. So they have succeeded in in the construction of this common enemy and therefore communism is, they don't give them equality. Instead, they give them somebody else to trample on. And why does Mr Modi survive is, is I think a huge question, not only scams. You know, when the pandemic happened, each time you think this is now the tipping point, like what is happening now Agni but I really don't know when we'll reach that tipping point. When the pandemic happened, the suffering was so extreme. Time magazine actually carried a cover story where they followed this one Hindu migrant and the amount of travels he suffered. At the end of it, they asked him, and who are you going to vote for in the next election. He said, of course, Modi. So, so then they end with an interview with me, and he asked me how do you explain this. And I said that, you know, something is happening. It's, you know, they're succeeding injecting in the veins of our society. A very, very powerful drug. The drug is called heat and intoxicated by that drug. Everything is acceptable. Hunger is acceptable. Joblessness is acceptable. Displacement is acceptable. It's a terrifying situation. I mean, Nazi Germany, at least the economy was strengthened and revived. We're actually seeing the collapse of our economy, but we're seeing the worst economic situation, the contraction of, and yet his, his support is only growing. The power of hate. I have no other explanation. Thank you. Thanks. To the government. In missing. I mean, how do we fight this fight. I wish we understood fully, but, but there's no doubt that I think it's a, it's, it's, it's a battle of a generation large. There's a huge radicalization of the Indian Hindu. And if you don't recognize it, we're missing something. I mean this, if you have seen those nice bright faces of young teenage boys coming and playing cricket. You know, on Friday afternoons at one o'clock, it just sort of threw me. I mean I've seen something more constructive to do in their lives and they think they've sort of suddenly accomplished. So there's a certain radicalization that is unfolding of the Hindu mind. What the discourse is, is basically that the Muslims through the 1000 years that that we had Muslim rulers in India were commenters and oppressors that we have not found anyone, even after independence, who had the courage to name this enemy within and then to fight them. And for the first time, that's why when somebody says we actually want freedom in 2014 90 not in 1947. This is what they're saying that this is the, you know, and it's not just that actress who said this is sort of the popular sentiment. And, and so it's a very, it's a very difficult and you're making films about this, this whole reconstruction of Muslims as being uniformly evil and and the enemies and and therefore we have this sort of 56 inch chest, sort of masculine leader. Of course he makes some mistakes, you know, we all unemployed and we, we, we, we going hungry and all of that is alright but he's fighting the big fight. And, and I think that it is this radicalization that it's a it's a huge failure of left liberal politics and civil society that we are not able to counter this. We've not fought this battle. I've talked a lot to senior political leaders who keep talking to me, you know, after the 2014 elections, senior Congress politicians said to me, you know, we've learned our lesson, what is the lesson we've done too much for secularism. We've done too much for for Muslims and we've done too much for the poor. Now, we have to set this aside, the only way we can remain is power in power is to talk about Hindu rights to talk about Hindus and to talk about the middle class and, and, and the region. I said, firstly, I wish you had done too much for for for for the minorities for the poor and for upholding secularism, you wouldn't have been in this situation if you had. Secondly, there are moments in in a country's journey and when there's something more important than winning the next election, even if that was how you'd win it. But, but nobody's fighting that battle, not even the left, not even the communist left and, you know, and I have respect for them but this confronting this battle up front. The capital M word sometimes which I, which is Muslim is, you don't even hear it in in the so called, you know, secular parties lynching may be happening who's talking about we'll talk about unemployment, we'll talk about farmers and not talk about Muslims because we lose votes and so on. So I think that there is a collective abandonment of the fundamentals of our constitution across left liberal centrist politics. And that is not unique to India. I mean you look at the Labour Party in this country, you look at the Democrats, you look everywhere. And they've moved further and further to the right. I mean I'm hearing Macron in his debate with Marine Le Pen, and it was interesting he was talking and he said, we will take a stand against Islamic fundamental racism. I'm going to Le Pen. And why was he talking only about Islamic racism, why was he talking about white racism. And so on so we all, we all sort of the right wing has succeeded in in in in making us defensive about standing up for what is most fundamental in our belief systems. And I think that we all collectively bear responsibility for, for where we've come. My generation has let you all down all you young people you'll have to, you have to decide what kind of country and world you want to build. And I know good people to lead you in that journey. So, but at least I can try and lead this session. We will go on till seven o'clock, five to seven, and, and then we will, we will have to decap to the staff common room and continue the discussion there for those that would like to do so. But we still have, we still have a bit of time left. So, should we take the next question. Yeah. No, I'll put great comparison. You know the one big difference that I see is that I never did succeed in strengthening the German economy through very exploitative ways. I mean, I, I never realized the extent to which forced labor was central to the German economy during Nazi times. The simplicity of the, almost the entire German population. I mean, forced labor was happening every factory without exception, industry was running through the war, farms were running all on forced labor. Even the bakery down your street was running on forced labor. So, there was an economic model that they had constructed which seemed to be working for. Okay, I met a young, I've had numerous conversations, I mean, I'm, I'm just processing the last months I've learned a lot through these conversations. Just one of them. This young man was telling me, you know, my grandmother, she was a simple woman so she said it as it was and when we asked her what was the best period in your life, she said of course the Nazi people. And you say why, they sent away these Jews and we got all their properties cheap and we, you know, and we had a good life. So, I don't think there's, you know, I think I don't think the lessons to be learned from Nazi Germany in terms of how they threw even the war, the economy was protected and sustained in ways that were extremely oppressive and exploitative. But I do feel very much that the idea of radical love is is deeply okay, let me as briefly as I can. I think that three principal crises at the level of some simplification that seem to be confronting our world three clusters of crisis. One is the closet, the crisis of inequality of the economic model. The second is the crisis of climate change, but also climate change with equity at its center. And the third is the crisis of how do we live with increasing diversity around our world. And I believe that the idea of solidarity is actually a key to each of these two answers to each of these. And an economic model, and a new radical new imagination of the social contract to resolve each of these. And the economic model, I think is, there's some things that are very clear universal social rights, for instance, the idea that we must take care of each other. And it hits me in multiple ways I was responsible for leading on the drafting of the food security act in the last government. It was, you know, giving 800 million people half their calorie requirements almost free. There was 120 million school children getting free meals, etc. And when the law was being debated in parliament, I found there was no one from the political establishment willing to defend it, including people in the Congress, no one believed in it. Because neoliberalism is completely part of our gender consensus. So I was in front of television cameras every night trying to defend, and I couldn't quite figure out why everybody was angry. And including the anchors all the anchors not the ones who are normally angry everybody was angry. I couldn't figure out what was it and in one of the debates, a leading industrialist who's normally considered somewhat super etc. She said, I'm really fed up. I'm wrong with the fact that I made lots of money. I worked hard to make my money. I've done nothing to harm the economy. Why should I be taxed to feed the poor? And it was a moment which, you know, you have a moment of, I certainly understood what this rage was about. And I said, I'm sorry, the poor work much harder than you, they've done much less than you to harm the economy. But the central point is that in a good society, I didn't have this phrase that we must take care of each other. But I said in a good society, people of wealth must be happy to share some of it so that people who are living lives that are which are completely intolerable for no fault of theirs have a decent life. I think it is, you know, I can make an economic case for it and a very strong economic case for it, but I have a feeling that we must make a moral argument. What is the good society? And what is an economic model to construct and to approach that good society? And therefore, let us, the next battle must be, we cannot go into the next pandemic without universal healthcare. I mean, let's be in India. After the doctors, a large part of our doctors with taxpayers money have got educated and gone to North America and Europe and everywhere else in England. Among the ones left 80% of them work for corporate private corporate hospitals. 80% of our doctors just 20, what you were saying about uncaring 20% are left to work in the private public health systems. How are we going to deal with any, you know, any future health crisis with the middle class don't care because we've sort of, we thought we'll always realize at this moment but still there's no correctives. I think the battle for universal social rights in a new economic model built on the notion that we, why should we do it because we must take care of each other. And I think that we have to fight this upfront. And, you know, I can make very strong more economic arguments for food security act, how can you have a country where one third of the population is malnourished and how can you do this etc. But I don't want to make any of that. I want to make the argument for a good society. And an economic model that that answers that that imagination Gandhi said that when you are in confusion. Think of the poorest person that you ever met the weakest and think of what you're whether what you're doing is going to make sense to improve that person's life. And if we use that talisman we just couldn't have gone in for neoliberalism at all. So I, I am sticking my neck out and saying we must have a discussion about our economic model with the fundamentals of the idea of a good society. I don't see a shortcut to that I mean even to the former prime minister we, you know, since I was on the advisory council is to have discussions. He was deeply committed to markets, and he felt that that was the only way, and so on. And I said that, so can we just let's agree. Okay, if you have free markets, let's just agree that there should be a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow anyone to fall. No child should sleep hungry. No child should have to die because there isn't healthcare, etc, etc. No old person should have to work till the last day because they don't have have a pension. But this is eminently affordable. Let's do this and, and, and move ahead from here. So I think there's a new radical new imagination that is called for. I was talking to Yens. Just before this I was saying that when the Berlin Wall fell. It was seen at the most ambitious experiment in human history to build a just and equal society collapsed. It was interpreted that the ideas of equality and justice have been defeated. And out of the rubble of the Berlin Wall, it is for young people now to pick up and, you know, pick up the bricks again and rebuild. But, but in ways that ensure, and we try to build the most just and human society by means that were the most unjust cruel and so on it was bound to fail. What is this new imagination, we cannot say that the only imagination is this a new liberalism is now reaching a point where everybody is slowly admitting that they're not going to be any jobs. Most young people will not be able to look forward to jobs so we'll give everybody one sort of. What's it called cash handout. I feel frightened about imagining such a world because we don't work only so that we get some money home we get work because it gives us dignity and social work. Imagine a new society. And I think the fundamentals of this new economy has to be built on the idea of a, of a good society. I'm sorry if that sounds strangely dissonant, but I'm convinced that that solidarity has to form the foundation of the answers to all the three challenges, how do we deal with climate how do we deal with inequality. And how do we deal with difference. Thank you. And of course, we don't have a lot of time left now so I think we should take the last questions comments as well as the one that are that are online, and then we'll see if there's time at all to answer any of them at all. The first one is from you yet know the white top there yeah. And so, but why is the West looking away. Yeah, and you right in the back. Yes. Thank you, Sandra. The opposition is going to take is the voice of the president. In the civil society, we take it upon one ground, the idea in the sense of content creation of political activity of the department. There have been letters before. Can this be explored as a civil society level so that they can be attention for the media and the public. The last question from from the floor here. Yeah. Thanks. And then we have questions from the from the online audits, which we can see here, but we can maybe also read them out. Thank you very much for this talk. What have you just what you have described as happening in India we're seeing that being replicated all over the world, a culture of intolerance. Do you think poverty has a role to play in some instances, and how much responsibility should be placed on the leadership of such countries versus what we can do what we can be doing on the ground to educate the citizen tree. As you're doing so that they're more resistant to such divisive messages that is one. Other one is, while you're pointing. There are lots of much you can read them all out. While you put, while you pointed out about abject cave cave in of the civil servants your description of the judiciary was more like an indifference to grave injustices committed by the administration in in wrong for the rest of those and scams etc including the death of Stanswami. Would it be wrong to say that the judiciary has also caved in, though it's pretending not to. I'm an Indian student that saw us here at the US. Here, people struggle against growing problems or oppression from capitalism racism exploitation and alienation from each other I want to believe that non violence violence has the power to transform these systemic problems, but it can be difficult to convince Americans of this, whose culture is often unfamiliar and skeptical of conquering with love. I also often find it difficult to practice non violence within myself, do you have any encouragement for me to keep believing and working along the non violent past. Finally, you noted that the emerging science of genocide are becoming evident in India under the current regime. It has been observed regarding coming the violence or the past that the feared other has to be demonized into the fearful other in order to make lynchings and murders justifiable. Do you think that India today is going through such a process that may eventually lead to the genocidal expulsion of certain religious slash linguistic minorities, either non citizens of non citizens of a sound. I think there is no time to answer them but if you want to pick one, one, one or two issues very briefly to respond to please do so. What I'll try to do is to give a one line kind of answer to many of the questions. Why is the best looking away. Quite clearly because India is seen as the alternative to China, both in terms of the economy and in terms of geopolitical security, and there's a very cynical engagement with India and the result look away. There are a lot of questions about ethics. Also why, why has India, you know fallen in why has hatred spread taken root in India and so on. I want to say one or two important things. The lack of education I think is absolutely not correct. I worked in, I'm privileged in my work to work with India's, some of India's poorest people, much of my life, and I have found that the more educated people are informal and this is the best institutions etc. They're the ones with the highest levels of anti Muslim sentiment, sexism anti gas sentiment, the greatest degree of survival of civilization and what is best in this respect for every faith I find in the least educated and the working class people you'll find, you know, in a working class home you will find a woman who will walk out of her house, she'll see a mosque and she'll bow her head, she sees a church, she'll bow her head, she'll be here. You won't see this happening elsewhere so it isn't the lack of education. Surely, my guess and because it's a global phenomenon I think this is really important it is probably a lot to do with the failure of neoliberalism, to create jobs for the millions. I think young people today across the world have no future to look forward to. And unless we recognize that that is the central problem, and either you then fight against to change the economic model, or you look for scapegoats. And we're being led to say the problem is not the economic model it's these people of color this is people who do namaz these people like this people like that. Etc. And I think that because it's also a global phenomenon it could install something peculiar to India with seeing the rise of right wing, because there is just no job creation decent work creation that this model is providing now I think finally is going to commit to it. And if you don't confront this problem how do you expect every second Indian today is below the age of 25 which should be a glorious period. But what what do they look forward to. What are we offering them in terms of life possibilities. And if I'm not going to be, you know, swept away. I think has collapsed it has caved in. I think we are in the verge of, you know, it cannot be a, it will not be a genocide like Germany has seen, but to imagine a situation where 200 million people in our country are going to live more and more in a situation of in, you know, uncertain insecure citizenship. It's going to create a situation I think we can't even imagine it'll be something closer to the Rohingya situation than than Nazi Germany but we are in in at the verge of a catastrophe. The role of civil society again, I think that the amount of attacks that they're doing on civil society is because the right wing sees it as actually the last opposition. They've tamed the political opposition they've tamed the judiciary they've changed the media. They fearful of us. And, and I don't know how long they remain fearful of us but we have a particularly important role in these times. The friend who asked about about non violence, how do I convince people about non violence. And so on. So let me sort of do something a little unusual. I mean, we can draw from many ethical systems but there's something actually that prophet Mohammed said which I thought I just leave you with. He said what is the duty of a good human being when they witness injustice. So he said at the very least respond from your heart means at least you feel you care. The better among us respond with our tongue, which means we speak out against the injustice. The best among us respond with our hands which means we act against injustice. My, my only expectation is at least let us respond from the heart. Be kind. If enough of us are kind, the world will change. Thank you very much. Before we break up. You, you said the ends then you say something as well. So I will, I will not say anything really but just to add to so it to this very depressing picture. And I will, I want to say if we're looking for lessons to learn from how to challenge the common sense of hatred of BJP, how to organize, which means to use that then maybe one should go where I in my advice to you for the presentation here. I advise you not to go, namely to the global understanding of authoritarian populism and the fight against that this against the world there, there are countries where, where, where there are more successes than elsewhere and maybe just as it does appear that RSS and BJP have learned from elsewhere. That is exactly where one maybe should try and learn from as well to try and counter that in in establishing the ideas of the good society and that is new imaginations and so on. But that is just indeed closer to home there are also points to raise from the planning board in Kerala. So those words, I will thank you once again, and thank everyone who had stayed way over time for this. But that of course is a testament for the, for the very interesting and invocative and an extremely important discussion and presentation we've had here. Now, as I just mentioned briefly before, you're invited to join us in the staff common room in the main source building at the first floor, it requires all sorts of identity to come through to that but it's possible. And we will have a drink or two there before we will break up and we can discuss more, more relaxed as well. So thank you to everyone. And thanks to the organizers once more. Thank you to Karen Farida who is in the internet somewhere. Thank you very much.