 Good evening everybody. My name is Edward Simpson and I'm the director of the SOAS South Asia Institute. Welcome to our annual lecture. We have something of a hybrid event this evening. The format is going to be a lecture from Thomas Blom Hansen, followed by Q&A, which will be chaired by Roshna Rajbhai colleague in the Politics Department. Please put Q&A into the chat as we go on. The South Asia Institute, SOAS represents a vibrant and diverse community of scholars and faces outwards from SOAS to the rest of the world with a particular focus on South Asia. The previous speakers in this series have included Ramachandra Guha and Wendy Donagha. It's my pleasure to welcome this evening, Thomas Blom Hansen to the lectern. I've known Thomas for quite a long time now, and he's reliant dear by Avani Professor of Social Anthropology, founder of the Stanford South Asia Center, and author of numerous books, including the very well known Saffron Wave and the Wages of Violence, which I was astonished to learn was published in 2001. So now has its 20th anniversary, which surprised me because I still regularly recommend it to students as if it was somehow fresh off the bookshelf. Another of this evening's talk is the Violent Heart of Indian Politics, Reflections on Popular Sovereignty. So Thomas, welcome to SOAS, welcome to the South Asia Institute, and welcome to this rather hybrid format. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you for this kind invitation. I'm thrilled to be back in person, although the audience is small but dedicated. And so I'll see if I can navigate this sort of hybrid format, I will sit down so I can see my screen, and I hope that work for all of us. Okay, I'm going to talk about Indian politics. At the end, I know that on the on the, some of the advertising there was a mention also of academic freedom something I, I have less original things I hope, or I would say to say anything about I think it's a good thing we should keep it but I will say a little bit about some of the logics that I'll describe in this lecture, spillover intro challenges that many experience when it comes to doing work on India at this time. All right. So let me begin. The story of India's democracy is often the rated as a miraculous birth of a democratic constitution against all odds and probabilities from this moment a great promise. And democracy gradually changed from high minded idealism and ambitious nation building in the new Nehruvian era to the present mass politic mod by pervasive corruption and cynicism, and a more recent turn to violent matter and my recent book, the law of force. And I will just share it here. Let me see. Here we go. The law of force the violent hard Indian politics seeks to challenge seeks to challenge this common storyline by pointing out two things. One, that violence has been a foundational importance in Indian politics and practical governance and policing for many, many decades. And secondly, that while Indian democracy has been very effective and making the moral force of majority rule of foundational value in public life has been less emphasis on translating the spirit and the values of the Constitution into a foundation for the country's political life. It's true as many of our colleagues and many fine scholars have argued that the Indian Constitution is a capacious and farsighted farsighted document has been able to creatively accommodate group rights, and has been appropriated by many groups and Indian society in that quest for inclusion and fuller citizenship, giving the Constitution, a real social and political life of its own, albeit not as deep as we sometimes imagine. It's also true that the democratic and procedural norms outlined in the Constitution have only in part penetrated everyday political life, and the way most Indians understand the essence of what politics is about to many ordinary Indians. What proper politics is not necessarily always captured by the Sanskrit derived term Rajnidhi, or the proper exercise of power term that today is widely used by BJP leaders, as if reflecting what proper politics should be like, and what a virtual society and dharma should look like, as opposed to niche Rajnidhi or dirty politics of ordinary politicking. However, the vernacular use of the English term politics, and also politics cardinal or doing playing politics is a far more common thing to me to encounter as Mukulika Banerjee has pointed out quite rightly in my view. So doing politics conveys a deeply politics, conveys a deeply realist and often cynical ethos of desiring, holding, exercising political power, perhaps better captured by the Urdu terms Yasa with the connotations of strategy and trickery. I think I take this to be a fairly indisputable social fact. So the question I want to ask in the rest address today is how 70 years of democratic politics, activism and rambunctious electoral democracy in practice shaped and transformed the way in which political power and legitimate public authority are understood and transacted in India today. This is a huge question I can only do a little bit, but I want to talk about this sort of tension between a question of rights and the question of violence. Over many decades, it's interesting to note that over many decades neither Congress nor the mainstream left parties deployed the promise of liberties and the rule of law as enshrined in the Constitution as major public campaign themes. Many on the left were in fact outright skeptical of the value of such negative Bush while rights guaranteeing individual and collective freedoms in the Constitution. They were seen as emblems of Bush while ideology of liberal freedoms and had never really been prominent in the mainstream anti colonial nationalism during the freedom struggle. There it was the language of the duty to resist that dominated after independence the powers of the state was turned into an instrument for reform and removal of social illness of all kinds and many of these were projected not as negative rights but as positive rights, social and economic development, education, social upliftment and many of them appeared in the often nowadays ignored direct to principles of the Constitution. In the decades to follow centrist and left of center forces in India build themselves as defenders of India sovereignty against ubiquitous foreign hand or foreign interest as guarantors of social reform modernity and development. In the early political discourse, it was progressivism of Pregadiva emphasizing equality reform modernity that became the rallying point, rather than the more contrived and rightist, if you like notion of liberalism or thought about understood as economic freedom and individual rights. The only exception to this general tendency was the activism in defense of civil rights that blossomed during and after into your Gandhi's imposition of emergency. This was the first, we shouldn't forget and only time in the history of independent India that the government turned its full force against members of the upper middle classes and the political elite, not all but some. As we also know it was impoverished Muslims and other marginal communities that all the real brunt of the violence and the reformist seal of the desire to clean up India cities combat corruption and curtail what was seen as a runaway demographic growth among the poor. So India's most prominent civil rights organizations were founded during DCS the People's Union for civil liberties founded in 1976 by JP Nalain and the People's Union for democratic rights founded in the year after 77. The addition to a today of course and in last decades a very vocal activist community, including feminist and LGBT Q groups and, and so on. The only I would argue that, and we can hopefully discuss this that the only larger communities in India that today consistently made the constitution and consistently advocate the rule of law and protection of human rights, other countries recognizable minorities dollars tribal communities Muslims and communities in northeast of India. In the late nine and CC a protest against the government's amendment citizenship act of 1955 made the constitution, maybe for the first time really a highly visible and explicit rallying point for the protesters in places like Shaheen bark and many other places across the country. Today, one can say that some of those groups may appear akin to an Indian version of what you're going to have a Mars and other theorists of democracy have called constitutional patriotism. I find that to be even that to be a problematic label considering that each of these groupings emphasize and defend only particular aspects of the Constitution provisions such as secularism freedom of religion reservations, and few of these social political institutions or communities can to be can be said to and to see as to be embraced the democratic spirit of the Constitution in their own community practices. And the question is, does anyone really. So here is a slide that shows a result of a pure research poll that for whatever it's worth and this is a very small number of people been pulled and mainly urban the main, mainly educated gives you some idea of, of, of some of the attitudes that that one is not. You have to find those attitudes on among people you will readily meet in many parts of India. And so it's interesting that the support for democracy in this pure research poll which covers something like 47 different countries was one of the lowest in all of the world, the entire world. And since thought us with a thought that representative government in principle, would it would be a good idea. And, and, as you can see 65% supported rule of experts the highest of all countries pulled and more Indian supported autocratic rule by strong leader than in any other country, including Russia and Turkey and so on. So that in itself is is interesting you can take it as a kind of for whatever it is it's it doesn't it's not a very deep survey of course but it does indicate some common attitudes, at least in the urban middle classes. I was surprised by the fact that 53% of those polls also thought the military will be a good thing. Surely that I'm not sure that would be the same if you ask people in Pakistan, for instance. How does one explain then what what can only be called a kind of general difference about the Constitution and basic values in political discourse in India. And how does one explain that a deepening democracy that indisputably has afforded previously excluded and denigrated groups a growing role in the electoral process, and has been accompanied by a concomitant weakening. At the same time has been accompanied by this weakening of democratic norms, such as respect for rights equality rule of law and cultural difference. The answer to that lies in the role that we sometimes ignore a much bigger role of violence than is often being talked about. So let me go a little back to some of the history before I get into this. So when, as British rule consolidated across the subcontinent in the 19th century colonial officials found themselves in a constant state of worry about possible outbreaks of violence and discontent among the massively massive event and infinitely diverse populations they now rule. We also know the East India Company's informers and intelligence intelligence sources were tasked with keeping an eye on disobedient local rulers, as well as for Kiers mendicants got men of various tribes. We also know they failed to detect the resentments that eventually manifested in the great rebellion of 1857 that shook empire globally. This year, breezy confidence in British superiority gave way to new forms governance, and much more intensive policing and the potential for popular violence was now regarded as a permanent threat to British rule. Not political violence, but popular violence. It was countered by the gradual incorporation of native native elites into the deliberative bodies. But, and this is my focus combined with harsh policing of streets, cities and towns. The European penal code of 1860 still in force, introduced multiple sections 18 that allow the in total that allow the authorities to use extensive force against any form of collective action deemed the detrimental or dangerous to public tranquility, tranquility in the public it's still a kind of public is very important legal term. In the 20th century, riots and other disturbances were routinely attributed to the work still of irresponsible fanatics, blood marshes criminals and so on. In the eyes of the authorities, the growing urban populations across the subcontinent constituted and always unstable and volatile environment prone to excitement and irrational passion. So many of these disturbances and observers began to refer to such popular sentiments as a cauldron or Karahi large dangerous compound that has to be kept under control in order not to boil over. This constant possibility of an uncontrollable even irrational popular violence was also fundamental to anti colonial thought and political action. In the East Tilak States Hindu festivals such as the gun party would serve in the 1890s as a new physical mass politics and mass manifestation that both wanted to counter and emulate the mass spectacles of the Muslim Muharram for instance, while always at the brink of the threat of mass violence. The violence that sometimes actually happened in Bombay in the 1890s Gandhi encouraged and let mass action while constantly seeking to control its potential for violence. And has been pointed out by Faisal Devji Gandhi's thought and action revolved around what he calls the temptation of violence and the recognition as violence as a form of irreducible truth of politics and a popular sovereignty. The total authority and potency of non violent action rested precisely on this supposed capacity to control and keep in check the potential of a much larger much more catastrophic form of violence where communities would set upon each other and ignite an endless cycle of anger and vengeance. In this perspective partition was not a catastrophic aberration, but rather the eruption of this ghastly truth, if you like of political life, and its attendant political and social consequences into public violence on an almost unimaginable scale. And we would just published an I find deeply original book violent fraternity global political thought in an Indian age, Shruti Kapila proposes to see the partition, and not the Constitution as a form as as a foundational to Indian political life in several ways, although she also talks about the partition was a combination of a form of politics built on what she calls fraternal antagonism between Hindus and Muslims that began with Tillak Savarkar and the RSS and so on. It also instituted a logic of enmity that enabled Hindus to create political unity that promise to overcome the deep social antagonisms of cast of cast and untouchability antagonisms that in Ambedkar's view as we know would forever prevent Hindus from forming a proper society. Now in the decades that followed independence, these colonial ideas of riots and disturbances of public tranquility, being caused by fanatics and criminal elements were supplemented by the category of the anti social activists the anti social element. Those who would cause division and discord by unnecessarily stir the cauldron of public sentiment and unleash mass violence or disturbances. When, when emergency rule was opposed in 1975 by Indira Gandhi it actually happened in the name of ensuring public order and protecting national sovereignty and protecting public order from the JP movement that was very active across North India at the time. But also supposedly, supposedly protecting the state and national sovereignty against a threat of mass violence from within, and the dreaded foreign hand that was always involved during those years. And let's also not forget that the first iteration of the upper the law of the unlawful activities. Act was passed in 1967 and was used for to target both insurgencies and so disturbances ever since today it's been used much more widely than ever before. So let's fast forward to the to the period we're in now from the date 1980s where Indian politics enters a much more intensive phase marked by transformative mobilization of lower class communities, claiming visibility and presence in the public domain. The emergence of powerful regional movements and of course the rapid growth of the Hindu nationalist movement around the demand of the liberation of rams and its birthplace in New York. We all know resulted in a dramatic escalation of communal violence now mainly as a tax on Hindus or on the Muslims by Hindu militants. These developments were also accompanied by a whole new slew of forms of protest assemblies demands and indeed incidents of public violence that escalated from the 1980s to continuously high levels in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Reported cast violence also escalated in these decades as upper caste and dominant caste communities retaliated against what they saw as lower caste arrogance and political assertiveness. So this hyper politicization was magnified by a couple of other factors as well. Firstly, the electoral and the legislative process in India today separated in a way that's unknown in other major democracies, because of the complex legacy of a nervous colonial bureaucracy it's suspicious of a subject population, and the in the Rubian state turned into a highly centralized and command driven technocratic bureaucracy, and the vast majority of policymaking and implementation is completely separated from the electoral process. The vast majority of elected politicians neither make laws, nor drive specific legal reforms. Conversely, most public officials across India see elected politicians as a constant constant threat to the ability to implement laws and policies. The result of this alienation of electoral politics from lawmaking is that the domain of public contestation is dominated by emotional and ideological issues, symbolic gestures concerned with collective dignity protest commemorations, martyrdom, etc. The other thing is that public violence and the performance of anger and outbreaks has become ever more accepted languages of political life in India. While Indian society remains deeply hierarchical in terms of deference to social status and wealth, decades of dynamic electoral politics have actually established popular sovereignty as a dominant idea. Only those who can win the hearts and support of the majority will be and should be able to rule and manage the expectations, the anger and the potential of violence of this majority. Public violence is therefore changed from a earlier protest mode into a couple of new modalities. One is what I would call a performative demonstration of anger, disaffection and community strength as an increasingly legitimate language of political expression. And secondly, a kind of what I would call a transactional modality if you like, where disturbance of political order loss of life and loss of governmental control or the threat thereof can be mobilized in support of certain demands made on authorities and dominant communities and a punitive modality where mostly dominant communities, kin groups or factions set out to exact revenge and violent punishment for perceived insults to their honor property or perceived entitlements. How do we think about sovereignty and popular sovereignty and the problem is here I think a lot of the work that has been done in this field attached itself very much to questions of state and nations and laws and legality. And instead, I go back to a figure that definitely is inspiration for much anti-colonial nationalism as well as mainstream political ideas in most of the world. That is, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the social contract, he launched a distinction between sovereignty and government that were to become foundational in most modern democracies and it's here on the screen for you to read those two little excerpts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued is indivisible and expressed in the general will, a force residing in the people as such, a force both constitutive of all power and inalienable, that is, it cannot be given or granted to anyone else, least of all, of course, a monarch or a dictator. By contrast, the government is merely a kind of executive function serving to administer and maintain liberty and order and to secure correspondence between subjects and sovereign. Rousseau concedes that the actual sovereign and its general will always elusive, always evoked interpreted through consultation, assembly and possibly a majority vote, maybe even a plebiscite as he also recommended this book. Yet, he argues, the force of sovereignty has to be present, has to be an omnipresent constituent power that enables and empowers all legitimate government. Its main function is to be what political philosopher Richard Tuck in a recent book has called a sleeping sovereign, a presupposition that's always there but has to be asleep. Now, Rousseau's distinction between sovereign, between the sovereign people and the government corresponds, or between sovereignty and government corresponds well with, in many ways, with the distinction between Raj and Sakhar in India, with Sakhar being the hands of the head being a more precise expression of Rousseau's understanding of government even than the English term, and the Hindi term Raj corresponding with Rousseau's notion in some ways of the sovereign as the underlying source of power, the underlying reality of rule. The we, the people of India, the preamble to the Indian Constitution invokes precisely this, the people as the constituent power of modern India, a sleeping sovereign ideally only to be awakened during elections. But also recognize that while the general will requires careful legislation by enlightened men, the actually existing people might well be a problem that can be corrupted, and as he calls it, deceived. And this warning against the actions of a deceived or misled people would have resonated all too well with many of the framers of the Indian Constitution. This process happening a few years after the mass violence of partition. To come back to Shruti Kapila's works he argues or urges us to consider partition and the violence that followed across the subcontinent in the first years of Indian independence, not as an aberration but instead the constitutive and violent moment where the general will of the Indian nation was defined. If partition with all its moral ambivalence and horror was the violent truth of the birth of the nation follows that India sleeping sovereign if we go by this terminology, the people isn't equally dangerous and morally ambivalent force with independence and democracy that dreaded cauldron of public anger had to be managed but also taken seriously in new ways. And it was precisely this fear of violence and manipulation and motivated the formation of the election commission of India, one of the most empowered and autonomous of its kind anywhere in the world, capable of disqualifying and excluding candidates and the envy of many other countries in the world, I would love to have election commission in the US for instance. No chance. Anyway, after the end of the emergency. The, the now famous model code of conduct was instituted in order to curb institute even stricter limitations on the speech and conduct during elections. In our case in 1995, the Supreme Court of India, but she've seen a leader by Takari from electoral campaigning and found him building guilty of spreading communal enmity, which is the strict rules about this during election times. The judges admonish Takari and reminded him that and I quote, leaders must be more circumspect and careful in the language they use for me for maintaining decency and propriety. And for the preservation of the proper and time honored values forming part of our heritage. I know that such strictes and public speech during election campaigns have not prevented the proliferation of many forms of hate speech and India, despite these rather stringent provisions also, for instance, in section 295 a of the Indian penal code that bans deliberate and malicious upgrading of communities and insults to religious beliefs of a class of people as the section reads. He's a young magistrate in Pune expanded on this problem to me in the following way, which I find interesting. He said, look, many. I asked him why is it impossible to control or curtail the proliferation of hate speech that was going on at that time. He said, well, many of these people say that they just talk straight from their heart. How can we prove that to be a malicious thing or even a crime is only during election time can we say that whatever people say or do are done with one intention and that is to win votes. This is why we have all these cases only during election time. With the rise and of law cast politics on a grand scale, the idea of mobilizing or representing majorities who John in states and elected bodies as cast coalitions as religious communities became a much more powerful idea. You can say a permutation of the sleeping sovereign a true majority that could be awakened indeed. The notion of the majority itself, the Bahumut began to require stronger effective and more force. The more force of a majority of a majority whether defined as a pre-given cultural entity understood as an electoral proof of the superior force and truth represented by a political party or a leader. And this is indeed a very common perception in India today. It emerged in no small measure from regional politics across India. The linguistic movements across much of India in the 1950s and 60s had mobilized powerful sentiments and the assumption of an inherent superiority and naturalness of a polity based on linguistic affinities of a majority. The majority was the basis of the linguistic reorganization. They had also demonstrated the political potential of mobilizing emotional bonds around language and the generalized rhetoric of cultural intimacy and relatedness. In the rise of Hindutva, most of the morally charged rhetoric of sacrifice, treason of emotional outrage and attachment often accompanied by physical attacks on newspapers, public figures, institutions emerged in states such as Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra where strong linguistic and political leaders in meeting the politics dominate political life. And to come back to our friend Bal Takali, more than any other formation, it was Shiv Sena that framed this new politics of direct and violent action. In the 1980s to the 2000s, Shiv Sena also called, for instance, for bonds on a regular basis, sometimes to achieve particular goals, but often to demonstrate its ability, just demonstrate that it could shut down the city if it wanted to, and the state. The power of the bond writes not on actual violence, but only of the latent threat of it. The effectiveness of these bonds said less about active support for the Shiv Sena or any other state, any other party that may call it. And more about its claim to command the control of public space and the control of the source of public violence. And to come back to my terminology here, Shiv Sena's innovation was to permanently weaponize the sleeping sovereign as it were. Shiv Sena claimed that the movement and its leaders were able to interpret and express popular anger to control and project this latent anger as mass violence, but also to curb and transform this force into real political power when needed. In this way, Shiv Sena became at its peak something like an omnipresent and shadowy power that everybody had to reckon with one way or the other. And that proved to be an almost irresistible formula for popular politics and political entrepreneurs and aspiring political bosses across India. It's been demonstrated by many scholars and observers in recent years. If you don't know the book by Lucia and Mcaluty and others called Mafia Raj. It's a good example of many bosses of this kind. In some of my earlier work, I've called this kind of violence and this form of power, de facto sovereignty, because it's based on the ability to kill and to discipline with near impunity or total impunity. And this is possible in a place like India because the sovereignty of the state is far from a settled question, not just in regions and communities that openly contest the presence of the Indian army and security forces, but also in all kinds of other ways such as open public order laws and streets, street protests in matters of community and family customs in matters of exacting punishment that the enemies or families and communities, and the list can go on into many mundane practices. I'm not saying that India is a weak state like a terminology I always found dissatisfactory or unsatisfactory, but rather than it's a poor state and it's uneven. And therefore, this there is all this room for these forms of contestation. Opposing and defying the law can easily be constructed as a and mostly is constructed as a defense of the nation or the true people the true popular sovereignty of the community, or the majority. And we also saw in the US in the attacks on Congress in January and 2001 this year, or even in the farmers protest that just has been concluded successfully in India, where one saw the return at times of the old 1980s spoken, the, the, the true rule brought versus the not so authentic India, urban India. And for some scholars, this distinction between Raj, understand understood as sovereignty of the realm and Sakhar suggests a deeper conceptual golf between notions of just rule and actual government, a golf that may indicate a continuing legitimacy of what some people call kingly forms of sovereignty and legitimacy. Others, correctly in my view, argue that what Richard Burkhard, many years ago aptly termed the lordly style of salvation politics and public life need not refer to any legitimacy of actual aristocrats kings rather than any political bosses and notables in India are fully aware that their power and legitimacy depends entirely on the ability to embody and express the aspirations and style of the communities and kin networks, they command. And he has suggested the dominant style of popular politics in North India is what she calls kingship without kings, based on metaphors of kinship projected on to what she also calls divine kinship. This leads me to a few other reflections and I'll show you some more slides in a moment of on what is how should we think about popular sovereignty, because it's of course a lot more than just a capacity for violence what is it what more is it. So while governments and states constantly try to project sovereign power into territories and populations, popular sovereignty is not really a legal concept, but it's an ideal and aspiration horizon, something that can never be fully achieved. In his work on popular sovereignty in America, Edmund Morgan many years ago rephrased Burns Kantorovich classic idea of the kings two bodies to be the people the people's two bodies one actual and flawed, the other permanent and pure. And as Claude Le Four also put it several decades ago, the idea of the people is always an empty place maybe even an empty substance that can never be fully represented and indeed always present is always present, but under and misrepresented most of the time. This is foundational for democracy. This means that the popular sovereignty of the idea belonging to self governing community and state is also a powerful emotional force, a powerful promise of fulfillment and inclusion. It can be experienced in a crowd or political rally. It's strongly internalized among, let's say the galrock shows in India, or the armed volunteers militia volunteer militiamen in the US, who hunt down illegal aliens along the border. And it can motivate voters project their aspirations until leader who promises to make their country respected in the world that happens, not just in India. So the national, the internationalist project crucially revolves around, I would argue, awakening the sleeping sovereign and creating a permanent sense of national mobilization and alertness. The tall flag post across India, the celebration of the army and the surgical strikes, and even the attempts to have everyone standing in cinema halls for precisely the 52 seconds it takes to sing the national anthem although that order was was revoked. But it also includes attacking and trawling traders perceived enemies these are all measures to kindle and awaken the live and effervescent experience of being part of a sovereign people. And mind you, this is an angry and anxious people permanently at war with his enemies. Anyone who publishes a book in India today will have to content with the law lawyer perusing the manuscript so as to identify passages that need verification or softening so as not to provoke public anger or hurt public religious sentiments. The unstated but very real implication is of course that a publisher and institution on author academic or artists may risk attacks and vandalization of their promises and home and face threats to their personal safety. It happened to a very prominent former minister just last week. I went through the same process with this book, which was somewhat ironic considering that my book is exactly about how these threats became so commonplace that I had to go through this process right. Anyway, so let me end or this last section is is about more about some others dimension of what violence is and does. And my argument, one observation I'd like to share is that as much as as India has been in a sense one of the most important places for the study and and thinking about and conceptualizing collective violence in the world. And also this focus on especially communal riots between Hindus and Muslims or against Muslims now has in a sense blinded us to the fact that there are so they are that public violence is a much more commonly. It's a much more common and much more widespread phenomenon than just these particular riots. Take a look at this. In since the 1990s the number of officially reported riots in India that is, and these figures are all available now. And online, and not so many people looked at them but it's well worth doing I should say that keep in mind when you look at these that just keep in mind how much work any police department will do not to register something as a riot. Right, because having arrived in your precinct is not good news for a station commander or for a police commissioner and so on. So keep this in mind. These are, and these are probably also heavily edited numbers. You can see that the collective, the numbers are pretty high in during just after emergency and then again in the 90s then they fall gradually, and then they have sort of stabilized in the last decade and a half at around 75,071, whatever. Now, only a few percent of these total riots are registered as communal. Again, the category that's more severe and will also risk transfer or other kinds of sanctions on police departments that see this on our watch. But what is really striking here I want to share with you is that the vast majority are actually not. It's neither political. It's not communal. It's not student. It's not whatever. It is what you call normal violence that is a normal way of transacting and interacting with each other as well as with the state. These are non-trivial numbers, even in a large society like India. And so what are these, and actually we don't know. We don't know because many people like myself who are taken interest in this have actually not done any kind of systematic study of how these other kinds of riots actually take place which is a dominant form, and this is probably something of an understatement, right? These figures are most reported figures as we know in India are under reported. Now, this raises the question, why is it that this has become like this? Why these very high levels of violence? It doesn't have to be like that. And the few figures we have, however reliable they are back from the 60s and 70s show just decidedly lower numbers, right? So it didn't have to be like this. It's not endemic to Indian society. Why is it? Now the normal, and this I'll end with these reflections on this, that the normal, we know the normal explanations. This is a political strategy of instrumentalizing violence to seek office or to seek certain forms of gains. These are gangsters and criminals doing it and so on and so forth. But actually, I don't think that's very believable only. That's not everything that's going on. And the couple of reasons, one, is what I'm trying to show here again based on official numbers, which is interesting, that when you look at some of the number of individuals, I'm just taking a few years here to 14 to 16, people were charged under the sections IPC 153 and 153B incitement of enmity between groups, which is the communal, this is what you're charged with, if there's a communal riot, right? There was only although the police say, oh, we have a 16% conviction grade in all riot cases. Actually, when you drill down the numbers, the reported numbers, and you will think that this should be over reported. There's only 13 cases that there's a conviction, which is, let's call it a trivial number, right? And, and you can also see here the very, very large number of pieces of people who are arrested and charged. And, and, and, and there's enormously high pendency, even, even by Indian status, even by the status of the Indian court. This is, what can you, what can you draw from this, this conclusion that I heard many people I have talked to and spoken to and hung out with over the years, that doing this kind of a fund in the street, as it were, or staging or whatever attack on other people is almost risk free, but it depends, it depends which community you belong to. I'm happy to say more about this because both, especially Muslims and Dalits are persecuted and punished much more harshly also when it happens. So most of the punishment for riots do not happen after, but actually during the time of suppression of the riot and that's highly differentiated. So, the final section I'll just say a little bit about a third explanation you can, you can think about. And that is that violence and public violence is also a screen for enjoyment and for an experience of some kind of fulfillment and even freedom. And the protesters and vigilantes who today states attacks and opponent institutions and individual traders describe their actions always and as the inevitable effect of pent up anger and uncontrollable outrage, as if the scale of physical destruction is an index of the depth and intensity of their rage, right. And protesters almost mirror the language of the law such as article 295 a when they blame the offenders for provoking their own anger. So many groups in Canada are more us to blame the conduct of immoral youth for the anger that wells up in themselves the vigilantes the violence is felt like a natural urge to protect Hindu values when provoked and leads vigilantes to beat up and molest middle class youth at private house parties, for instance, not uncommon currents in a similar vein the activists who attack contemporary art exhibition spaces, artists or writers or academics blame the artists or the writers for their attacks in their view immoral art and other expressions are offensive to Indian culture, and the activists claim that they simply cannot control their own pride and anger, they must seek and destroy. The protesters or the vigilantes want the government and various public to take note but the audience is not always a general public it can often be a more regional segmented of particular audience. Public actions, even excessive and cruel violence can be purified made just and moral by the imputed injury to the community or collective emotion that provoked in the first place. Violence is portrayed as purely reactive spontaneous and therefore inherently just. It's like a safe center activists and Mumbai put it to me many years ago something like a force that's inherent in any brave and self respecting man, if someone slaps me he told me my hands come out and I slap him. It's natural neither it's natural justice. It's as if the violent act has autonomous force pure reaction without culpability or moral responsibility. The light will be see going on now I want to suggest across India is perhaps not so much so such an aberration from much earlier and longest patterns of much longer standing. But it begs the final question I just consider briefly what why do so many ordinary people in India seem to tacitly endorse or even actively participate in public violence. Many common sense perceptions and some scholars to attribute public violence to the work of young frustrated or deprived men for whom destruction noise inflicting physical harm is a form of compensation for their own weakness and marginality in everyday life. There may be some truth in this sometimes, but the best studies of violence and it's mostly male perpetrators have decided to demonstrate that perpetrators of extreme violence are really very marginalized or very deprived. Rather perpetrators are aspirational frustrated, but also drawn to the experience of power fraternity and freedom when engaging in violence and violent organization. Precisely, the experiences that doing politics may offer the sense of being involved in something bigger than yourself, or being protected acting with impunity, the enjoyment of the strain suspension of norms during riots and collective protest, or the strain suspense of of elections where power is hanging in the air, or the voyeuristic pleasure of the bystanders to violence, who often like to cheer on our boys. So my proposition here is that that legitimacy of the legitimacy of public violence is directly connected with aspiration and experience of empowerment. In 2017, a very interesting book came out published by a American sociologist Francesco Duina it's about America, it's called broke and patriotic why poor Americans love their country. He shows in compelling detail that American citizen citizenship itself gives the poorest in America and experience of power and freedom despite their marginality. He interviews an elderly man and veteran living in a mobile home in one of America's poorest states. And he says I don't have much but at least I know that I live in the strongest and the richest country in the world. It seems to me that a somewhat similar logic, maybe at work in, at least in part in contemporary India. I think it's precisely this promise of inclusion into an impart majority defeating sense of freedom when in the crowd, and also the sense of having been given permission by one's leaders to act hit or abuse that are very powerful ingredients in public violence These ingredients are mostly most clearly articulated in the projection of an injured majority against as many enemies and here's what Amit Shah said in 2014 when campaigning after the deadly attacks on Muslim communities. He said in a meeting election rally, a man can live without food or sleep, he can live when he's thirsty and hungry, but when he is insulted, he cannot live, we will have to take revenge for the insult. And decades of economic growth and urbanization have mobilized an enormous desire for improvement across India becoming a little wealthier little more educated more modern. For the vast majority as we know these changes are slow and hard one, but there are smaller experiences of freedom and enjoyment available from social media movies fashion consumer objects, and indeed the internet. There are two smaller freedoms offered by political rallies meetings informal activism among millions of young and underemployed people it's that passing a time the capacity to enjoy it enjoy in in India and other Indian languages that often count as freedom. It's different from an earlier generation of political activism where politics was counts in language of attachment or self sacrifice day. It seems that political life promises another experience of freedom that the freedom to enjoy to be given permission by political leaders to command the street to attack policy enemies of the people and traders of the nation to the nation. So it's with that in mind, and this is my last sentence a few sentences that I think about what are the implications of all this for how we experience also the encroachment on political academic freedom that many people in India feel and even people who work on Indian society abroad. Now we all know that many kinds of trolling our endemic in in social media spaces and internationalism other others considering themselves Indian patriots have created an atmosphere of permanent excitement and permanent anger where activists engage in sort of competitive sports dealing of slurs threats and expletives that writers, tweeters, academics and many others. In some cases, such as the campaign against a conference that was called dismantling hindu where there was held in September online this year. There was one million emails that were sent to university administrators in the US wanting them of consequences, never this defined. The institution supported this conference. And in those cases that may be a clear structure and command to this form of harassment, however, in most cases like it is with lots on the street, I would say, in much of India. This is not so. And most trolls are doing this as a pastime is mischievous scheme to disrupt and destroy a bit, a bit like the malware and the viruses going around on networks. This is for decades. But for me there's a clear threshold threats to my own personal, or my own, or my family safety. These are not uncommon, unfortunately, but they are illegal in most jurisdictions, and I always tell anyone to promptly report such activities to campus security because it's actually breaking the law as for the rest, or I can say is ignore the noise. Thank you. Great. So, as I was saying, we are keen to have participation from our small but select in person audience but also from those of you who are listening to the talk so I'll keep my remarks very brief. Yeah, really, as I said a very fun. It's a fantastic talk which gives us a lot to think about I'm very keen to read it. My sort of first thought or question was to push you about something which you've written very eloquently about which is in relation to democracy. It's not about popular sovereignty but we're careful not to link it directly to democracy and I wanted to perhaps push you a little bit and and say about and ask you about what you think is the relationship between violence and democracy and is the claim that this violence that was there at the historical origins of India's nation state then meant that there's something as it will baked into its democracy but that that is not something that's just historically particular to India but is of general interest to those of us who are looking to India to tell us about what democracy has in store. So in a talk William Vane if we if we think about India today as he did of America earlier as telling us about the kinds of if you like antinomies and challenges that democracy has to bring India as if you like an exemplary case that shows that is that the sort of case you're making is that the sort of scope of the argument or do you wish to limit yourself to popular sovereignty on which the sort of small caveat would with regard to Raj would be that that's of course about rule but not necessarily popular rule and it's a term of course associated with the British Raj and so on. So the second question in relation to violence but also in relation to the Constitution which is a little bit as you know my own area of interest and in relation to the protests the the citizenship protests against the CAA that we saw and that inspired many in 2020 and I think you said at the start that in some ways they are invoking constitutional values so there is a sense in which we can talk about liberal constitutionalism as having a social reality in India today in the practices of the excluded the marginalized or in a sense these protests being an example of if you like bottom up constitutionalism but then you also sort of stepped back from that and said that well perhaps in many cases those are still demands made on behalf of if you like particular groups rather than universal citizen. I again wanted to push you and I could be wrong so please do feel free to correct me in your response but the two are not of course mutually exclusive as your own work shows and in many cases the demands may be made for instance on a count of Muslim citizens who face a threat from these amendments but the demand is being made on the on behalf of a universal value of citizenship if you like so is there if you like a contradiction between the group and particular and the universal in that sense. I'll close with my final thing which is about violence and I think what was very I think thought provoking about your talk is that you tell us to look at routine and everyday forms of violence and not just the spectacular incidents of violence and you also pointed towards the need to look at things like riot statistics more carefully as telling us about the changing something about the changing nature of violence. So my question is if you like in contemporary India. At the same time as saying that that is perhaps not if you like all of the story so my question and I'm being long winded here so I'll stop quickly is. And we need to take the routine and the not routine forms of violence very seriously in any discussion of democracy in India. At the same time, it is of course not the only truth about democracy or the most fundamental truth about democracy in India and perhaps sometimes the compelling nature of violence and this is a critique made of Foucault's work but it's a critique applicable to a lot of those who focus on violence is that it captures our attention in ways which over or which exclude the significance of the the existence of other elements to the experience of democracy. So I'll stop there. Yes, please. Yeah. Cheers here. So thank you very much for tonight. These are all great questions and I mean just to begin with the last one. No, this is not a full story. It's not but I think it's a story that we need to look at in and I was when I started to drill down in these statistics I was, I knew that it wasn't there was more than communal violence to look at, because this is something everybody knows from experience that has spent significant amounts of time in India. There was more to it but just the CS scale of it was quite astonishing to me and begs a kind of social science questions what what is going on, how do we explain this, and how come that it's been missed out in so much work. And this is quite right. It points to also a larger sort of question of that the whole law and order and policing dimension of Indian society is completely on the study completely on the study has been left to legal scholars mainly very few social sciences to study. It's not easy to do, I should say, because these are not the most forthcoming informants you can have in the world. But, so, so it's not a full story there's a lot more to say, but, but violence is exactly designed to capture the attention. Right. It's a dominant it's a strategy of domination or the strategy of interruption, right, where you capture the attention and you already pre shape an argument if you have shown ability to stage some kind of event or violent action. Then the calculus is that something, and maybe not even always calculus because it can be done in many ways but is that this will have repercussions for a long time and I find one of the things I find striking is people's questions of these things they will say oh there was a disturbance here or this is where this this fellow was, you know, killed or whatever these are history people know, right. They know them more about communal riots but they also know about other things. So there was kind of, you know, local everyday histories of violence I think that that shape the way politics is transacted in ways that it is, it is designed to be this kind of almost like a meta language politics is where it's like a manifestation of a conflict right and that's what it's designed to do and that's why it's used that's why it's so effective that's why it's irresistible to most, to most political operators and the violence here is not necessarily one that's done. It's also the threat of it that can last years after one event or one show of a gun or whatever can. The first point about popular sovereignty and democracy. See, so my, yeah, I deliberately talk about popular sovereignty because one I think it's an understudied and underused and underexplored concept and I think it has a rich life, not always a life. Where it is articulated as it's not as if people walk around in America or India and say I love popular sovereignty right that's not the form it's not the phenomenal experience of it it's not the, how it appears in the world but it appears as a sentiment, right, as a very strong sentiment and I think I toy with the title for these. Maybe this I'm going to write a different version of this book for for us marketed and toy with the title of sovereign sentiments because I think it is the emotional force that actually is really interesting and how deep it is and how consequential that can happen in a democracy but it's it doesn't have to be right. Those two things are not necessarily. I mean, we know that democracies create all kinds of, of, of conditions for this to thrive is India is the prime example of that, but, but and but also the US as we see at the moment or other places in the world. But I think the popular sovereignty is also invoked and mobilized in situations where there's perhaps less than fully evolved democracies as we see right. So it is a it's just a form of, it's a form of political subjectivity you might say or projection or horizon of thinking within which you imagine your own political life. And I think needs to be studied. I think there's a strong link between popular sovereignty and violence stronger than there is between democracy. So, so ultimately of course this is a conversation about what Indian democracy has come to and what it does enable but it's not all there is to say about this book is not about Indian democracy as such but it's about a very important element. And the last thing I just want to say is that when I say that these, the Constitution is invoked. I think it's striking that the Constitution has a life that is only now is as if the Constitution is being discovered in a strange way in political life in academic writing, you'll be hard pressed to find a few people like Susan and a few other people writing about the Constitution in the 60s and 70s and some legal scholars, but from the 1980s 90s onwards the Constitution becomes an object of interest for historians for social scientists and so on so forth but not very much right. And it's only as far as I know, and I may well stand corrected here, but as far as I know, even in that, even when the emergency came to hold, even with the first janitor cabinet model. There was all the civil liberties stuff going on, but I don't know if I never read anything about where the Constitution was kind of held up. And I comment this also from having lived and worked in South Africa where after the end of apartheid, the Constitution became a sort of rallying point. There was millions of copies of a pocket size Constitution you carry in your pocket, and people would take it out, and they would take it out in political rallies and read from it, right. In meetings and there will be, there will be pre before we start this meeting would like to read something from the Constitution. So, you know, this is a, I mean, an astonishing thing, but you know, the same could easily have happened in India, it happened in 2020. So what would be in these values and they will read the preamble and so on they will read some of the articles right. So my question is, why, why then why not before why not the last 20 years what's going on is that because the Constitution is on the thread. I don't know, but that's that's one part of it and I think I don't think we have to pass a purity test of invocation of the Constitution and people support the Constitution for whatever. You know, and the language of the law as a promise as a horizon this is very much the case with both Muslims and dollars and, and also ST communities and so on the promise of certain protection. I think that's great. We don't have to but I'm just saying that it doesn't mean that you may live your community life in accordance with Constitution principles right. I mean, that's nobody asked for that right. No, I think you I mean, all what you're saying is actually correct and is happening right. And I like your point that popular sovereignty is maybe to the ways in which we can think about it as a as a idea that the majority should rule that we have legitimacy because of our standing as the real people and so on. And, and so and that can. And that's exactly what friend, especially like, if you think of the linguistic movements that was the argument they honest right that sentiment they honest with strong numbers is about our land and so on, and we are the majority and so on. And they try to, to make that argument in a sort of classic popular sovereignty domain of form, whereas I think you're right with the vigilante groups or even some of these I mean it's, it's of course more proliferating right now, but that we go back in decades and sort of semi private armies or whatever, but I don't think at times maybe the justification for some of that violence has been in terms of protecting the larger nation or larger community but very often it's also been about you know settling schools or I am this community, I'm working for this big man, whatever. And we have to teach them a lesson and so on. So you're right that not all that violence is encompassed within sort of framework of saying this is what we're doing right, but I think it's interesting that what has happened in the last six, seven years on the BJP is of course on one hand an outsourcing of a lot of this violence right so most of the violence that actually takes place against minorities is not done there's no state actor except Yogi sometimes. But in the rest of India, it's done by all these other agents completely maybe affiliated with the BJP maybe not often yes but not directly right, but they still try I think to more so than has ever been the case and that that's maybe the innovation is that they try to harness, right. I mean there's a whole big debate about what happens to cast violence and forms of, you know, pushback against Dalits and law cast communities under the ages or under the protection as a right, that now we do it in the name of this which means you got to, you got to just tell do what we tell you right. So, so I think you're right that not all of this kind of wild of dispersed forms of desires and revenge or violence or use that as a kind of not everything that shows up in the police statistics right. A lot of that might well be this kind of stuff that you talk about right, it is there's no question about it. And at times it gets harnessed and formulated within this light do think that that's certainly the politics and what what the BJP is trying to do is to be in a sense to give a direction to this right, to give a cover so almost like an umbrella under which you can, you can act right, it's like a script that you can adopt. You may have done it anyway. But here's a script right well how about that. And that script in itself is sort of also mobilizing right. So it's what I like the way you put it it's complicated and I don't think it's a simple. It's a simple question but I do think it's that there's a vast area of, you know, what, how people perpetrate this kind of violence how they justify to themselves. How they, how this connects with these wider sort of discursive forms that people can draw on at various times right. And that's in flux. But I think it's, it's one of these things we should look at. To be the timekeeper which is not always the happiest of roles, but we also have audience questions. So if you don't mind. If I could read out a few questions from our virtual audience and then we can come back to the audience in the room if if they're burning questions. So if I may I might take three questions at a time and then because we have about 10 minutes or so and then you can choose how to respond to those. So the first was from Vishal Bora, who is interested to hear more about the threats of violence made regarding dismantling global Hindutva and if they yeah they were evidence and examples of this. The second question is from Faraz Khan, who says, isn't violent demagoguery and violent demagoguery and angry mobs a common feature of any low and middle income country instead of being specific to India. And sometimes even in richer countries with ethnic and racial divides and if our right populist leadership, if it's USA, Trump, Turkey or the one, etc. aren't we seeing a common phenomenon here. The third question is from Faraz Shah, and I think she wanted to know more about the limitations regarding freedom of speech and expression. And yeah, and how, and how it's possible to categorize people as traitors or instigators but I think you did say something in relation to that when you talk over to you. Okay, thank you. Yes, let me just let me answer the second question, which is, in a sense, a straightforward question. This is not unique to India. No, does it exist in other countries. Yes, I live in one of them, known as the United States. I think we have many lunches that are far more dangerous than anything you've seen India they have a lot more guns and they have there was a military culture that pervades that society and I think I think one of the things that happened with the war was that all of that became visible in a way that it's been there for a very long time it's become weaponized become given a political it's a little bit more severe and I was just discussing that there's a narrative that gives it form because all these issues and all these sentiments and and all these, you know, pushing back against America becoming a black and brown society and so on, right, instead of a white society and all that that all those have been there for a long time but this narrative and narrative arc and focus some of this. So yes, there's nothing unique in that sense I think every country has its own articulation of this but I think the arguments being made I mean the popular sovereignty arguments very strong. It's extremely strong right, we are the people we are the patriots and these people have stolen the election or they are whatever. And it's also interesting I mean has deep roots in the US and in other forms you know one of the big debates about popular sovereignty in the US and a classic debate is between Abraham Lincoln, and some of the southern politicians, right, who are saying we are defending the state's rights against the union and we are defending popular sovereignty, and including slavery, right, our right to own slaves. So, so there's a lot going on there. The first thing about dismantling. Yeah, I mean there were there were tons of threats made against people organizing committee. The threats were pretty much the same as always made some of them now because of social media technologies and other things you know you locate people we all very easy to locate where people can find your address I have also been receiving threatening emails that say we know where you live we're coming to visit you and so on so forth and that's when you cause campus security and and so on and I and there are people who have been trolled much more viciously there was a trolling against women, which is particularly vicious. And there's a trolling against and South Asian women, especially. Actually, if you look like me, you're probably like you get trolled but not the same degree of cruelty. So all of these misogynist racial dynamics go into this kind of thing. And so, so the conference was sort of hanging a little bit in the balance at some point. But people pulled together and fortunately, although institutions were encouraged to dissociate themselves didn't happen so we were able to get support from most of the institutions and that's important. And I think that's also what the battle is about, especially public institutions with not a lot of money are prone to give in to this cave in to cave into public pressure and one of the things they did was to use something called the Hindu American Foundation. They had on their website a template for that that you could download and then write my son, my daughter goes to such and such school or was or wants to go whatever and I will never send my kids to the school because you support your anti-Hindu or whatever. And they sent something like half a million letters. We don't know how many were sent. And they were all bogus. Fundamentally bogus right, but it for if you are unsuspecting dean or admissions officer or whatever, and you get all this in your mailbox like, Whoa, so our job is to in a sense educate our colleagues to say, This is these other people they run a concerted campaign. You've got to be right. Not naive about it, but also not not be too afraid of it to be robust about it. And I mean this is the reality. And it's people are tuned to this when it comes to threats within your own country about when it comes to one country you may not know then it's a different thing. So, I mean my line on this is that I don't think we as academics. I use a kind of standard American responses that I don't think we should be dictated by the agents of the foreign government. That seems to work really well. So that's a good line to have against these people. There was a third question that was about. It was about academic freedom and freedom of speech, but I think it's I think you address that. Yeah, quickly I'll conclude with I mean I think there were a couple of questions, and I'll just sort of say them. Is it one from Shivam Katariya's can be ascribed this increasing violence to the colonial paranoia of public violence, dating back to the 1857 mutiny. The next question from a sheet. Is it fair to categorize a bit correct constitutionalism in the same way as constitutional patriotism. The constitution was imagined and drafted as a transformative document and therefore would adherence to a document that's forward looking book the same way as a document considered as stuck in. Yeah, no, I like that question. I think. Was a better patriot. I think so. Is it fair to categorize a bit right constitutionalism in the same. If you like box as constitutional patriotism I think that's. She said that maybe she didn't hear it correctly. Yeah, so that term has been used. I mean it was sort of a coin by Habermas and others, you know, and it's essentially an argument against popular nationalist. If you sit and think about the world in Germany then thinking about popular sovereignty. You know, it's complicated. There's a complicated history, let's say, of the invocation of the nation and all that. And Habermas's idea is that a political community should come together not because of their field see and the loyalty to the nation, but to that constitution that constitutes there that describes their political community. That's what the notion of a constitutional patriotism is. I actually think I'm going to agree with that. We also know that America was frustrated by many things in terms of what was possible what was possible to encode in law. We signed as a law minister after some years right. So he believed in in the reform of the power of law in terms of reform but he also but he was frustrated he in the end he said these people, you know, into society cannot be easily reformed because they don't want to do it right. So, so there's more to it but I do think that he, he would have been in agreement with this formulation that instead of of having a political community based on history and historical destiny it's it's based on as it were the invention which is essentially the American model right. Yeah, the American model you come together you give yourself a constitution built around that of course in reality America is not because it was built on on racial superiority and weapons and lots of violence. And all that, but the idea is that. Yeah, I want to answer the last question and then that was the last. So yeah, she, I think my interpretation of that last point that was made I think by Sheetha Saxena is that even so. And if we if we think of this as being a version of constitutional patriotism, isn't there a difference between transformative constitutionalism, which is what we have with America looking at a constitution as a forward looking document as distinct from a constitution that is enshrined entrenched and is something that you are the US. So I would push you further. The US Constitution has become a weapon of the right there's no question about it right and it's become a question a weapon of the of the literalist on the Supreme Court. We know that there was no doubt about that and because it's a very old document, but I the idea of constitutional patriotism doesn't say anything about the age of the of the Constitution right I mean I'm thinking of my South African friends with their outsized Constitution invoking it at every political meeting that's constitutional patriotism in a country that badly needed something new because what is the history of South Africa if not a history of violence right and and and oppression of the worst kind. So of course you need that. Yeah, so I'm, yeah, I think the concept is interesting. And I think maybe it's because patriotism has a bad name, you know, for all kinds of reasons but I think the meaning of it is, is where from where do you derive the loyalty to the community. Yeah, that's the idea. So there was one more thing. I don't think so. And I don't think so. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for. Yeah. No, there was one more I forget what that first short question was but anyway, it's okay. No, I think you've done justice to questions as far was as far as was possible within the constraints of the time that that you had so thank you so much it's hard to address. A lot of questions after a long talk so thank you for that. And it's been, yeah, it's been a great session. It's very, it's not very often that we get a scholar who combines attention to detail and to particularity with seeking to come up with a general vision. And there are very few, in fact, who would go beyond their own methodological niche or regional niche to talking the terms of political theory of sovereignty and democracy more generally so thank you very much for that and it's over to Ed now for closing remarks. Thank you very much, Thomas. Thank you very much for a thought provoking and as severe said hair oil question. I'm trying to work out what severe meant by that. You don't need hair to experience that I suppose it's optional. Anyway, Thomas. Thank you so much for delivering the South Asia Institute annual lecture. It's been a pleasure. And the challenging set of conversations I think that I hope will continue over dinner later on. So thank you very much and please join me in expressing thanks to Thomas with a round of applause. Yeah, I think the audience who've been very patient with us in our hybrid attempts at hosting this lecture online. Thank you very much for your patience and I hope you've been provoked and challenged by the experience. And I hope to see you again next year.