 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Gyan Prakash, who's writing a book on emergency, written a number of popular books earlier, trying to get into this issue of history as a narrative, which is a little more interesting than what historians normally do. Gyan, good to have you with us. Thank you. Let's, for the time being, step away from the emergency on which there has been a lot of discussions. And we'll wait for your book to come out. But there has been talk about, shall we say, the rise of new kind of politics. Trump being one, Modi, Erdogan and Turkey, and Duterte and Philippines being some of those who are being talked about. A kind of, shall we say, populism combined with a very sharp, right-wing, divisive politics. That seems to be the hallmark of this kind of figures. How do you see this, particularly since you are close to Trump, and you've also been close to, shall we say, the Indian Sinatra? Well, I'm a historian. So I mean, usually, as a historian, I dig. And a lot of explanations for Trump, Modi, Erdogan, Oban, all of those people has been personality-driven. I'm not discounting the role of personality, but I think in the kind of long term. So how is it that, at present, we have across the world the rise of this kind of right-wing populism? It's not a coincidence. And it cannot be a coincidence that suddenly you have these kinds of populist figures emerge in all these different countries at the same time. So there has to be some deeper reason. In short, I think that what we are witnessing today is a crisis of democracy. Now, that can be a cliched sort of term. But if we can step back and see, I think it's been in the making. At least since the late 70s or early 80s, that was one moment where you could say that there was a kind of a global crisis of ruling regimes. You have cultural revolution in China. You have the Prague Spring. You have emergency in India. You have anti-war movement. You have counterculture across the world. There was some yearning from below which said that democracy hadn't delivered or various kinds of regimes hadn't developed. One kind of a solution was imposed through the 60s and 70s, out of which, broadly speaking, we can say we had a neoliberalization of the world. And by neoliberalization, I do not mean just economy, because you can say, well, Adam Smith was about trade and production. Whereas neoliberalization means neoliberalization of everything, economizing of everything. But our society or democracy is not based on the idea of common good, but it's based on the winner takes it all, on the basis of competition. What is called economy is the basic, the core issues of the economy. And free trade is what is going to drive the economy. So that seems to have been the, shall we say, the pushback of the crisis of the nation states, which emerged in the period that you're talking about. A lot of it for at least the developing countries was really the pushback against the states which had arisen as a part of the decolonization process. And as you said, the decolonization process, at least for a lot of the developing countries, had not delivered, at least for the people. And therefore, the pushback in different forms was coming. So you are saying that the weakening of the nation state was one of the ways of, shall we say, the capitalist forces trying to address the issue. And actually marshalling the power of the state in favor of a neoliberal economy, where it's not only that the economy should be capitalist, but our universities should be also run on corporate principles, our newspapers should also run on corporate principle, that everything should be economized in that sense. State has failed. The public sector has failed. Big government has failed. Let's hand it over to people who know how to run this to quote unquote the capitalist. This is the core of the neoliberal agenda. By, I think, the end of the last century then, this process had matured. And in India, you could say 1991 and neoliberalization was one moment where you can see kind of crystallization of this. And then by UPA2, you see further development of it. And so by the time economic crisis hits, the neoliberalization of the world, of course, destroys communities. It destroys various kinds of organizations that were in support of people like trade unions and various kinds of cooperative agencies and so on, because now everything was supposed to be run on market principles. Now in the wake of it, after 2007, 2008 crisis, then what happens is communities around the world now again saying that democracy hasn't delivered. Now they don't say specifically neoliberalism hasn't delivered. But what neoliberalism did is that the opposition against the ruling regimes disconnected the, let's say, discontent against ruling regime from any kind of a social and economic analysis. And that's how you get an identity politics, whether it's race or religion, which is completely disconnected with what social and economic policies have done to the society. So you can now say, garb se kaho meh hindu. Or the older whites in America can say, make America great again. Founding fathers were white. Of course, forget about who were there before the founding fathers. But the whole thing is to turn it against minorities, rather than turn it against the ones who have led these countries and global capital. That's really the crux of it. I think there, neoliberalism has played a crucial ideological role, which is to, in a way, defang the opposition. And direct it in favor of opposition against minorities and scapegoat minorities for their problems to say, well, the reason why you are in this condition is because there's appeasement here in India. Or it's because of affirmative action. These African-Americans are being given positions that they don't deserve. Well, the Queens riding Cadillacs, the Ronald Reagan times. So now we are in a position, then, where some demagogue can appear and mobilize these sentiments and say, it's not about the corruption that is inherent in all these kind of giant giveaways to big corporations. It's because the minorities are being appeased. Or there's corruption in government and so on, whatever. And so if we run the government on the kind of corporate model, all problems will be solved. And America will be great again. India will be great again, and so on. So withdraw the state further from its redistributive role, which is what, at the core, was the reason for government. That it has a redistributive role. It has a welfare role. It has some public responsibilities. And this is all a part of democracy. Really delink all of it and say, actually, corporations know best all this affirmative action, appeasement of minorities, et cetera, should be withdrawn. Dalits, for instance, anti-reservation in India, as you know, is the other hidden plank of the right here. So all of this is essentially to delegitimize the state further, which is what happened in the 80s, as we talked about. There's a delegitimization of the state and the government. And now this is to move even further to the right. This is what you are identifying as a case. And the state then becomes primarily a coercive instrument. So if there are movements, you can call them anti-national and crush them, like JNU or any farmer's agitation or Dalit agitation or Kashmir. It's all anti-national. The same thing is happening in the United States. You wield the state and make the state largely a kind of an authoritarian power. So you have this combination of populism and authoritarianism happening at the same time where the authoritarian leader now claims to be the representative of the people. The will of the people. And that's a familiar slogan. Now coming back to the fundamental issue, how do you fight this? And I'm not talking about only India or only United States. What is the way forward? Do you see that we need also to talk about how the state should be accountable to the people? How the public sector, which in some sense did get alienated from the people because it appeared to be too big. So how to make this accountable is also an element, for instance, the resistance today to these policies and to think about. It's a crucial question. In fact, 2017, I mean, you remember, there was this movement of not in my name against lynching and so on. And I happened to be in Mumbai at that time. And there were gatherings of protest. There were about 500 people who gathered in Bandra on Carter Road. Now, 500 people is nothing in India. It's absolutely nothing. And so I began to think, yes, there are people who are opposed to, let's say, policies of intolerance from a kind of a liberal point of view. And I applaud that. I mean, it's fine. But that cannot be the basis for a ground level resistance. There's certainly a resistance that will be effective. And then I began to think of what's happening at the same time in the United States. And I must say, the contrast over there was striking that the resistance in the US has come largely from women at the ground level. They're broken from the Democratic Party. So they're not under any kind of party mobilization. So in one sense, you can say it's also sign of times that the normal gatekeepers of democracy, the political parties, have lost their appeal. And so you have grassroots mobilization. So you have women. And you have African-Americans, the Black Lives Matter movement. And I was wondering, why is it that that's not the case in India? And I think the explanation is that in India, the minorities got equal rights because of nationalism, because of anti-British struggle. There wasn't, I mean, I'm not saying that there was nothing. But there was no comparable, let's say, civil rights movement that you could summon and enlist in drawing a kind of a ground level resistance against what's going on in India. Whereas in the US, they can draw on very strong tradition of Black civil rights movement and women's movement, which have now come together in resistance against Trump. The tricky part, of course, is that some of it is also being done in identity politics terms, which could be a problem. But looking at India, we have also a much bigger history of peasant movement, farmer's movement, working class movement. At the same time, we have the Not in My Name. And of course, all of us are also participants in that. We also have the working class movement and the peasant movement, particularly the farmer's movements which have taken place in the last three years. So it is how to bring these two different strands together, shall we say, the relatively middle class, liberal expressions, which are important but nevertheless limited, and the kind of groundswell of movement which is taking place everywhere, where class and identities have to come together if we want to defeat this. I think the weakness of the United States is while they have the civil liberties movement to draw upon. The working class movement, what Martin Luther King started as basically the poor people's campaign, that has really not taken off. And it's only now you see the poor people's campaign also now developing again. So I think these are the different strands which need to come together, not only here but in different countries for this to change. I mean, in a way, that was the challenge for Bernie Sanders. That Bernie Sanders was able to appeal largely to the young people and frankly saying that, you know, I'm a democratic socialist and so on. But somehow he wasn't able to connect with the black civil rights movement. But after the election, things are changing. And you can see that there was like a recent poll in the United States where they said, well, socialism is not a bad word among the young people. And they are proudly. More than 50% are willing to say this. Exactly. And with the new election in New York, this 28-year-old, she defeated a democratic poll. Openly saying she's a democratic socialist. So things are changing where new kinds of connections are being made. Here in India, I mean, I say Dalit movement also has that kind of potential because Dalit movement has always been as much about social justice as just about dignity. So that may be one area. If somehow we can bring together the farmer's movement and Dalit movement together, you could get something which is sort of caste and class together. Do you see the, for instance, Reverend Barber's poor people's campaign? Do you see that also as an element that could change the scenario in the US? I think, I mean, I'm actually quite positive about this. And just the other day someone was saying, you know, you think Trump will win. I said, you know, I didn't think that he would win the last time, and I was proven wrong. But this time, I'm more hopeful because I do see at the ground level, I'm not talking about just university-educated people and so on, I'm really thinking at the ground level there's a certain kind of a revulsion, not just against him, which is there, of course, but also they're seeing that many things that they took for granted, various kinds of social programs are being systematically dismantled. And that has real consequences for them. So they're the poor. Yeah. So like health care, for example, it's ironic that Obama himself never actually campaigned for health care, thinking, well, people will reap benefits and it will win popularity. I mean, things don't happen that way, so I don't know. I mean, he was a great election campaigner, but he was a very poor political judge of how people actually believe. So but then when people were actually threatened, and in spite of the fact that the Republican Party had all branches of the government under them, they couldn't really repeal what they call the Obama care. So it's a state of flux and we'll have to see how all of this is going to develop. We are living, as the Chinese say, in interesting times. Yeah, we are. Thank you, Gyan, for being with us. Thank you for watching NewsClick and be with us on future programs.