 and director of the South Asia program. Welcome to all of you to the Carnegie Endowments. Nice to see lots of familiar faces. I'm really happy today to welcome an old friend, Rahul Verma, to talk about his new book, Ideology and Identity, which has just come out with Oxford University Press. Rahul is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, about to be finishing up. And he has not even finished his dissertation but already published a book, which, for those who have done a PhD, know is quite exceptional. So congratulations to you, Rahul. Rahul has been, for many years, a regular commentator and analyst on Indian electoral politics. I'm sure many of you have followed his columns over the years. He's been doing a regular series in the run-up to India's 2019 general elections for the print. And so I encourage all of you to follow what he's writing there. In fact, he just had a piece out yesterday on elections in the state of Misarum. So there are five states which are going to elections right now and in December. Rahul's new book, which he's co-authored with Pradeep Chibber, who is also on the faculty at Berkeley, is a very, very interesting look at Indian politics and a very counterintuitive book. So for most of us in the room who talk about Indian politics or follow it, we frequently make the claim that there's very little ideology in Indian politics, right? I mean, what drives elections and politicians is something else. It might be identity. It might be money. It might be patronage, vote-buying, religion, all of these factors. But ideology is not something that we generally think distinguishes political parties or political candidates. And Rahul and Pradeep's book is very interesting because it tells us essentially that we've all been wrong and that ideology does matter. And they marshal a lot of data from election surveys, from experiments, from qualitative data field work to substantiate their claims. And I don't want to steal too much of Rahul's thunder, but basically the book argues that we've been thinking about ideology in India all wrong, that we apply our kind of Western frameworks of a kind of left, right, liberal and conservative spectrum to Indian politics. And that's not what politics is about. Ideology functions on different axes in India, axes that have to do with status, with recognition, with state intervention. And so Rahul is going to spend a little bit of time today talking to us about some of the major findings in the book. And then we'll have a bit of a discussion. And for those of you who are interested in buying the book, after the session, there's some books on sale in the next room. And so I turn it over to Rahul. Welcome to Carnegie. And I look forward to your presentation. Thank you, Milan. Thank you. Can you just turn on the? Yeah. Is this working? And should I stand or? Whatever. Whatever you want to do. I'll stand. Thank you, Milan. And thank you all for coming. This book I've written with my advisor, Pradeep Chipper. And the good thing about writing it with your advisor is that I get at least half the credit. And I can take none of the blame. I can say these are Pradeep's mistakes. So I agree with Milan. I think what has happened in the studies of Indian democracy and Indian politics that we have two images. The first image is of a vibrant democracy, one of the highest turnout rates in the world, and fiercely competitive elections. The second image about India is that we have patronage, vote buying, criminals running the show, dynastic politicians. But these two images of India do one thing in common, and which is sort of like, and the common thing is that Indian politics is non-ideological. And I think we should not beat ourselves too much on that, that we have been thinking wrong about that Indian politics is non-ideological. In fact, one of my heroes on party politics and party system, Giovanni Sartori, in his famous book of 1976, wrote a sentence which is basically, ideology does not strike roots in all soils. This was a belief that ideology is going to be born probably in Western world, where there is much more thing going on, and it should not be seen in probably African countries or Asian countries. And I think what we forgot, that ideological conflicts are born in historical moments. And our historical experience, the historical experience of post-colonial, multi-ethnic countries were very, very different. And that's why our ideological conflicts are going to be different. They're not going to be left-right economic divide as we see in Western Europe or North America. Our freedom fighters or fathers of modern India were fighting about something very, very different. And those things are going to shape politics in our country. And so this perspective about that Indian politics is non-ideological is not just in academia, but in popular writings also. This is a quote from New York Times Opinion piece in written at the time of 2009 elections, that Indian elections must rank with the least ideological elections in the world. No ideology, no larger-than-life leaders, no causes, no principles at stake, instead just alphabets. This lot siding with that lot and these people with them, a process resembling children's game show, not the solemn selection of leaders of 1.2 billion people. This is the standard narrative about Indian politics that despite one of the fiercely competitive election, one of the largest democratic exercise anywhere on this planet is non-ideological in nature. And I think one of the reasons is that we have given like too much weight to this popular notion of an idea of India. Even Khilani in his book, Idea of India writes about ideas of India. In his book, he says the nationalist leaders had no single idea of India, right? They were basically fighting about different ways which India is going to be organized. One idea won in 1950s, like that idea emerged victorious. It doesn't mean that that was the single idea about India. The Hindu nationalists were fighting about something very different. The socialist and communist were fighting about something very different. What emerged out of that conflict between nationalist leaders in 1940s and 50s was the Nehruvian idea of India, right? So this is like basically this image is on the cover of the book. This is Nehru's first ministry. The photo was taken in January 31, 1950. And we just like use it for a tongue-in-cheek film. Like if you look at this picture, it seems that the first Nehru cabinet was ideologically arrayed. Nehru sits right in the center. On the right side of Nehru, on the extreme right, it's Shyama Prasad Mukherjee who goes on to form Bhartiya Jansang which is the predecessor of Bhartiya Janta Party. On the extreme left, you have Dr. Bhindra Ambedkar who was the architect of Indian constitution fought for the rights of marginalized Ambedkar. And everyone on the right of Nehru is in some ways basically either a classical liberal or a Hindu right, right? Patel, Rajendra Prasad, John Mathai, Rajkumari Ambedkar. In some ways, everyone was sort of like talking in what we will call a right wing language. And everyone on the left of Nehru, Abdul Kalam Azad, Sardar Hukum Singh, Rafi Ahmad Kidwai and Ambedkar were sort of like talking about the revolution. So we use this picture to sort of like begin our exploration in what is ideological in Indian politics. So basically the book has like three or four components and I'll touch upon at least three of them today. So I will talk about the theoretical and historical basis of ideological divide in Indian politics. There are like we deal with the counter arguments in the book which is about patriotic democracy but I won't go into detail on that. I will provide some empirical evidence on the ideological conflict in Indian politics and how it has shaped the Indian party systems and I'll also discuss the implications. So one minute summary of the whole book is we argue that Indian politics is deeply ideological and ideological conflict has structured the movement of political parties in the space, party system space. That's one minute. Summary if you want, you can go follow this. Okay, so why do we think like the paradigm that has structured, so this is the classic really like narrative from Lipset and Rokan's famous book, right? Western European party system was rooted in these historical cleavages. These cleavages which were born out of in renaissance, reformation, industrial revolution. So what you saw in West Europe is a divide between capital labor, rural urban center, periphery, church, state, rich, poor. None of these axes exist in India. Why? Because we didn't go through those historical experience, right? In Indian case, like we never had that divide between capital and labor. The state was the biggest capital in Indian system, right? So and outside organized sector, we just have like less than 8% of Indian labor is in organized sector. So you cannot have mobilization of labor in a very organized form. Rural urban divide cannot exist in India. At the time of independence, we had 70, 80% of population living in rural area. No political party is going to be anti-rural and win elections in India. This divide may emerge in like next two, three decades, but it did exist for the last five, seven, eight, years. We could have the center periphery conflict, but that issue was dealt with the state reorganization through language commission. We never had the church state fight in India. We do have the element of religion, but it was so Hinduism is not as organized as religion as Christianity is. And that's why we never had that conflict. And similarly, even today, like there is like 70% of people live on dollar one a day. Given that amount of poverty in India, you are never going to have a political party which is going to be anti-poor in its rhetoric. You will lose elections. And because of these things, we never see ideological conflict on standard narratives that define what is ideology. What is ideology for us? We basically use the definition which exists in the literature, which is it's a set of beliefs, set of beliefs, ideas that are bound together in a non-random fashion. What we add to this definition is that this ideological conflict is about the proper role of the state, role of the state in society. And how do we distinguish day-to-day issues from an ideological conflict? We argue that it must have these four elements. These four elements are any idea must have an intellectual tradition. People should be writing about it, talking about it, debating about it. The second is that it should be transmitted from these intellectual elites or political elites to masses. Only then it is going to structure the party politics. The third is this division must remain stable over a period of time. So each election may see a very different issue driving the outcomes in that election. But we can call something as ideological divide if it is going to be consistent across a long period of time. And fourth, there have to be enough number of people on each side of the divide. Only then political parties are going to take a stand and mobilize on those ideological conflict. For on the rich poor case, because India is a predominantly poor country, politicians are not going to take anti-poor position at all. And that's why you will not see that divide. So what do, so we basically what we do, like the first part of the book is to establish what is ideological conflict or what those ideological dimensions in Indian politics are. For that, what we did, we basically read what our freedom fighters were fighting about. So we read through the freedom movement documents, the Karachi resolution, the Constituent Assembly debates from 1946 and 50, 1946 to 50, and what our leaders were basically saying. So the first thing which was very, very, like out there in Constituent Assembly debates, the biggest debates were happening about who is going, who are we going to call India, right? How are we going to define who is the citizen of India? And so basically that was one of the biggest debate which basically had other elements of who's going to get affirmative action, how are we going to bring in Dalits and Muslims and tribes into the body politics? So the first debate we were having was on how are we going to recognize the citizens of India and how are we going to accommodate into body politics? So the first divide we see is on the quotas, majoritarian impulses, those kinds of things. Second, in the Constituent Assembly debate and just the aftermath of it, the biggest fight in Indian politics was happening on Hindu code base, basically trying to reform the marriage acts in Hindu system. In fact, that, like the defeat of, I don't know, defeat, but basically the conservative bring of the Congress party lost that battle in 1950s. From 1950 to 1956, that was the biggest battle which was happening within the Congress party. In fact, Ambedkar left Nehru's ministry saying that Nehru does not look very serious to get this Hindu code bill passed. Nehru had probably different ideas. What Nehru does in 1956, he basically breaks down the Hindu code bill into four parts and then get it passed. And in some ways, what we realize that the second axis of conflict in India is about whether the state is going to intervene and remake social norms. And there, what we do is sort of like reread Indian political thought and you may disagree with our reading of Indian political thought, but what we argue that Indian political thought differs from Western political thought on one key aspect. And the argument we make that in Western political thought, which is Hawks, Locke, Rousseau tradition, the argument is that the state is the primary agent which is going to make the society. In Indian political thought, from Ramayana, Mahabharata, Arsashtra, even Islamic scholars like Maududi and Sarhandi, Buddhists, everyone was writing about one thing, which is society is predominant. State cannot intervene to remake social norms. The job of the king is very simple. Maintain the social order. When can the reform come? The reform can come only through individuals, right? So state cannot introduce social reforms. It's the job of the society and religious leaders to be introduced those reforms. And if you look at Gandhi, this is what he was doing. Gandhi feared the state. He thought that state is going to basically, he thought state policies are violent, right? That's why Gandhi never talked about redistribution of property. He was talking about the concept of trusteeship, that the capitalist can come together and form a trust and run the system. So Gandhi thought state interventions are sort of violent. So these are the two axes. The first one is politics of recognition. And the second one is what we call as politics of statism. How you're going to recognize groups? And second, whether the state is going to intervene in social norms. Then we use data, like we have a theory, we want it to sort of like test it empirically. Because we, like most of us who have been studying India never thought about it. We never had good questions in our survey that can measure the ideological divide. But so what we do, we basically use all survey data that was available and find the best proximate question which captures what we think is the ideological divide. And in interest of transparency, we have like listed all the questions in the book that this was the question wording and how we have coded. So what I can show you from here, looking at 2004 and 2009 national election studies data, that there is indeed ideological divide on both the axes. You will find enough number of people on the extremes. Large majority, which happens everywhere, will be around the center. So this is ideological divide in 2014. You could clearly see that the BJP voters, the mean position of BJP voters is what we will call as right. The Congress and the smaller regional parties are on the center, and the left and the communist parties are on the left side of the spectrum, right? And then somebody can say, oh yeah, we all think that 2014 was a case of ideological divide because Modi was present. He's an ideological vanguard and you saw 2014 as an ideological divide. There are two pieces of evidence and allow me to convince you there. One, we had a question which basically asked, who are you, like whether you vote going to change depending upon whether Modi was the PM candidate or not. What we find that it made no difference to people who were sort of like right on the politics of recognition or social conservatives because they were anyway voting for the BJP throughout. What Modi does manage to do in 2014, he basically brought the people who were on the, like right on the politics of statism. So we had a question which sort of like measured something related to economic statism and Modi brings to manage that group of people within the BJP's fold. So the paper Pradeep and I wrote after 2014 that Modi manages to bring two extremes of like ideological conflict within the BJP's fold. I think it might be useful. Could you just give people an example of the sorts of questions that you use to define statism and recognition so they have a sense of how people would fall on that spectrum. Okay, so because each, so this data is from national election studies which is conducted by Lokniti CSTS in Delhi and each time in their surveys, they ask some like lots of questions. One question is on who are you going to vote? Who's going to be your PM candidate? But lots of measures on attitudes and behavior. So sometimes they do ask questions on do you support reservation policy for SCs? That becomes our question to measure politics of recognition. If you support affirmative action for schedule cast and ballots, you are going to be sort of, you are favoring politics of recognition which is sort of like left or Democrat here. And if you oppose affirmative action then you are opposing politics of recognition and you are right on our scale. Similarly for statism, do you support equal rights for sons and daughters to inherit the property? If you support equal inheritance right, you are in favor of statism, you are sort of like a left-leaning person. If you oppose equal inheritance, you are a right-leaning person for us. Does that help? So in each survey these questions, like so we don't have the same set of questions in each round of survey. So it's hard for us to compare and say whether the ideological polarization over years have increased or decreased. What we can point out through this survey is that this ideological divide has remained stable. So whatever questions we could get, we from 1967 to 2014, so we see a very, very similar pattern in all election surveys. In 1967, Bhartya Janshan and Swatantrita Party, voters of these two parties were on the right and if you look at lefts and socialists, they were on the left, right? Same in 1996, 2004, 2009. So what I'm trying to argue is that there is a ideological, I've given you information about the intellectual lineage of the ideological conflict in Indian politics and this slide basically shows you stability of that divide across five, six election cycles for which we have data. And this ideological divide is not just a domain of the rich or the privileged in India. You can see its resonance across Indian society like within the voting blocks of each party. So if you look at like, so what we did like in this graph, circle and the square represents, so square represents BJP and circle represents Congress. Even within upper caste, the Congress and BJP voters are different. Even within Dalits, the Congress and BJP voters are different. So a Dalit voting for BJP is more right compared to a Dalit voting for the Congress. And so the third element of our argument that ideology to structure party politics in India needs to be transmitted from elites to masses. And how does that transmission takes place? The literature has been talking about like manifesto, party activists, leaders acting as heuristic device, association, family networks, education, media exposure. So we have bell like robust literature from US and Western Europe on these four things. And in some ways we show that in our book as well. There are two new elements which we add to how transmission takes place. The first one is religious practice. So I think like the world survives because Indians pray a lot, right? If you look at religious practice data, like 60 to 70% of Indians practice religion on a daily basis, right? We have more, so census does count places of worship, we have more places of worship than schools plus hospitals combined in census 2011. And this is like consistent across census years. So it means like Indians participate in religious activities on day to day basis. It doesn't mean that the only way they participate is either praying at home or going to temple churches, mosques or Gurudwara. There's one important element of religious practice in India is basically very informal gatherings, right? Basically people meeting at homes and singing some songs, religious songs. And we think that's a very, very important aspect of religious practice. And Pradeep couple of years ago wrote a book on religious practice and democracy in India. And what we find people who practice religion are more sort of conservative on both our scales. And finally, and I think like this is a scary picture for many of us is that liberalism in India is driven by English speaking elites. And that's just like one or 2% of Indian population, right? That's the only segment of the population which speaks the liberal language and you can understand the kind of writings which is coming after Modi's victory in 2014, right? And what we did, it is basically, this is again, so we used 2004 data, 2004 NEA survey. And in that survey, there was a question about how well you speak English, fluent or something like that. So only five or seven persons had we speak fluent English. And that the second aspect was to look at that education. If you look at this graph, this graph basically shows that people who have high school and above education and they think that they speak good English are on the extreme left, right? Which is basically just two or 3% of Indian population today. If you look at people like everyone else, like it's sort of on the right side of the scale. And that's the scary part that the masses and the Indian elites are sort of like, the Indian masses seem to be very, very conservative. The final thing what we do in this book is we make an argument that ideological conflict has structured party system in India. So this is a stylized representation. What we show that India has with the rise of BJP in 2014 has entered into fourth party system. Now, how long that party system is going to survive depends on BJP's ability to then or losing 20, 19. If they loses, that would be a premature death of fourth party system. Otherwise we are going to have like a elongated period on that. So the first party system was 1950 to 67. Congress was the dominant party, sits right at the center. You had lots of smaller right-wing parties and then you have many regional parties. In 67, what happens, between 67 and 71, all these small right-wing parties, Hindu Mahasabha, Ram Raja Parishya, Swatil Chita Party, Bhartya Jalsang, they all get together in some ways or other. Basically, once Congress party breaks, the right-wing of the Congress party becomes the bridge between the Swatil Chita Party and the Bhartya Jalsang. And then the right starts like getting bigger and bigger. So when you come to that third party system, when they oppose Mandir commission recommendation for other backward classes, and they also sort of like Ram Mandir mobilization takes place, right starts getting bigger. And then what we see in 2014 is that now, like right is the biggest chunk of Indian political parties and they occupy a bigger space in Indian party system. The argument we make is that political parties have moved in this ideological space and that has structured the party system in India. Second thing what we do is that parties don't move by themselves, right? There should be someone who moves those parties and that someone is leaders who project themselves as transformational. I'm not saying they are transformational leaders because many of you may not like that, but leaders who project themselves as transformational, what they do, one, they can hold the organization together. Two, they can mobilize the voters. Three, they can increase the turnout for the party. And four, they offer a vision. You may not like that vision or ideology, but they offer that ideology, which holds the organization as well as draws in new voters. This is what Modi managed to do after 2014. They're continuously winning elections after elections. Like even in Rajasthan, where I think most journalists, which is like going to poll on 7 December, where most journalists are suggesting that BJP should lose, but everyone adds this line. Modi may still like bring in three or four additional vote, three or 4% of additional vote and it may switch direction. And that's the effect of leaders who project themselves as transformational. They can swing elections. So what has happened in Indian party system? The big story about India is Congress party has declined and it has declined slowly. And this is a structural decline. It's not declined by one leader. Everyone sort of talks about Rahul Gandhi and Indira Gandhi's leadership, but this decline has been slow and consistent. It's just going down the hill. And Milan wrote a very interesting article where what we know now is that once Congress party declines below 20% in a state, the chances of their revival in that state is very, very low, right? So Congress, so the first big story about the party system change in India is that Congress has consistently and slowly declined. The second story about Indian politics is that the BJP is basically rising. So even BJP's rise has been slow and continuous. What we want to sort of draw your attention to is that so far the argument about the decline of Congress party has been one, organizational weakness, two, leadership, and three, some groups leading Congress party. But if you look at like different states, in some states Congress party still has like substantial vote base. And in other places Congress has basically finished. And we ask the question, why do we see the state level variation? And in our case, the argument we make is that Congress party has basically is virtually sort of like I shouldn't call dead, but has declined to an extent that it won't revive in states where there are regional parties present, where Congress cannot distinguish itself ideologically. So Congress cannot distinguish itself ideologically in Uttar Pradesh, right? The biggest state of India, which offers like one in every six seats to the Lok Sabha. On reservation issues, Congress is no different from BSP or how is it going to mobilize votes? Similarly, in Tamil Nadu or in Bihar, regional parties occupy the same ideological position or space as Congress party. And that's why Congress cannot sort of like distinguish itself. Congress survives in states where BJP is present, right? So Congress is a big player in Rajasthan, in Madhya Pradesh, in Chhattisgarh, in Himachal and till 2015 in Delhi. And in all these states, Congress's biggest opposition was coming from BJP and Congress can distinguish itself from BJP. So if you look at from 1944, that was like the peak of Congress vote share and seats share after Mrs. Gandhi's assassination. Congress has declined in all state, but that decline is like most extreme in states where we have multiple state parties. Congress still gets 30% vote share and around like around 100 odd seats in states where BJP is present at its principal opposition party. What has happened in this decline of Congress party and this is a very like overlooked fact of Indian politics. So RSS or BJP as it exists today is it does not just composed of like Hindu nationalists. It has other elements also. B.D. Graham in his famous book on BJS basically asks a question which we try to answer in this book. The question was that in 1950s there were three kinds of Hindu groups present in Indian politics. The first was Hindu traditionalist inside the Congress party led by Patel. So Patel, Tandon, K.A. Munshi, those individuals within the Congress party. The second was Hindu nationalist which was within the RSS and the Bhartya Jalsang. And the third group was like orthodox Hindu groups like Ram Rajya Parishad, Hindu Mahasabha, right? And the big question Brahamas that in 1950s it was hard to predict which one of these groups are going to lead the charge of Hindu majoritarian politics in India. Today we know it's the BJS or BJP group, right? But what has happened over the years that these groups across that divide merges into BJP in 1980s and 90s. As Indira Gandhi moves Congress further on left on the statism and recognition the Hindu traditionalists keep on leaving BJP, keep on leaving Congress and the final blow comes after the Babri Masjid demolition and the final lot also moves with the BJP. In fact, like I remember like a lot of people see P.V. Narasimha Rao with the form of Prime Minister as the last Hindu traditionalist within the Congress party, right? So group, so Hindu traditionalist who believe in the time honored value of like Hindu politics. So not necessarily they are like anti-Muslim or they want to sort of like declare India like India should declare a war on Pakistan. They want that Hindu traditional belief should be dominating our state policy. They are very, very different from Hindu nationalists. So Savarkar follows the Hindu nationalist tradition whereas Patel and Patel, the group that followed Sardar Patel would be from Hindu traditionalist angle. So what we try to do here using 2004 survey data we show that even till 2004 like among Hindu voters those who we call as Hindu traditionalist Congress gets like equal proportion of vote. Congress basically never had the votes among like the Hindu nationalists. That was the sharpest divide. And if you look at like Congress party's own recommendation by A.K. Anthony, they fear that between 2004 and 2014 what we have managed to do is antagonize Hindu communities within our voting laws. And even that group has slowly left the Congress and BJP has got that. So now BJP is in power, fourth party system is underway. What are the challenges for the BJP going ahead? BJP is certainly the predominant party but basically they're going to face four challenges. The first one is since 2014, BJP is basically bringing in individuals, politicians, smaller parties within its fold to grow electorally. And this model basically resembles Indra Gandhi's model of 1970s basically bringing individuals. These are power seekers. They are just coming into a political party because they think that by getting BJP's nomination they are going to win election. Now that is fine as long as BJP remains electorally dominant what will happen when BJP starts losing elections. And that is going to create a big rift with BJP's ideological mentors and ideological projects. So that's one challenge where BJP needs to think about. The second is basically the social base of BJP is changing but its leadership is not. So Modi of course comes from a OBC community. But if you look at these two graphs what has happened between 1996 and 2017 the proportion of upper caste within the BJP's vote base has continuously declined. Whereas the proportion of other backward classes and SCSTs have slowly increased. So now what you have, there's a mondialization of BJP going on. You have more people from the lower strata voting for the BJP whereas its leadership structure its members of parliament, its chief ministers, its MLAs that is still dominated by the upper caste. So you are going to see a conflict where the lower caste within the BJP is going to ask for more positions of power and how they manage that thing is another challenge we believe in this. The third one is there is a delinking of ideological coalitions happening as we speak. And this delinking is going to sort of like create another challenge for BJP. What we see in the latest 2016 survey data is that you have urban youth who opposes reservation as a policy but they are not majoritarian in that sense. So in 1950s, 60s and 70s, Hindu majoritarians and people who were opposing reservation that was the same group. Today you will find a group going to liberal elite schools and colleges they oppose the policy of reservation but they are not anti-Muslim person. And so this delinking of ideological coalition is another challenge BJP is going to face. Also in that survey data, what we find that the youth shows at least some liberal tendency on marriage, dating and drinking, right? And BJP as a political party is against on all these things. And youth is also its biggest voting block. So that's the second contradiction in delinking of ideological coalitions BJP is going to face. Finally, what is going to happen after BJP after Modi? Transformation leaders or leaders who project themselves as transformational, they managed to hold on to these contradictions, right? When Modi is certainly more popular than the BJP and by his force of personality, Charisma and message, he's holding on to these contradictions. I do not know and it's like hard to think about when Modi goes, who would be the other leader who can manage these contradictions? So in some ways, how long the second dominant party system led by BJP is going to survive depends on how BJP is going to manage these contradictions after Modi's gone. They are doing certain things. They are building RSS schools in every block, right? And that may create some sort of leverage for them to have carters on the ground. But I really don't know how BJP is going to manage these contradictions. And the more successful they are in managing these contradictions, the easier it would be for them to deal with it. Finally, like the four big stories which is basically emerges from this book. One, this delinking of ideological space which I suggest is happening is going to reorganize the ideological space. And that means like we will have, we will see very new forces coming into our politics. The second thing which like on the patronage aspect which I didn't talk about a lot and I'm happy to answer questions on that. What we do think that competitive populism will continue in Indian politics. All political parties will offer things which will create fiscal pressures on the treasury. Third thing and which is a sad story about this ideological conflict is that because politics of statism is directly linked to family and time on our value on family, we think that the pace of gender reforms are likely to be slow, especially if the right continues to be in power. And you can see that in happening in the case of Sabri Malla, despite the court decision, the BJP and right-wing parties are opposing it. Finally, I think both things can happen and is happening in some way. So we also, we do see sharpening of the ideological divide which is leading to polarization. But what is the bigger worry here is that the ideological middle ground of Indian politics is shifting towards right. And you can see that in the response Congress parties using in this campaign, right? In Madhya Pradesh, Congress is trying to, I shouldn't say that, but in some ways Congress is talking the same language on cows mobilizing voters across river Narmada and they're promising they're going to build cows shelters. They're not nominating Muslims as candidates. So in some ways that BJP, what BJP has managed to do has shifted the ideological middle ground of Indian politics. Thank you so much. I'll be happy to answer questions that you have. Thanks, Rafa, that was terrific. I guess I'll start out with the question then we'll open it up. So I wanna ask you a question about the politics of statism, right? And I think the first question many people would ask is you make this claim that the BJP and Congress voters and leaders look very different when it comes to state intervention. But I think one of the biggest critiques of the Modi government is that in fact, they are just Congress plus cow, right? I mean, that was the famous line that Arun Shor used against them, that whether it comes to state-owned enterprises, public sector undertakings, whether it comes to pro-poor, pro-farmer rhetoric, whether it comes to doubling down on state intervention when it comes to social welfare, right? So the government came in claiming that it was going to dismantle a lot of the socialist quote unquote policies of the Congress, right to education, National Rural Employment Guarantee Program, all of these schemes that the Congress had set up during its 10 years in power from 04 to 2014. And in fact, they've done the opposite, right? They're now campaigning on the backs of these schemes. So is there really in practice an ideological difference when it comes to this question of the politics of statism as opposed to what gets talked about in 2014 on the election campaign versus where we are today? No, I thought like you might have. No, I mean, I have mothers, but I'll just start with that. Okay, so I do agree with what you're saying. The difference, I think what we have on that question is that we're making a claim that statism is about, so theoretically, statism is about state making policies on two or at least one space, which is like social policy and economic policy. And much of our focus, we have another paper where we do argue that economic left, right is going to emerge in Indian politics very soon. So far, when we talk about politics of statism, our focus has largely been on social norms, right? Basically, one political party uses the state power to intervene in social norms and remake society. BJP has so far opposed those things. Now, what they are going to do as a party in governance that will of course provide some evidence and that can also challenge the notion we have. But if you look at each step, whenever Congress party tried to remake society either through Hindu Code Bill, BJS members were sort of opposing, right? Even in late 70s and 90s, and this debate is not new. Like everyone sort of like wants these reforms. The classic debate between Bhopal Krishnabokhale in I think 1880 or something and Tadabhai Naroji, like the two factions of Congress party in 1880 was on the age of consent. And the age of consent was basically what is the age of like age for women to marry, right? And Britishers basically, the colonial government introduced that it should be like 14 or 16. And they both agreed on the principle that, yes, okay, the age limit should be raised, but Bhopal, so the debate was between Bal Gangadhar, Tilak and Gokhale. Tilak basically opposed saying that the government cannot make norms for social intervention. And this is what I'm trying to say, even on the triple talak bill, right? A person like OSU would argue that you cannot make, the state cannot make law. Let the society or the religious leaders come up with the law. So to answer your question in short, at least on social norms front, we do see a divide, right? BJP continuously opposed interventions in social norms on marriage laws, on Sati laws, on practice of Daabri. Anything that is to do with who people are going to marry, how they are going to marry, BJP stands against state interventions. So I have more, but why don't we open it up because I'm sure other people have questions. So if you could just let me know if you have a question to identify yourself and just use the mic since we are recording this so people are able to hear. Who wants to start? Tom. It is a very stimulating discussion with a lot of interesting things, most of which I think are very illuminating, but it also opens up some questions precisely the kind that Millen just asked. I mean, the first thing I had is your anti-statism who says it really doesn't refer to economics. But the more basic issue, and this is the one that's raised by you, is this may explain what's happened in Indian electoral politics, but the other point is that any government of India, any government of local states and so forth has to respond to a certain, what the Germans call Statzrazon, reason of state. There are certain things you have to do. You don't want riots. You don't want the foreign investors to run away. I mean, just see what the BJP did in Gujarat to get Parseetathas to come to them. So I'm just, one of the questions, and not only do states have that, that I think we're seeing, but powerful elites who have constituencies have it. So what I'm conscious of is whatever their private attitudes, the heads of major business families, the heads, the big, gradestani aristocrats, most of them react a little bit in terms of, to what extent their institutional, their and their clientele's institutional interests are being served. So I think, let me say that's, neither of these are at the level of the electorate. And I just wondered to what extent you can factor those in, that is if you will, the elements of reason of state, reason of institution. So I think more questions. Should we just take a few more? Anyone else have a question? Vijay. My question is what you spoke about is completely new to me. So going back in time in the 40s, I think Congress became de-party because of the freedom movement. And that brought them into power. And the reason why Congress, neither of you failed was because of poor governance and also the economy. So what part does governance and economy play in the future of both BJP and Congress? Let me take those. So I think all three questions are related. And I don't think I did a good job in explaining statism. So I agree with you Congress like was in power because came to power because it was a party of freedom movement. Scholars described it as a party of historical consensus because it was representing various ideas of it. And so that's why where we like, the intervention we are making here is that in 1950s, there were various ideas of India. One idea of India dominated that doesn't mean we never had either logical differences. What we are doing through this book is saying, don't get surprised in 2014 because you thought there was no right. The right always existed. It was growing. And in 2014, because many forces combined with it, it won the election, right? So that's the first answer that there were ideological conflicts happening. And at one point of time, one idea of one, the other point of time, the other idea of one. Now on the statism question, I absolutely agree with. I think like the reasons of the state is like a good point to get into this debate. So statism as a practice or as a policy also has a moral component. And that moral component is that I am going to use the levers of the state to remake the society and remake society in a way that everyone is going to benefit from it, right? Congress party uses the principles of statism to argue that this is what we are going to do. What happens in these 30 to 40 years when the state is used as an organ to intervene in both social policy and economic policy over a period of time, we create a system where state becomes really, really important for policy making. But what people also start seeing that this policy is only benefiting a certain section of society. The moral component of statism starts losing its character. And that's where I think like in 2014, people like Modi would come up and use the argument that state has become the province of only few and people who are associated with the family or with the Congress party. So that would be my half big response on this question. But I'll continue to think on that. Yeah, Nivrkar. Hi, I'm Caroline from the Truman Project and going off of this question about statism, what do you say about, there's the BJP, the political wing of the Hindu nationalist group of organizations, but then there's the RSS and the social organizations and they are in a sense, if the BJP is retracting from this approach of the government remaking society, these other organizations that are connected to them are with social welfare, with healthcare, with schools. So how does that fit into this? Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, my name is Abhilash. I go to American University here and I guess the question I want to ask in terms of competition within statism is that in India you see over the last few years there's been a rise in number of protests at level of farmers or protests in terms of people demanding reservation in government jobs. And that's usually a sign of, or I see that as a sign of unemployment. Because then people turn to state like, hey, you guys got to employ us. And that's been on the rise and that has been creating some competitive pressures within the BJP, I sense. And at least I'm from Jharkhand, I'm a shaper. And at least in the circuit there, I see that more. And so that's one question that how do you see that a playing out and be some other party potentially taking advantage of it? So what do you see, for example, in the period between 96 and 98 when neither the BJP nor the Congress was strong enough so that a range of third-front parties started gaining a lot of seats for the couple of years? And lastly, just to add a comment, we are talking about how BJP manages the contradictions of having an increased Dalit base and et cetera. Prashant Jha, the Hindustan Times guy, he had written a book last year about how BJP wins and he had an interesting anecdote about BJP and UP where Amit Shah does an internal survey and realizes that although they don't have enough lower caste members in positions of power, so they did the classic co-optation where they just created a whole bunch of positions to bring these guys into power within the party and not upset the upper caste as well. So do you think these are the sort of things that might play out a little more over the next couple of years? Thank you. Thank you for these questions. So yes, I think on the BJP expansion part, this will play out more, right? Anywhere, so this is a classical political science thing, right? The job of a political party is not to unite. The job of the political party is to divide. That's how they exist in the society. If you want to know the etymology of this word, it comes from the Latin word, two part, right? So political parties grow by dividing constituencies and so you and I may have a different, we may not agree with BJP's politics, right? But all political parties do this, right? Basically, they see a voting block and they see what the wedge can be, like the wedge that can be drawn and that's how they create constituency. So BJP did that in UP, will continue to do in other parts of India, that's how BJP will grow, right? And as I showed you that graph, BJP is going to face this pressure, where more lower caste are voting for it compared to upper caste, but they don't have positions of power and this conflict would happen in some ways or other. I also agree with you, but I didn't get what the question was there. Is more and more groups are going to ask for reservations, right? But can you think of a, like someone from Congress party saying the same thing as Nitin Gadkari said in the House on Reservation, which is basically here, he said that, okay, all groups are asking for reservations, but there are no jobs, what will you do with reservations, right? So in some ways, BJP does not actively advocate politics of reservation or favors reservation for one group. The limited argument I'm making that on the question of reservations, Congress has used that as a political strategy to sort of favor reservations for groups. BJP, of course, you cannot oppose every time, right? You are in politics to gain power. So BJP in 1989, once it senses that OBCs are such a big block, all they can do is one, remain silent, and two, if they have to oppose it, oppose like through other moves, openly you cannot make claims against OBCs. You're going to lose elections, right? So apart from like, there are three elements for politicians and political parties, right? One of them, only one of them is ideology, right? You may have ideological and policy platforms. The second one is to seek power and a politician has to always balance that out, right? So on the, and I think like this pressure, economic pressures of no jobs is going to sort of like become a big electoral issue in 2019. How Modi and BJP manages to convince that we have not been able to do much on that when reflecting board shares of BJP in 2019. So on the question of triple talak and statism, BJP in retreat. Not everyone may be familiar with triple talak. Can you just give like a 10, 15 second background? So triple talak is a practice among Muslims, I think in South Asia, is that the husband and wife can get divorced by just saying the word talak, talak, talak three times. And that is considered like an element of the marriage. And you may hear horrific cases of like these three words were said on WhatsApp or SMS or on phone. You don't even need to be present to say these words. And so what BJP government sort of like did come into power in 2014 using court and other thing that this practice of talak, triple talak has been made illegal, right? Now someone would argue that BJP is using the power of the state. Yes, it is using the power of the state, but issues also changes characters. So when Hindu court bill debate starts in 1950s, it was a debate about state intervening in social norms. Now how is right going to react to this that you have done for them to us? You have intervened in our social norm, now intervening in all other forms. You cannot only like the change has happened, right? So why does BJP now takes or propagates that we should have a uniform civil code? Because they know when you are going to create one code, it would be the code that is going to be accepted to the majority and the majority in India is Hindu. So uniform civil code is going to have Hindu characteristic, right? So what I'm trying to say on that question, it is basically becoming more from stateism to also recognition. Even if you look at part of our agitations in 2016 where Patel's and Gujarat were asking for the reservation. Journalists after journalists in their reports are saying one thing, that demand for reservation had a subtext that, and there is an interview where Hardik Patel who was the leader of this movement says that either make us the slave of the system which is basically give us the reservation or scrap it for everyone else, right? Politics of recognition is basically about recognizing the needs or group based inequalities and treating them that way, giving them, like accommodating them in body politics. What people like Hardik Patel would say that flatten those identical differences across the group and the policies should be very, very similar for everyone. You should not treat groups differently. On the question of, on the question of stateism, what we are basically trying to say, of course, if you are running an ideological project and which is what we are doing is a slide of a hand, but we do argue that in our case, ideological conflict in states like India where the nation and state is being created overnight, right? In 1947, we become from a post-colonial state to an independent nation state. You are doing two things in one night. You are trying to recognize who is an Indian and what is the state going to do. So ideological conflict in Indian politics or in post-colonial world is going to be about who captures the state, right? When you are going to create a state which is like a constitutional legal authority that was never seen in these places before, the job of any political party or ideological project is going to capture that power, right? Because through that power, you can remake the society according to your ideological project. That's the argument I'm trying to make. Thanks. Any others? Yeah, please. Thank you, Jerry Hyman, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as you'll be able to see from my question, I am not an India scholar, so this may be completely stupid, but you began by saying that there are, the West talks about left, right, and those are not the proper categories to analyze Indian politics or Indian ideological divisions. Rather, it's politics of recognition, of politics of stateism. So two questions. One is, you kept talking about left and right, nevertheless, as you kept going. And initially I thought you said, the more power you wanna give to the state to remake social norms, the more you are, quote, right. And I wasn't sure if that continued to be the definition of left and right as you went on in your talk and or whether you were just using left and right to talk about your axis. So I didn't know whether left and right, as you went through, and you kept using left and right regularly, was whether it was a description of your graph or whether it was an ideological description. So that's one question. And the second is, I wonder how you deal with, and maybe this was the stateism issue, the shift from essentially state-owned enterprises and the state controlling, and this on the economic side, controlling almost all of the levers of distribution and markets and so on and so forth under Congress. But even as Congress moved on less and less that way and to a more market-driven economy with less intervention by the state, is that part of your politics of stateism? Because you said the stateism dimension you wanted to argue about was social norms and things like divorce and so on and so forth. How does that work out on the economic side? Because that shift toward a more market began with Congress, not with the BJP. So how does that economic, I mean, I guess you could argue, sorry to keep going like this, but I guess you could argue that free markets as opposed to less statism, you wanna take the state out of the economic decisions more and more and you wanna leave them to the market or if you wanna put it that way, social norms. But that all, again, that all began under Congress. It continues now, but how do you, how does that fit into your scheme? There may be dumb questions. No, not at all. Vikram, you wanna? Thanks, I'm Vikram Nehru from Johns Hopkins University and first of all, let me just say I found this presentation very, very compelling, very interesting and very insightful, but I'm gonna follow up from what Jerry just said. I think to my mind, this entire discussion has been clouded by your choice of the term, statism. According to me, every political party has to define what it believes should be the role of the state along different dimensions, either economic or social or sociological or whatever. And therefore, what you've defined really is the politics of government intervention in social norms, the politics of government intervention as far as different groups of society are concerned, reservations and so forth, and you've chosen to ignore the politics of intervention in the economy, which is a third dimension and presumably there are other dimensions. And in each of these, there is a clear left and right. I mean, the left would be greater intervention, the right would be less intervention and that's in a sense very similar to the debate that occurs in every society, in every democratic society. So you're sitting up of the Western sort of, the Western debate as the straw man I thought was a straw man. It really doesn't exist. You were repeating very much the debates in the West and applied them to India, but seemed to apply different terms, which to my mind tended to confuse the issue rather than clarify them. I just wanted your reaction to that. Great, should we take one more? Karthik? Yeah. Thanks, I mean, my question is similar along the side to a gentleman here. I feel like you're trying to set up the binary here between sadism and recognition. Is there anything else that matters, that can go in here or that can go alongside it? To me, I just find there are a lot of other factors that could also sort of capture the complexity of Indian politics. And just sort of a quick other question. To me, I still, I mean, I kept calling implicitly at least because you didn't say it. You're trying to target the patronage argument, right? And for some reason, that argument just seems more valid to me today than anything else. Could you just clearly state why you think that that doesn't work now? It hasn't worked as well as it has in the past? Thanks. Why patronage politics doesn't explain Indian party systems? Okay. Yeah, the conscientious argument. Three very small questions. But no, thank you for those questions. And I think like, I apologize if I wasn't like, I was building a strawman argument. And that's not the intention at all. Like the one idea, which I'm not conceding grounds here, the idea is to begin a conversation on ideological conflicts, no grounds. I'm not conceding in that. But what I'm trying to say is this, like I do argue one, Indian politics is complex, probably we should have thought about more dimensions, but unfortunately, two by two is complex enough, going further would have been much more complicated. But we'll continue working on that. Hopefully we'll manage to do something. On statism, I see why, like, and it's my mistake, I should have been sort of like more prepared for questions on statism, but that's where it's for the spot. But getting back to this question. So I do agree that there is something, because what we are looking at, this whole politics of statism of last five, seven, 10 or 20 years of Indian politics. If you look back Karachi Resolution 1931, if you look at the objective resolution in 1946, when Nehru moves the Constituent Assembly speech, there was a consensus among freedom fighters of India that the state has to take the burden of poor, right? There was no debate, the Vekchipur locked in place. There was no, like there was, I wouldn't say that a large number of people argued that we should have a free market economy or a market-based economy. There was an agreement that given our society is so poor, the state needs to take care of that burden. Nehru's first sentence to the members of the Constituent Assembly was that the, like we have to sort of like feed the hungry and clothe the naked, right? That's how the objective resolution speech began. In a way that was like one consensus that the state has to do, like bear the economic burden. What I do agree with, like this would be a bad argument to make, Congress Party, when it is doing something in 1991 is not doing because of like some ideological left or right thing, they're making that move of liberalization under constraints, right? There is a crisis and that decision is being taken under crisis. That being said, and this is what we are trying to do in this book, because on economic policies, parties don't differ. We think that Indian politics is non-ideological. This is what we are trying to sort of like, when you see Western versus Indian binary, what we are trying to do is that economic left, right is not the only ideological divide that structures party politics everywhere in the world, right? In India, like every political party that would come to par will have to be welfareist in some ways. You could call it politics of freebies, but if they don't cater to the needs of 60 to 70% of population, it is an electoral society. So whether it's Modi or it's Congress Party, everyone is going to expand on the social welfare program. And this is what we are trying to do here, that economic left, right dimension is not the only conflict that sort of like makes up the ideological conflict. But you're saying something slightly different than that. You're saying it's not the only one, but it's also not much of a conflict because they kind of agree on those things. We do like very in the first chapter, we do make this claim that for a long period of time, this was not the case. We do see emergence of economic left, right in Indian politics and probably this is going to become much more pronounced in this election and next election. See, in 1991, middle class in India was 6% of the population. Who are you going to mobilize, right? You can't play anti-farmers politics and anti-rural, anti-poor politics. Since 1991 and in 2014, the size of the middle class has increased sixfold. Right now you have 24 to 25% within the middle class population. What I'm trying to say is that since the dawn of independence first party system till say 1990s or 2000s, economic left, right was not a big divide. It may be emerging and this is one more contradiction which BJP will have to deal with. On the patronage argument, the devil is elephant is in the room, so I need to, yeah. So the argument, we make a very simple argument on the patronage, right? And we have a serious disagreement. We think patronage and clientelism has become a belief system. So now it's basically about beliefs, right? Whether you believe in it or not. We give as much arguments and evidence we can to support our claim. You may disagree with that because what has happened on the patronage, clientelism thesis, it rests on a very simple, like there is a central element of that theory. The central element is quid pro quo, right? You give me vote, you give me money or something and I'll vote for you. On patronage, clientelism thesis except the city of Buenos Aires and Argentina, I don't think from India, anyone has evidence of that central thesis, right? So until you show me evidence on that, I'm not going to believe that argument. But there is some agreement, like I think what is happening in Indian politics and not just us, new evidence sort of supports the claim we are making. So yes, money flows in Indian elections, liquor and saris get distributed and voters do reach out to local level politicians for help. They all basically take benefits from the state, right? So all these things are happening but none of this is tied to the vote, right? So all political parties distribute free weeks or welfare policies, how am I, right? I'm basically receiving hundreds of benefits across five years and I have one vote, right? So all evidence points out to that I will take money whoever is giving money, right? Even like from election commission, like survey research, journalist on the ground, ethnographic research, all points to one thing. Like voters are saying, Karthik is giving money, I'm happy. I'll take from Karthik, Milan is giving me money, I'm happy, I'll take money from everyone, I'll vote according to my opinion, right? So if vote is not tied to me receiving a gift, then there's no vote buying happening, right? But what is happening is like a game of poker where the system as that has developed that everybody has to sort of chip in money to play the game, right? So because you don't take care of these voters for five years at the beginning of the game, put in your like money and at that point, I agree, all these things are happening. There is no evidence on vote buying. If there was evidence on vote buying, every other evidence which is coming from election studies would be contradictory. If you could have bought vote, then incumbents in India should have been getting at a higher re-election, we have less than 50% chance of an incumbent getting re-elect. Incumbents always have more resources. They should be winning more re-elections. I would say America is a patronage democracy because we have 90% re-election there, right? No one writes about Chicago machine as a patronage democracy in Chicago. So now for me, it's a belief system. I stand on the other side of the line. We have time, well, lots of hands went up. Okay, we have like three minutes. So why don't we just like rapid fire just, you know, and we'll give Rahul 30 seconds to respond, but yeah. Yeah. Oh, there we go. Thank you. Bill Primoge from Montgomery College and I'm hesitant to ask a question because I'm not an India expert either, but I do teach international relations and I always touch on India in my discussions. But I'm trying to figure out how the 200 million Muslims in India fit into your analysis and particularly why they would find any appeal from the BJP, which I quoted here. You talked about trying to BJP, trying to have a uniform civil code with Hindu characteristics. And how do they fit into this analysis? And it would seem to me, just as someone who does know a lot about India, that this is going to really intensify identity conflict in India, particularly between Muslims and Hindus. And you see this identity conflict being intensified in a lot of different countries. And but this would seem to, and if Muslims in India are following what's happened in the Middle East or in Bosnia or in France or in Germany or Britain, is this inevitably leading to some kind of conflict in India between Muslims and Hindus? Maybe we should just take that an end. So we took two minutes and I'm here. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, it's a good question. Join the club. I struggle as much as you do to understand India. So, and this is a fantastic question. So I recently wrote a small piece on the Muslim voters of the BJP. We have this idea that Muslims do not vote for BJP at all. There are people, like even in the United States, eight to 10% of African Americans continuously vote for the Republican Party. Similarly, in India, over surveys, we do find four to 8% of Muslims voting for the BJP. So I looked at the characteristics of these Muslim voters of the BJP. So where I think like there is a similarity. So Muslim BJP voters are, of course, more educated, more urban, they're also more, like from Shia community they get more votes. So the idea is this, like there are Muslims in India who would share basically this idea that the state should not be intervening in social life. The state should not be telling us who we can, we cannot let. Similarly, there are Muslims who oppose politics of reservations or affirmative action, right? And they might be voting for the BJP. So we have one chapter in the book, which is basically, so we thought about the counter arguments as much as we could. So on politics of recognition, like one of the counter arguments could have been is that it's not ideological. It's basically upper-caste Hindu prejudice against Muslim health and tribal. We could have make another strawman argument. That's the same in case of United States. It's a white prejudice against African-Americans, but affirmative action here gets part of ideological conflict. So we did a whole big survey experiment in UP with 15,000 voters, where we basically gave cues of prejudice as well as policy conflict. And we do find that it's not like Muslims like affirmative action. They also oppose affirmative action on many grounds and those might be moving for the BJP. Does that, okay, thank you. I'm afraid the time is up, but Rahul's agreed to stick around for a while. So if you have questions and weren't able to ask it, please do meet with him. And as I mentioned, his excellent book, which I think you all got a little taste of is available for sale. For those of you who are non-India experts but are interested, there are two chapters in particular. I think they're chapters nine and 10 on the Congress and the BJP, which are very useful primers for understanding these two parties, how they've evolved, and kind of sets up, I think, the 2019 election, even though that may not have been the intention very well. So thank you, Rahul, for coming. And please join me in thanking Rahul for his talk. Thank you.