 There's also a deepening of those old fault lines of caste, of gender, and in a way there are sort of grotesque new manifestations of it. One example, of course, is the flogging in Oona, and would you say that with all these new distortions of what Indian culture is supposed to be about, obviously those old fault lines are only going to be deepened. I'm not quite sure what fault lines means, but caste and so on. Yeah. No, you see this idea of Hindutva maintains that India is Hindu. This is the country of Hindus. The Christians, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs will be tolerated. The Muslims are our enemies. All these people are outsiders, but we will tolerate the Christians and the Buddhists and the Sikhs, but the enemy, which is Muslim, has to be told where his place is. If he's going to live in this country, he's here on sufferance. So that's the situation, and the fault lines certainly are deeper there. There's another fault line under this Hindutva, and which is developing, and I brought that into my book, The Dalits, because Hinduism, as we know, is responsible for many crimes, but for two great crimes. One is Sati, and the other is untouchability. And what is happening today, there's a kind of cow mania set in motion by the ruling party, where there's supposed to be cow rakshaks who are supposed to protect the holiness of the cow. And the Dalits recently rose up and declared, and it was a big uprising, nothing small, no little minor revolt, saying, the cow's your mother, you look after her, you deal with her, and they will not lift cow carcasses anymore. They made that quite plain. So there are this kind of fault lines which are raising a revolt of this kind among certain sections of people, the Dalits primarily, and this would have, I think, delighted the heart of Mahatma Gandhi and of Ambedkar. You know, to spoke about the political earlier, I also should have added the ideological, because one of the very strong threads running through this novel is, of course, something that a lot of us are remembering these days, which is the German example. So you actually have a character, a German who's in India, and says, well, our past is your future, and your novel suggests that it is all already here. Can you talk a little about this parallel? You take it actually beyond the nation theory. It's a masculinist kind of narrative. It implies eugenics. It implies ethnic cleansing. Would you talk about this parallel? Yeah, you see, the reason that I have brought German comparison is partly based on fact, because, well, let me begin by saying that the Hindu Mahasabha was the ancestor of the BJP, of the RSS. There was no RSS back in 1925, 26, when the Hindu Mahasabha was founded. But it's the same thing. It's descended from that mentality, and the Hindu Mahasabha was greatly enamored of the rise of dictatorship in Europe. I think in the 1920s, maybe Hitler was not yet in the saddle, but Mussolini was. And so representative of this Hindu Mahasabha had even gone to Italy and met Munje. I put him in the book. He had gone and met Mussolini, and Mussolini had advised him that from childhood the mind must be trained for war, must be prepared for war. So why? Because the Hindu Mahasabha had always believed that Mahatma Gandhi was a bad event in India because he emasculated the Indians through his non-violence. He weakened them. He made them a no-good lot, you know. And that memory must be obliterated. That's why in Athuram Godse killed Gandhi because that had to be wiped out. We had to become a militant nation. And the connection between the European dictatorships and the Hindu Mahasabha was very strong. And those were their icons. So that's why I brought in this German character. With variations. At the end he says, of course, there are Indian variations. No, no, no. But it's true. The point is that there are historical parallels. And because a lot of people will sort of defend the lack of parallel in a literal way, I think it's important to point out that, of course, for example, we have caste. You know, there it was race, maybe. So these variations, and in fact, the eugenic parallel, recently there was a suggestion. No, but talking about caste, the director of cultural information, cultural transformation in my book, he says caste is a beautiful thing, you see. Because through caste we have developed skills, you know. And we have refined skills to a great extent because of caste being carried from generation to generation. So he is, they are forecast. And they are for outcasts, you know, the untouchable must remain so. But as far as eugenics are concerned, there was, under the Nazi rule, there was this experiment in eugenics to produce a superhuman race of Nazis, future Nazis, who would rule the world. Arians. Arians. And, you know, Hitler's slogan, when he began invading Czechoslovakia and Austria and so on, his slogan was Europe today, tomorrow the world. And in order to rule the world, there had to be a superhuman race made up of Europe's master race, which would be the Aryan race. And there was, of course, no such thing. So it had to be produced through a scientific experiment where the, the, a certain type, the blonde, white skinned, blue-eyed, blue-eyed type had to be produced. And so men and women, you know, in this experiment had to mate and those children were kept in Nazi homes and so on. So I brought that on. But I was amazed while I was writing this book, there was an article, a small item in the newspapers, which said that, that there was some kind of experiment for Aryanization, which had been begun in India. That's right. I read about that somewhere and I couldn't believe that this was happening. In fact, a lot of, you know, fun was made of it on the social media. Sad fun, let me say. It was sort of a tragic comic, a picture of a young white man saying that, you know, this is the kind of Hindu offspring we should produce. Nathara, I wanted to, in a time when writers, filmmakers, artists, the cultural fraternity is vulnerable to being hounded. In fact, as you've said, even to being shot. But the whole range from self-censorship to murder, I think it's important to revisit what you've said throughout the book and, of course, in your real life. You returned your Sahitya Academy Award in 2015. You spoke up against the emergency earlier and so on. That art has to be political, that it has to take sides. I think we'd like to hear from you on this. You see, we are all political in the sense that we live in a political environment. Just as we live, the human race has different kinds of natural environment. So we have had different kinds of political environment. And I think human beings growing up in a particular environment, then react to that or their lives are affected, I should say, by that political environment. That's what I meant when I said we are all political. But certainly writers have not only not avoided it, but they have not been able to avoid it. Writers like Pinter, like Arthur Miller, like all the great Latin American writers whose writing has been political and it has lasted for that reason. That it is reflecting a universal theme within its own context and the human cost of that particular environment. So how can even the feminist movement have used the word political? That the personal is the political. So there's no avoiding the political.