 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I'm Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha. 75 years ago on the 15th of August 1947, India became politically independent after nearly two centuries of British colonial rule. In this edition of this program, I discuss what happened then, what is happening today? We look back and look at the present and maybe look forward as well with a senior journalist and author, a person who's won many hacks in his life, who was barely nine years old when the country became independent. He was born on the 22nd of December 1938. Welcome Prem Shankar Chah. Thank you Paranjoy. And a brief introduction to you born in Bihar in Patna, educated at some of the most well-known, the elite educational institutions, Dhul School Dharadun, St Stephen's College, University of Delhi, Modeling College, University of Oxford, worked with the United Nations Development Program, joined the leading English daily newspapers in the southern times. The Times of India, Economic Times in senior positions, was a media advisor to Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, has been a consultant and a member of various international committees and national committees, author of several books, including books on India, China and touch me, visiting professor, scholar at several Indian and international educational institutions. Thank you so much once again Prem. You were barely nine years old. So your memories of the 15th of August 1947 must be very vague or very fuzzy, but surely as a young man you knew or you understood what quote unquote freedom, what these words meant independence. So if you look back what happened 75 years ago and look at where we are today, let me have your initial remarks of where this country has traveled in the last three-fourths of a century. Paranjeev, first I don't know whether to thank you or to do the opposite for, embarrassing me with your list of my educational and other so-called achievements. I didn't have much to do with it. Actually I was very fortunate, I was among the fortunate, but I will say one thing that I was conscious of being an extraordinarily fortunate, very young person at that time. And my only desire throughout even when I was in the UN and in New York and then in Damascus and Syria was one day to just get back to India and work, work meant being working in India. And I'm glad I've came back and I have, in spite of everything that's happened, I have not regretted one instant of the last 75 years or after I came back the last 55 years. If you want me to sort of give you a one-line statement on what you said and I think I can do it, it is to say that I am profoundly disappointed and I would say I'm close to despairing for the future of our country. So the promises that or the hopes, the promises I should say, the hopes that many people had including you, when after 1947, during the tenure of the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, they seem to have been completely dashed today. For the present regime, the Narendra Modi government, which has been in power for more than 70 years, Jawaharlal Nehru seems to be a very, very dirty word, a dirty name. How come? Yes, Paranjee, I think I don't want to leap straight from 47 to today. Will you allow me to sort of say a few things in between? Yes, I was very proud of Nehru's India. I was fortunate enough to have met him as a college student, first on Republic Day in 1957 and then at Oxford in 1960. I was both thrilled by him and also I must tell you when I met him in 1960, somewhat disappointed by him because the Nehru we met in 1960 was tired and was beyond his prime in many ways. I think just too much responsibility for too long. But whatever, I think that the tragedy is we had so many ideals and we actually started so rightly. I mean, the Constitution is about as ideal as possible, much more important than that. It is unique in the sense that it has created a framework within which something like 15 or 30 major ethno-national groups which made up India before were able to come together and form one modern nation state without any resort to violence. If you look at Europe, there's not a single nation state that has been formed there without violence. In fact, violence was the tool of the formation of the nation state. We managed to do this in India through consultation, through a long struggle, a unifying struggle against the British tragically marred by partition but not brutally destroyed. And having done that, having created this extraordinary, versatile and diversified diverse country, diverse secular country, democratic country, we have managed by series of short-sighted decisions taken by a succession of administrations starting from the very earliest days of our independence. We have managed to bring ourselves to a position where today we are a country without law. We are a country without any kind of self-respect. We are a failed economy. We have 100 million young people, more than 100 million who have given up looking for jobs. At this moment, we are in such a terrible situation that 38 million people, 20 million of them daily laborers have lost their jobs in the last four months. So to say that I'm disappointed with our performance, it would be an understatement. You talked about how India, one of the biggest strengths of India was the fact that it was so plural. It was so heterogeneous. We're the only country in the world with 17 languages in our currency node, including English, which is not in the age schedule of the constitution, which has 21 languages. In terms of culture, in terms of every conceivable way, we are arguably the most diverse country in the world. Yet, we see in the recent past an attempt to make it India homogeneous. The Rashtriya Swam service goal of creating a Hindu state because 80% of Indians are Hindus or are supposedly Hindus. How to see this transition from heterogeneity to attempts at making India a kind of a homogeneous country? Attempts, I say. It's a semi-literate attempt to turn the clock of history backwards, to make it run backwards. The ideas that Savarkar began with, I have no complaint about those ideas because they were the ideas of 1925. And they were very appropriate at that time. That was the height of the nation state period. If you wanted to make a nation state in India, you would naturally think of the way that nation states were created in Europe. The fact that India was not amenable to that was yet, it was too soon to tell at that time. We've learned in the last 50 years that that was not the right way to go. And in fact, the right way to go was, in fact, to make a unity out of diversity as we succeeded in doing between 1947 and 1957. But the fact that Savarkar was wrong does not make him some kind of an evil person or anything. It is the way it's been interpreted today, 75 years later, that world of the nation state is gone. Look around you. It's a globalised world. And to try and go back to creating a nation state which in any case impossible, let's face it, with the kind of diversity we have and the way that our Afro nations have learned to use this diversity and to establish themselves and to assert themselves, you cannot go back. You can break up India completely, which is the direction that the BJP RSS are going in, but you will never be able to make it into a single homogeneous country. That is a completely impossible dream. So I think that we are facing a situation where a crisis of identity of India as a single nation is what they're driving us towards. That was very well expressed. You've been an economist. You've studied economics. A lot of your articles deal with the political economy and the economy of this country. You talked about India today being a failed economy. You've talked about the large numbers of young people who are unemployed or given up looking for a job. You've talked about people who've lost their jobs in the recent past. Now when you look at, you know, sort of the transition of the Indian economy from the so-called Nehruvian model to Indira Gandhi's so-called socialist model, and we move on to Narasimha Rao 1991, the 30 years ago period of liberalization. And today, over the last few years under Narendra Modi, what has been the transition to the economy? At one level, they're very right-wing in their views. They want to sell off the public sector. They want to privatize as many as PSUs or public sector undertakings as possible. At the same time, this is the same, this is the same regime which talks about atman nirvarta, which is self-sufficient. What are your comments? Well, they, you know, they don't know their elbow from their shoulder. There's a, there's a, there's a crude, a different phrase for this. I'm not going to use it, but let's say they don't know their shoulder from the elbow. They don't really, they don't know what they're doing at all. They have absolutely no idea what they're doing in the economy today. The problem with the, in the economy at this moment, or has been since 2011, how do you revive the growth that took place between 2003 and 2011? First of all, that growth was killed. It had, it would have revived automatically and continued. It did revive. When, in 2009, when the global economic recession followed the financial crash of 2008, Dr. Manmohan Singh called in the Reserve Bank of India, the chairman, and told him that he must lower interest rates. And against his will somewhat, the chairman, the, the president, what do you call it, the governor, the Reserve Bank agreed. The governor agreed. And for two years after that, we had, the fear with, always was inflation if we, if we allow the demand to, to run away. In fact, for two years, we had a 12% growth rate of industry and a 1% inflation rate. But into, in 2012 again, 2010 and 11, the RBI for its own reasons, again, began raising interest rates. And from that point onwards, they kept raising them continuously to 2016, for five years. And the, there's no economic logic behind what they did. Because they kept citing an inflation that didn't exist. Inflation was being measured in India by the cost of living and not by the state of demand. The cost of living index in India, 60% of it reflects the shortages in infrastructure, housing, transport, travel, education that we have at which keep pushing these prices up. Not in excess of demand. Only 8% of that cost of living index actually is an area in which this you can clearly see rising, rising for the rebound. So having done that, they pushed up interest rates when the economy was already slackening and there was worldwide recession and the economy has just continued to crash. This began in the, in Manmohan Singh government period, I must say, and Modi took advantage of it. But Modi has made it worse and worse and worse and worse. In fact, if I'm just interrupting you, you talked about recession. For the first time in the history of this country, in the six months starting on the 1st of April 2020, India went through what some describe as a technical recession. We had negative growth in two sets of quarters. And for the full financial year, there was negative growth. And even now, whether it's Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Finance Minister Nirmala Sita Raman government officials, they keep talking that the worst is over, the Indian economy is going to revive and some people say this is going to be a v-shaped kind of a recovery. Are you as optimistic? Are you optimistic in this regard? I just briefly mentioned what I read today in the standard, I think a few days ago, the latest estimate by the CMIE, 38 million jobs have been lost. Workers jobs have been lost in just the last quarter. 28 million, 20.3 million of these were daily workers. We have 42% of our workforce, non-agricultural workforce today consists of casual labor. You're defined as being employed if you have as few as three days of work in a month. The 6% unemployment rate that we have today and still is now risen beyond that, but we don't know the latest figure is for people who have absolutely no jobs, not even one day a month. That is not the European definition of unemployment, but the European definition of unemployment, we have a 40% unemployment rate. That's how bad the situation is. When you are a casual worker, what is your job security? What happens to if you're ill? What happens to you if someone dies? What happens if you have to go home suddenly? What happens if you don't get work three days in a row? How do you live for the fourth day? Degree of insecurity in which human beings are living in India is, I think, unparalleled. There have been thought periods of war Afghanistan, of periods of family drought sub-Saharan Africa, but continuously, consistently, and as a result of the government's own policies, no working class, no population of a country have been as systematically reduced to helplessness and penury as in India. Don't take the GDP figures into account, just because the overall figure just tells you the total GDP, but the way that differentials have widened. I live in Godfrey, another elite thing that I have. Next to me are three houses where each house has three Mercedes and BMWs parked in front of it. The whole of this company is like that. I mean, what you're saying is inequalities of income and wealth have grown rapidly, the stock markets are moving, the rest of the economy is in a mess. What we see oligarchs and crony capitalists doing rather well, while the rest of the economy is in a terrible shape. Yes, absolutely. I don't, as a rule, use terms like oligarch and crony capitalists because they have so many meanings that they've been, it says, overused. But the truth is that we have our own version of economic oligarchs in India and they have got, we are extraordinarily rich and they have not the faintest shame about their wealth. That bothers me. More than anything else, that bothers me. There is not the faintest sense that we owe something to the people around us. They're blind to misery. Let me change topics a little bit. You know, in between June 1975 and March 1977, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, imposed an emergency. We know what happened in March 1977. She lost power. She, of course, returned to power, but that was in January 1918. A lot of people argue that what we have been seeing today or what we are going through at present is a kind of unwritten, unspoken emergency. Do you agree with this view? If so, why would you say this is an unwritten or unspoken kind of an emergency? It is an ongoing emergency in the sense that it is a time in which all laws that were passed, enacted and enshrined in the constitution to ensure the freedom of citizens have been systematically changed in order to give draconian powers to the central and state governments to put anyone in jail for any reason or even without reason as long as they like with no hope of coming out. Now, that they do not use this more is only because if you go beyond a certain point, you will provoke a sort of a violent reaction. The point is they want to use democracy to destroy democracy and in democracy, so long as people have the illusion that they can change things by dissenting with the government and power, they will not take up arms. So you will not in fact start putting enough people in jail and for or doing worse things than that to destroy this illusion. That is the only boundary left today. So what you're arguing is what we have today is like an illusion of democracy and even in the mid-70s, Indira Gandhi was accused of undermining institutions, whether it be the judiciary, whether it be the civil service, but do you see the institutions that are supposed to safeguard uphold democracy having been systematically weakened in the recent past, in the last seven years and a little longer? So would you like to elaborate if this is indeed the situation? Well, we haven't got to quite the stage where democracy has become an illusion because we, for example, you would not be able to talk like this and I would not be able to write the way I do if it had become an illusion. But we are clinging on to the democracy that is left because the ruling powers are afraid of shattering the illusion that democracy exists. What I wanted to say is Indira Gandhi was responsible for undermining institutions like the judiciary, like the bureaucracy. And this government too has been accused of undermining several institutions where whether it be law-enforcing agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Income Tax Department, they've all turned into sort of weapons in the hands of the ruling dispensation to target their opponents. Yes, this has happened. This has happened systematically. I can give you chapter and verse in a sense. There are certain parallels which need to be from which you have to draw your own conclusions. I mean, I'll give you one example. I think it's either retiring or just retired, the head of the National Intelligence Agency is the same CBI officer who was deputed by a BJP government of which Arvani was the Home Minister to inquire into the murder of Haran Pandya in 2003 in Gujarat. His name is Mysee Modi. Now, Mr. Modi created a very good job there in six months. He had the case ready and 12 Muslims were sentenced to life imprisonment as part of a grand conspiracy to come and kill either Modi or another senior BJP leader as revenge for what happened in Gujarat riots, you know, a year earlier. Now, that was a very fine, very well-knit case, et cetera, et cetera, until 2012 with the Gujarat High Court throughout every shred of that case with the most scathing comments imaginable. But that was in a unique way and never happened before, you know, without precedent, an unprecedented way when Modi came that was reversed by the Supreme Court, a bench under Justice Arun Vesra, and Mr. Mysee Modi was then at the same time made the head of the National Intelligence Agency. Now, you draw your own conclusions from that. Of course, every Prime Minister has the right to bring in people who he trusts in key positions, but there's a sort of a systematic thing to this. I can go on, you know, position by position by position, including the most recent one of Mr. Asthana being brought out of the Gujarat police corridor a few days before he retires and made the Commissioner of Police of Delhi that this is not quite unprecedented. It's happened once or twice before on very special grounds, but the point is this is quite different from that. There was no specialist in this. Delhi was full of first-class officers. In fact, the cream of the police elite officers elite used to come to the Union Territory corridor and they were all overlooked. Okay, I have just a few more questions given the limitations of time. Let me ask you a little bit to talk about what's happened. We talked about democracy and the weakening of democratic institutions. What's happened? I mean, how do you see the state of parliament at present? We've just witnessed the monsoon session of parliament literally and metaphorically being washed out. Now, do you see the parliament as an institution? I mean, how do you see the change? How has it changed in the last 75 years and where do you see it going? The problems of parliament started a long way back and I will come to what's happened now at the very end. The parliament has been systematically criminalized. It has been criminalized by the decisions of the government of the day and every single government that has come to power in India is responsible for this, not Mr. Modi alone. In fact, Mr. Modi least of all the damage was done even before he came. The BGP was able to take advantage of it because the damage had been done. Let me just very briefly tell you, we have the largest constituencies in the world, 6,000 square kilometers the size of our parliamentary constituency. In Britain, the size of a parliamentary constituency is 369 square kilometers. In Britain, they did not feel the need to party because democracy, the electorate grew very gradually, but they never felt the need to create a formal financing system for elections. Every other democracy has done so. India, we followed Britain, but then with 6,000 square kilometers to cover in four weeks and maintain the carters, political parties had no sources of funds. The only one that was emerging corporate donations were banned in 1967, they were made taxable in 1967 and then banned altogether in 1970 by the Indira Gandhi government. Let us not blame this government, every government is responsible. The end product of that today is as the associate for democratic rights has pointed out over and over again that one-third of our central and state legislatures have criminal indictments against them and these about half of them have the six serious crime indictments against them, murder, kidnapping, rape, arson, armed robbery and I think there's one more. Anyway, so the point is how do you expect a parliament like this to actually deliver the miracle is it does. If you look at the standing committee reports in parliament, they're excellent. Sometimes they're not as well informed as we would like them to be, but the people work hard, the people on the standing committees, they take their work very seriously. That is the best part of parliament. What we see in the Natak we see on television is the worst part of parliament. What Mr. Modi's government has done is okay is to say express the contempt for parliament that is growing in the people in the most brutal way possible like saying I don't care whether you're there or not, I don't care about your descent, I don't care about your views, I will use my brute majority and a variety of techniques to make sure that you know I put key bills through when there are minimum number of opposition people actually sitting in the house and using those techniques to pass whatever laws I want. That's what he's been doing, but we destroyed our parliamentary system a long, long time ago by first not creating an electoral financing system and then by destroying the only system. And now we have, if I can add, we have the most opaque non-transparent system of electoral bonds and we already know that the bulk of the money at least three-fourths or more of this money is going to the Bharti Janta Party. It's gone to the Bharti Janta Party, but I'll tell you one thing in 2024, if this, if the government changes, the new government will not change this law and will take 75% of the money that I guarantee and I hope I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, I should personally do prasthit in front of you. You will atone for your sins. Exactly, in front of the camera. Okay, my last question to you, we started our conversation where you're saying why you feel not just despair but a sense of despondency when you look at India's future. The occasion is the 75th anniversary of India's independence. Why are you so despondent? I mean, let me divide this question into two parts. What do you think is likely to happen when the next general elections take almost three years away? We are looking at April, May of 2024. That's the near term, so to say. And when you look ahead beyond 2024, I mean, are you as despondent? Do you remain as pessimistic? Do you think the future of this country, we describe ourselves as the world's largest democracy is very, very bleak? Well, first let me be just slightly elaborate what I said earlier. My despair on the economy, my despair is not on the people of India. On the contrary, I see a kind of a flowering of an intelligence here, which I think there are very few countries in the world that have. And it's happening because the intelligence here is feeling threatened by what is happening in the government today. That is one. Second, the degree of innovativeness in small industry, in farmers, I've been studying the farm problem very closely for the last nine months because it has happened. And there are many solutions and the farmers have been in find some of them themselves without Mr. Modi's help. But the agriculture has been in a crisis precisely because farmers are so phenomenally successful in the past. We have a crisis of massive overproduction in just about everything, which is why you can't suddenly wipe out all market protections for the producers and say, we're going to create a free market because in a free market of surplus, the producers prices will be driven down into the ground and they will die one by one. So, you know, this is, I think that the people of India will come to their senses and I see that and they will join together either to bring the BJP RSS to its senses or to vote at an opposition coalition into power. I think that a new kind of coalition around issues is beginning to develop in the opposition. You can see it in the letters that the 10 opposition leaders including Raul Gandhi and so on have been writing systematically to the president. They're always on issues. You can look at the dinner that Mr. Kapil Sibyl hosted the other day, you know, every major political party, including the Biju Jantadal was present. We have, there is a realization that issues now matter, that India's future matters. It is being promoted. It has been created precisely by that intelligence you were talking about. You look at the Twitter and what's happened so on and look at the alternate press and see what's happening and see how they talk. I thought I had asked you my last question but I have one more question for you. You know, many argue that one of the biggest successes of Mr. Narendra Modi as the prime minister of India is that he converted India's multi-party democracy into like an American-style residential system where two individuals, the personalization of politics. The BJP on its own got 31% of the vote in 2014 which increased to around 37% in 2019. The NDA had about 37% of the vote in 2014 and then around 45%. But we have the Westminster style of parliamentary democracy first past the post, winner takes all. But half of the people of India who voted did not vote for either the BJP or the NDA. But not that old NDA doesn't exist with two of the BJP's oldest coalition partners having gone their ways. So how do you see the political scenario building up in the next two and a half years or so? Well, I cannot give you an answer of what will happen but I can only talk about or rather I can hazard guesses but guesses is not what you want. All I can talk about is what needs to happen. First of all, I think you must understand that a coalition to win an election alone without a clear policy platform that all are agreed upon and that brings back hope to the people of India will not win because the BJP has and the RSS. The RSS has 86,000 shakhas. They had 40,000 in 2014. They had 86,000 in 2019. There may be 100,000 today. There are at least 10 million foot soldiers that they turn loose. These are disciplined people. They're relatively honest people compared to the others. They are not the kind of party workers who are predatory in the other parties or criminal, as we know, just saying, UP North, Bayard, etc. So the point is, they have that advantage and they can unleash them wherever they want to and they point out all the little things that they've done at a level that never even catches the eye of the press. What are the things that an ordinary man worries about a villager? His safety of his land, which means he doesn't want disputes, his children's education, health, health issues, and maybe I mean, this is the fourth one, I can't remember. The security of women. Well, I think that's becoming a very important issue too. You're right, but I had the fifth one in mind. Doesn't matter. The point is that for that, who does it turn to? If there's something, the threat to them. They turn to the local big wings. See, those who know the police, those who know the local subdivided officer and so on. Now, that grassroots worker who can be an intermediary between the government and the ordinary people and you need them because we are such a vast population, that grassroots has to be honest and it's been predatory or disappearing in the case of Congress. In state after state, this just vanished. The people have gone and joined somewhere else. So, we're not going to be able to build a coalition of simply parties putting together, not to be around issues. Okay, thank you so much for giving us your time to the viewers and listeners of NewsClick. Thank you very much for explaining in detail why you are at one level despondent and despair about the future of the Republic of India. And at the same time, you are not completely hopeless. You see some signs of optimism and why you see those signs of hope. Well, thank you so much. Once again, Prem Shankar for being with us. And on behalf of all the viewers and listeners, best wishes to you and keep watching NewsClick.