 The Relentless Invention of Modern India. Adam has the British cover, so we have dueling. We can have votes here, which is better. Before I introduce Adam, let me just say a couple of words by way of housekeeping. One is we're doing this in collaboration with Adam's publisher, Basic Books. So thank you to your public affairs. Public affairs, sorry, public affairs. It would help if I had the publisher, right? The second is thanks to Rachel Osnos, who's there in the back, who many of you know and have emailed, who is the one who always helps us get these events together. And I just want to flag that a week from today, May 10th, we'll be doing another event in this room for the launch of a new volume on the Indian state called Rethinking Public Institutions in India. It's a public event. The invites have already gone out. The event's on our website, so I hope to see all of you here. That's from 4 to 5.30 with the reception to follow. I first met Adam, I believe, in 2012 when I was visiting Delhi, and you were relatively sort of new, I think, to India at that point. And then in the span of the next four or five years, Chris crossed the entire country from interviewing Prime Minister Modi and visiting Gadrath to traveling to Bengal to reporting from Kerala and all the way north to Jammu and Kashmir. Many of you have probably read his dispatches without even knowing it, given the economist's lack of author bylines. Adam spent all told six years in India as the economist South Asia correspondent. Prior to that, he was the Southern African correspondent for the Economist base out of Johannesburg. Was the editor at TheEconomist.com. He's now based in Paris as a European business and finance correspondent. This is his second book. His first book is a really fascinating book called the Wanga Coup about a failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. And all I have to say is it is utterly fascinating. And also makes you never want to go to Equatorial Guinea. So I thought what we might do is just chat a little bit about the book and then open up for questions. The book is now out, available, and fine bookstores and retailers everywhere. I hope all of you will please stay after we're done. We'll wrap up at around 6 o'clock and go downstairs for some wine and beer and snacks. And there'll be books on hand for sale and hopefully Adam will be happy to sign a copy for you. The Financial Times recently reviewed the book, calling it engagingly written, deftly weaving eclectic encounters into its portrait of a country in transition. It is a fabulous beach read if you're looking for summer reads. And I say that with a positive spin because it's something that you will learn something from but is actually really a lovely read and a real page turner. So you can take it to the beach with confidence that you're not going to be judged by the people around you. Let me start maybe just asking about the title because it's not just a cute title. The title actually is very meaningful, super fast, prime time, ultimate nation. Why the title and what does it mean? Well, thanks Milana. Thanks everyone for coming along. Thanks to Kani for hosting this. When I got to India in 2010, I was among the many things that delighted me and much about India delighted me. But among the things that really pleased me was the way that language is used in India and the fact that almost everything is completely over the top. So that if you open a power station, it's an ultra mega power project. And if you have an interview with someone as a journalist, you have a world exclusive and everything is a little bit hyperbolic. And this tickled me. I mean, wherever I went, there was always something that was a bit over the top. And so I felt the title should also touch on that and should be slightly exaggerated. I love the fact that the great university in Punjab is the lovely professional university on the number one campus. You know, everything has to be the most. But the four words of the title do reflect the structure of the book. And so what I did in the book as a reporter, as a journalist, someone who had the privilege and the time and the resources that the economist gives its journalists, I could roam around anywhere, almost literally anywhere in India and have the time to go there and ride trains and hike in Kashmir with Indian goldlings or go to Gujarat and hang out with people there. And I would ask them basically the same question, is India emerging as a much stronger power than it was before? And what I've done with the book and what I've done with the title is to break that down into four different sections. So Superfast is broadly about the economy. Will India get this strong economy? It may not rival China, but will it get sustained rapid growth of the sort that will make India matter much more to the rest of the world? Prime time, the section in that talks about democracy. We all know this sort of basic fact about India, the world's biggest democracy, that there's disputes about whether being a democracy is an asset or a burden in the Indian context. Well, my argument for this is that when India reaches its democratic prime time, then at that point, democracy is a great asset and it's not a burden anymore. The third section, the ultimate section is about the world and how does India engage the rest of the world in this ultimate realm of dealing with outsiders? My starting point for this is that India is massively underachieved in the first 70 years of its independence assistance and asking whether that's going to change and it's going to become a much more influential power. And the last section, the term that I've used nation refers to the domestic stability of India, whether the relationship between the Hindu majority, the 80% of the country that is Hindu, whether that stability which we've seen for those past 70 years in dealing with the 15% Muslim and the other religious minorities and so on, whether that stability can be expected to continue or whether that's going to come under some greater threat. So that's broadly the structure of the book and we can talk in any detail as you like about those parts. But as I went around, those were typically the four areas that I would be writing about and the question I would ask for each one is, is India getting stronger? Why don't we just go through each of them starting with the super fast, starting with the economy. And here we are a couple of weeks before Narendra Modi's sort of three year anniversary in office as prime minister. And if I'm reading your work correctly, you are sort of cautiously optimistic. But somewhat critical in your assessment. So you say in the book that there were many optimists who had predicted when Modi was elected in May of 2014 a rush of dramatic pro-growth reforms quickly tackling areas where the previous incumbent, Manmohan Singh, had failed and those optimists were disappointed. And the result, at least at the time of writing the book, was mostly a continuation of the cautious policy making of the prior decade. We're a couple of months out since the book has actually gone to press. Some things have happened since then while demonetization, GST, the big goods and services tax is on its way. A couple of other legislative initiatives. Where are we today in terms of getting to the super fast objective that you lay out? I mean, I think, so to explain the optimism that I felt and to some extent I still feel, you can build it on the fact that to some extent, Modi and the BJP ran a campaign that was about after the end, it was about recast, it was about development and it was using economic issues as an important factor for the voters to care about. So that's encouraging as a starting point. If they want to be judged on the economic performance they're going to deliver, that's in itself just a very good thing. And I think that in the years since he's continued to talk about that. In my interviews with him, and I did one lengthy one before he was Prime Minister and one lengthy one after he was Prime Minister, he talks a good game. He talks about the importance of growth, the importance of making sure that things, reforms of some sorts are taken to make India become a faster growing economy. And that, I know it sounds very basic but that sort of intention, that desire is a fundamental building block for achieving it. If you're not saying that's a priority, you're not going to get there. Where I would be not optimistic about what's been achieved is that his understanding of how to make India's economy stronger seems to be somewhat limited. I mean, I think he talks about modernizing the state, which is all very good. He talks about trying to achieve the make in India program, the manufacturing program, a sort of Chinese style perhaps of development, building infrastructure. He doesn't talk about markets in the same way. He doesn't talk about releasing some of the entrepreneurial spirit that I would like to see released in India. But he has shown a certain boldness that it's true with demonetization, for example. I personally don't think demonetization will help the economy in the slightest. It might help his popularity bizarrely. But it shows he's bold. He can be bold. He can take very bold decisions. I just wish he'd shown that boldness on something else, rather than demonetization. So, okay, so there's two things that I want to ask you about. We'll save demonetization for a second. Is it portion in your book where you go to Gadrat and you are talking to businessmen and you interview a businessman in Ahmedabad who says, I think you're asking about privatization and sort of what's going to happen with these kind of lumbering public sector undertakings, many of which are loss-making and there's been a lot of criticism about why should Indiana 20% or so hold on to these. And this businessman tells you, look, basically Modi doesn't want to sell these things. Is that your judgment? He basically doesn't want to sell these things? I'm not sure that he understands the benefit of selling them. I think he's been asked repeatedly, not just that businessman, but there were many others who I've asked him directly and people I know who are closer to him than I am have asked him directly. And the answer has consistently been he doesn't see the benefit of doing so early. He might do it later, he doesn't see the need to do it early. His record as Chief Minister in Gadrat was to try to make the state-run companies work better, to crack down on corruption to make the civil servants efficient. But it wasn't to liberate, it wasn't to give power to others, it wasn't to pull the government back and let entrepreneurs, for example, flourish. I don't think it's in his instant to, for example, privatize Air India, that wouldn't be what he wants to do. Whereas personally, I think that the Indian state has to be capable of doing certain things and step back from doing other things and then India will flourish better. My insight into Modi's understanding of these things is when I've been in small meetings with him or when I've asked him directly, what do you mean by minimum government? What do you mean by the phrases that he comes out with about making India rise as a golden eagle or whatever? It doesn't get very far beyond the slogans. He can't unpack his slogans very well and explain what he intends to do, for example, with a naughty problem of Air India sucking up, what is it, a billion dollars a year. Why don't you just let Indigo or the other privately run companies take over much of the roots? He doesn't engage in that, I think. So, he's bold, but he has limits, maybe cognitive limits on his boldness in terms of where he might want to go. But on the one area where he has been bold in your judgment to monetization, you talk about how it's sort of a big economic and political gamble, but the implementation was botched. In your view, is it just the implementation that was botched or is this sort of conceptual underpinning of demonetization fundamentally? Is it a bigger problem just the fact that oh, people had to wait outside for endless hours outside of ATMs and they had to reconfigure every ATM in the entire country. What's your assessment? Well, any assessment will have to begin with what you think the purpose was. If the purpose for doing demonetization was to crack down on corruption, you'll have one set of possible outcomes from that. Was the purpose just to indicate his boldness, that he's a prime minister ready to be tough and take the size of action? Then you have one set of outcomes. Or was it somehow to shift India to having a digital economy and to get rid of cash and suck cash out of the systems or that people start using credit cards and debit cards? It could have been all three of those things, but I think on none of the scores, apart from maybe the political boldness, did it really deliver what was intended? I don't personally believe it's a great deal to end corruption in India. Although for the short term, perhaps you will know this more than I do, but perhaps there were political parties that had had a big supply of cash ready for the Uttar Pradesh election that were then inconvenienced by what was done. Perhaps there was some minor shift towards people using more of those online payment systems and digital payment systems. But it'll be a long time before India's economy is not 90% dependent on cash. That hasn't ended just because of that transition period that we saw with demonetization. So I think the end result is mostly the signalling, the fact that he's shown his political boldness. I think that's what he's got out of it. And I've got to admit, I'm surprised at how popular it was. I assume that if millions of man and woman hours were wasted with people queuing up at banks, that would have made him less popular. It didn't. It seemed to make him more popular. So I had misread the political consequences in the short term. Even so, I don't think he achieved a great deal. So I mean, that's a natural segue to the second sort of bit, which is on the politics, on the prime time. Who's gonna be the opposition to Narendra Modi? You have a section in the book where you talk about Rahul Gandhi, who is the kind of perpetual neither in, neither out sort of leader. And you interview an unnamed Congress leader. I think he's a former minister. He or she is a former minister. Who you quote as saying, Rahul Gandhi intrinsically doesn't want it. If you don't have the intrinsic will to power, no one can supplant it in you. Well, what shocked me, I'll set aside all the criticisms that I heard of Rahul Gandhi from Aaron Jaitley or the BJP or non-congress figures, just concentrating on the many criticisms that I heard of Rahul Gandhi from within Congress itself. What surprised me was that those defending Rahul Gandhi and those attacking him said the same thing. They said exactly what you just quoted there, that he doesn't want it. He doesn't hunker for power. He doesn't have a hunger for being in charge of things. The ones who defended him thought that was a good thing. They said, oh, isn't it great that he doesn't actually want to be in charge? And the ones who criticized him, I think we're more honest saying, isn't it a problem that we've got a leader who doesn't want to leave? I think there can't be anyone in India, including Rahul Gandhi, who thinks that Rahul Gandhi is a good political leader. And I think there's just no doubt that until the Congress gets a good political leader, there will be no national opposition from that party at least. And Rahul Gandhi is not it. Where will the opposition come from otherwise? It's, I really am not seeing anyone out there right now. The typical answer, if you're not sure what to say, is to try and pick some state government leader, some chief minister who's done rather well recently, that the idea that any of the strongest ones have done well relatively recently, I don't think Natesh Kumar, I don't think Kejra Val, I don't see figures in the states who could possibly build a coalition at the moment to stand up to the Modi machine, the BJP. So it's a problem, not only in India actually, that the weakness of the opposition parties all over the place, whether they were in Turkey or Britain or other parts of the world, the weakness of the opposition in India is something to worry about. So I would be remiss if I didn't ask you because the economist has a history with Modi and Rahul Gandhi. Many of you might remember the editorial that the newspaper published ahead of the general election of May 2014. I'm just gonna quote a couple of lines. In talking about Narendra Modi, they say quote, there's much to admire, meaning much to admire about Modi's background and so on. Despite that, this newspaper cannot bring itself to back Mr. Modi for India's highest office. We do not find the prospect of a government led by Congress under Mr. Gandhi, an inspiring one, but we have to recommend it to Indians as the less disturbing option. Now this created quite a furor as you know. Arun Jaitley said in a public statement, thankfully the economist does not vote, Indians do. In response, I know this wasn't something that you alone had a hand in. Obviously these things are largeses, but would you regret it? Do you regret it? There you go. No, I don't think we do. I mean, for a start, I don't think the economist's endorsement would have made any difference either way. So it's irrelevant really, but in the end, the way we do it as the economist, we couldn't have gone off and endorsed some tiny little figure in the middle of nowhere. It was a question of, do you endorse Narendra Modi or not? And we like, still like, Modi's ambitions on the economy. Despite what I said before, we think he's someone who aspires to make India's economy stronger. And I think, despite my caveats, I think he's getting somewhere. At the same time, if we go to the fourth part of the book, the nation of heart, we are deeply worried about what appears to be happening on the ground in parts of India and the silence, the strategic silence that we see being used by Modi to tacitly allow others to feel they can do certain things, which are apparent. And if someone is being lynched because of their religion or because of their different practices, a prime minister should speak out about it. And the economist, despite our name, is not just about economics. We care about other things and we care about the social fabric, the stability of India. And the record that Mr. Modi has in Gujarat was a controversial one, to say. And his refusal to confront that and discuss that in any detail ahead of the 2014 election, we felt was very problematic. So that was why we did that. So let's go to that and then we'll get back to foreign policy. You asked the prime minister about this issue, Gujarat, 2002, the riots directly. And this is what he had to say. If you, meaning you, have any problems with 2002, then I'm helpless. I can't help you. I have faced 10 general elections in my state. The people have always supported me. So I have completed this examination with distinction marks. Yeah, I found that response, again, deeply troubling. Here was a person who thought that popularity was the same thing as innocence. He read through that sentence, the idea that if you win elections, somehow you've got your record clean for you. What I was asking him in that interview and what we were saying in our question of endorsing him or not is whether he could explain whether he had done the right thing as a leader before. And if he could set out what was the right thing that he'd done, we would have endorsed him. Instead, he just said, I'm popular. And that's, you know, as a category, that's an entirely different thing to say you're popular. You could be popular for committing the most heinous crime, but that doesn't make it right. And his, either his unwillingness to confront that, and I can understand why he didn't especially want to talk about it ahead of an election. But that for us was an issue that mattered. And I think it's, some of it's coming home to Roos. We see that in what's been happening in Assam last week and in Bihar. Our reasons to take this very seriously. But how much responsibility do you lay at the feet of the prime minister, right? Because a lot of Indians and a lot of defenders of Modi would say, you know, it's completely unfair to ask one person to comment on every death which might take place, every anti minority incident violence and so on and so forth. So is that really a realistic expectation? I wouldn't expect him to comment on every death, of course not. But I think there are, there are certain incidents that get a lot of media coverage. They are very significant in themselves. There are comments, for example, by one of his own ministers who called non-Hindu bastards at one point. There are certain moments when a responsible leader will speak out or will tell other ministers to speak out or let it be known. The slowness is a pattern. There is a pattern of silence which is worrying. And if he wanted to just prove that that wasn't a problem, he could do so with extreme ease and not to. He chooses not to for very, probably slightly cynical, but very real political reasons that he knows that this is in certain elections a healthy strategy. And I think you could expect a prime minister to be more responsible than he'd be. So I just want to read another passage and ask you to elaborate on it. And this is, you know, linking up to recent events he just alluded to. Modi wouldn't confront the Hindu right if doing so threatened his own popularity. He calculated that he needed young nationalist volunteers to help him win elections. Though he also hoped to appeal to mainstream voters. So as one shrewd commentator put it back in 2016, Modi routinely exploited strategic ambiguity. Yeah. Well, exactly. I mean, this ends at the point I was just trying to make now, but I think I don't want to labor the point. I don't want to say this is the only thing that Modi uses. I do think he talked a lot about Atadi and then talked about the big ass and so on. He's not a one-trick pony, but he is ready to resort to it, if needed. I think we see that with the appointment of the chief minister and at the Desh. We see that in other examples recently. Borrowing sign, if the economy doesn't deliver in India as we're hoping it will do, what strategy would a prime minister use? Why fear is that he might use a rather ugly one? But are these two things mutually exclusive, I guess, is the point I'm trying to get at. I mean, can you have both? Can you have the sort of Hindutva sort of ideology and plank and yet delivers back your growth and everyone is happy? Well, everyone. Not everyone is happy, but enough voters in the electorate are willing to vote for a package like that. Quite possibly, yes. I mean, my role isn't to sit back and say what's an electorally successful strategy for Modi to adopt. That strategy might be very successful. My concern is what does it mean for the stability of India? What does it mean for the long-term prospect of India? And I, in the course of my job, had the chance to go to Pakistan very frequently and I saw a country there that had no attempts to preserve the rights of minorities and no attempt to preserve the sort of secular nature that it was initially created to promote. And the costs of that are all too obvious in Pakistan and to come back into India was an enormous relief. After just a week in Pakistan, you'd come back into India and think, wow, isn't this country well run? The fear that India could somehow start off down this disastrous route to somehow be like Pakistan would be a nightmare. I'm not saying it is, but I wouldn't want it to go down. So, okay, this is now a perfect bridge to the fourth pillar on foreign policy. You're planning this very well. You seem to be giving Modi a decent amount of credit in the book about his attempts at rapprochement vis-à-vis Pakistan. And in one interview where you're talking to him, he says, look, I'm constantly trying to find new pathways, new avenues to reach out to Pakistan and he sort of goes through the various things, whether it's inviting Nawaz Sharif and the other Sark leaders to his inauguration, whether it's not his surprise visit in Lahore and so on and so forth. Where do you come down on the Modi or the India's Pakistan policy the last three years? Well, I was struck in the various encounters I had with Modi. Those two long interviews and the other ones to see his position on Pakistan transform. And I suppose in a sense it's a very predictable path. He started off in the very first interview being terribly hostile to Pakistan. And by the time of the one I did in 2015, he was sounding very much like a man who thought he could fix the problem and get another piece of prize and make it go away. So he had shifted his position quite dramatically. I think that in many things, Modi personalizes policy. He thinks he is foreign policy. That he pays a visit to Pakistan and that is a different foreign policy. He personally can embody foreign policy in a way that may allow him to think that he can deliver something that has evaded India, Pakistan for the past 70 years. I worry that he blows very harsh and cold on Pakistan. That there are moments such as the invitation to know as Sarif to the inauguration when it looked wonderfully like there could be a rapprochement. Only for there to be all sorts of hostility in the buildup of the state elections in Kashmir. The reaction, of course, to terrorist attacks which seem to have been sent from over the border. Modi has to respond to the rather bellicose TV broadcasters' responses in India. And he knows what's his priority. His priority is to make sure he doesn't come across as soft. So I think what we've actually ended up with, despite, yes, I do think he was sincere in thinking he could do something new, I think he, again, has reverted to a policy that isn't much different from what we had before with maybe some more aggressive PR dressing up the surgical strikes that India apparently conducted into training camps for terrorists on the other side of the border in Kashmir were fated as if they were some enormous breakaway from old policy in India. The presentation was different, but I'm not sure there was a real step change in the response there. I think Modi has, and I can understand why, but he hasn't proven to be very different from his predecessor. And I think that comes down to the difficulty of handling Pakistan. It's an incredibly difficult place to get a grip on. So I don't blame him for that, but I just don't see that there's been as big a difference, either in terms of muscularity or in terms of reaching out as maybe we might have hoped a year ago or so. Another place that's difficult to get a grip on is the United States. What do you mean? You mentioned that, look, India is likely to gain strength in foreign affairs. And for many structural reasons, that's going to lead it into closer alignment with the United States. And there are several broad trends that sort of make that predictable. Now, November 8th happened. And is it as predictable in the era of Trump? Is anything predictable in the era of Trump? I mean, you know, no. If you were for a think tank, you think you can predict everything. Well, maybe you can. I begin the book with a visit to an astrologer who goes to get parrots to read the future for him. And I think maybe we'll have to turn to parrots to answer the question. I think what's interesting is not just the uncertainty about Trump, but to some extent the similarities in nature and character of Trump and Modi. And I think there is the possibility, when they finally meet, when Modi presumably comes here, I don't see Trump going anywhere, that maybe they'll click. Maybe there'll be some wonderful bonding between the two of them, that they'll see a like-minded figure on the other side of the table, and they'll work very closely together. My broad feeling is that those long-term friends that we alluded to, whether it's the influence of the Indian diaspora in America, whether it's the trading relationship, India's need for high-tech military gear, the mutual concern about the Asia security situation and the rise of China, and so on. I think all of those larger trends do push India and Europe broadly closer together. And I think whoever we've seen in office, in India in the last 15 years, and whoever we've seen in office in America for the last 15 years, we've seen that process continuing. So my starting point at least is to assume that that's what we're going to have for the next four years. But as you suggest, everything is with a caveat of we just don't really understand by what's happening here with the State Department, with broader policy goals. So I'm not coming here to tell you anything about Donald Trump. You could tell me about Donald Trump. I think maybe let's open it up, because I'm sure there are lots of people here who are eager to ask you questions. And I might jump in at some point with a couple more that I have. So I just ask that you wait for the mic. Tell us who you are, and please keep your question short so we can collect a few. There's one in the back. Hi, Ronnie Mullin. I teach at the college. Hi, Adam. Hi, Milan. I teach at the college of William & Mary. My question is about demonetization. You briefly mentioned it. What was the real purpose? And if you could elaborate a little bit more with regards to the UP elections. I was there a few weeks ago, and all the talk was about which party had the money to buy the elections and which didn't. So if you could both perhaps talk about that, that would be great. Thanks. Do you want to take a couple, or do you want to go one by one? I don't mind, but how do you know that? Maybe we'll take another question, and then right here. Wait just one sec. Wait, one sec, one sec. Right here, in the third row. Yeah, please, please. You know, Adam. Can you just tell us who you are? Yeah, my name is Jeremy Tishpande, formerly of the World Bank. Currently, I work on India, especially on rural sector. And that's my question, that did you have, half of India lives in the rural sector. And you know, the agricultural growth is lagging. It is one to two percent, while the rest of the economy is growing at seven to eight percent. What do you think of this issue? Because Modi derives his strength, mostly from rural areas, because they like his ideas. You know, they like, in demonetizing, it is rural India that supported him, in spite of all the problems they faced. So whether you had a chance to look at rural India, how it thinks, how it influences Modi's policies. Thank you. Thank you. OK, great. Well, I mean, on the first one, actually Milan's the expert. I shouldn't have him talk about it. But I mean, really, my, and I wasn't in India, I've got to say, you've been there more recently in Oto Pradesh than I was. I mean, my presumption, as I said before, was that demonetization would have been frustrating for many ordinary folk who'd had to stand in those bank lines and who felt their time was being wasted. And any casual laborer who could no longer get a day job because the cash wasn't there to pay him, you'd think would be upset. And then the second point, yes, did the political parties, which political parties would have been inconvenienced by withdrawing the cash? Well, if your party knows that demonetization is coming, if you're the BJP and you know that cash is going to be withdrawn, you obviously don't stack up on the cash. You stack up on something else. Or you have, if the cash is printed, you'll be the one who'll be able to get the cash. So I don't have any reporting on the ground detail to give you. But the conspiracy theory has been widely repeated to me that the timing of demonetization, because it came just, what was it, two months before the opening of the Pradesh campaign, could be explained by that election. But I'll leave it to Milan to explain what he knows about that one. No, I mean, I think that the second aspect you mentioned, the electoral funding bit, was a kind of ancillary benefit. I don't think that was the driving root cause, right? It was a helpful quirk. I mean, I really genuinely think that the Prime Minister, as I've described this, is sort of a passion play. This really spoke to something inside of him, this idea of cleansing India from corruption in the way that he'd like to cleanse India from filth through Swach Bharat, clean India. And I think he and a very small group of advisors, right? I mean, there was no, as far as we know, complex cost-benefit analysis done, right? I mean, many senior economic officials in the government didn't even know this was going to happen until the central bank didn't seem to happen. So, but I think the calculation, such as it was, was that there would be a lot of currency which would not come back, and that therefore the Reserve Bank could write off their books and then would provide a sort of windfall gain to the government that could then be distributed. And of course, as we now know, virtually all of the money came back and that was no longer possible. And, you know, of course, the side benefits of moving India towards a digital economy and all the rest were, you know, helpful sort of things. I think the fact is that most political parties, although they traffic in a lot of cash during elections, don't necessarily keep a lot of cash lying around, right? I mean, these things are parked in other assets that are earning productive returns. And so, yes, the BSP and the SP, which may be more cash reliant than the BJP may have been in convenience. But if you look at what the Election Commission of India says, I mean, they recorded record cash seizures from UP, in fact, from all five states who went to polls. I mean, the cash seized in this election were about three times as much as in 2012. So, most political parties will tell you. They found a way around it. They found a way around it, right? I mean, parties at the end of the day are pretty adaptive. You want to say something about rural? Sure. I mean, just very quickly, in response to something you said there, that the demonetization decision was taken by a very small number of people. I think Modi's visit to Pakistan was taken by three people. I mean, there is a pattern here of a very, very small number of people in the government taking all the decisions, I think. Now, I mean, on the government's defense, on both of these things is, you know, part of what you needed to have demonetization was secrecy, because otherwise, people could gain the system, right? I mean, and similarly with Pakistan, is that part of the shock value is that it doesn't leak out to the times of India, you know, well in advance. Although people did gain the system, despite it, but yeah, on the rural side, yes. I mean, I do, I did spend time as a reporter going and writing on the subject and usually looking at particular issues, you know, water supplies or what reforms would you need to take to make the agricultural sector more successful. My feeling, though, is that our presumption that India is this predominantly agricultural economy or that the people predominantly out there working on fields is getting a bit outdated, that India is becoming rapidly a country dominated by the town and by the urban economy. And even in the villages, it's actually the service industry of some sort that is employing people. If not full time then for a large part of their working year. And I would often go to somewhere 200 miles outside of Delhi and you'd find that, yes, there were people growing something rather, but they also had little barber shops and they were running generators for a town nearby and they were very much influenced by their cousin who was working in town and sending money back out. So I think a lot of what we on the face of it see as rural India is actually very tightened and knotted into the urban part of India. And of course then the growth of towns and the growth of connections between villages means that we'll see India becoming politically a much more urban well. And what is it, 300 million people are gonna be added to urban India in the next couple of decades. I think we'll see the political consequences of that with, I'm not sure I agree with you that Modi was mostly elected by rural voters. I think the big swing voters in India were those in town and they were disgusted by the failures of Congress and Manmohan Singh in the second term and they switched with a vengeance to back the BJP. The risk for Modi is to lose the urban votes again, I think, because he has so far held them, not in Delhi, but in other places. Great, let's take, I think Tanvi had a question and then BJ, yeah. Right here in the first row, thanks. Congratulations, Adam, on the book. I'm Tanvi Madan from Brookings. Adam, you talked about one of the things being different with Prime Minister Modi is presentation. And it seems that one of the reasons for that is he's very particular about setting the narrative. And one of the sensitivities about particularly foreign media outlets like yours and the FT and Wall Street Journal in New York Times is they help set the international narrative. That matters, of course, for investment, for India's investment destination, et cetera. How, from where you're sitting now, but also engaging with your colleagues, how is India being seen? Is it still seen as that bright spot? Is the window gonna stay open in terms of that window for Prime Minister Modi, as you said, he might not be doing it now, he might leave some things for later. Will that window stay open for him in terms of how India is seen? The title of your book is about self-perception in India. Is India seen as superfast, prime-time, ultimate nation? And will it continue to be seen that way? Thanks, Sunvi. I think just a couple of rows there, Vijay Kumar. Yeah. Vijay Kumar, I'm unaffiliated, but my family has some businesses in India. I largely agree with your premise of your book. The question I had was that the organized sector is not creating enough jobs. So what would that affect be? Would it be every talk about demographic dividend? Would that be a demographic right? Yeah, well, okay, to go with Tanvi's first. It is really striking how much the current government in India does care about perception. Despite all the rude things the economist has said over the years, I think I had incredibly good access to Mr. Modi and to ministers close to him and to close advisors. Even after, I would write something very rude. They would be perfectly willing to have me come back in and have another chat. And I admired that. I thought they were not petty. They didn't take me personally. They were ready to engage and to explain their position. That's not unlike the status of the New York Times with the current White House, right? Simultaneously repelled but enthralled. I think that's true. And I think it goes also to this sort of personal embodiment of policy that Modi likes to be talked about and likes to be seen. One of my last cover stories on India presented Modi as a one-man band and this idea that he was doing everything. And I think he probably loved that. I think he wouldn't dislike that. How does the rest of the world see India? I think that, of course, is in comparison to how is everyone else doing? And given that Turkey or much of the rest of the emerging world, Brazil, they're not doing very well. When the IMF comes out and notes that India's economy, even if you don't fully trust those GDP figures, India's economy will be bigger than Britain's economy, France's economy, Germany's economy within a few years. By 2035, it'll be bigger than Japan. Those are the sorts of things that will keep people interested in the potential for India. But equally, you talk to an individual businessman about their own experiences in India in the last year or two years. My job at the moment is to go around Europe and talk to CEOs of big European companies. And one I talked to, I mentioned in the book, he makes forklift trucks to lift things around the warehouses. And he just said, well, in China, they have 250,000 forklift trucks. In India, they have 25,000 forklift trucks. There is just a different scale there. And India's not going to get, it's not going to close that gap for such a long time. And we don't see them picking up the pace as fast as they should. And then when you talk to Indian businessmen who actually have much more influence on what the rest of the world think, they grumble. They say that on the ground, India is not progressing in the way that it appears if you trust the IMS figures. So that's where the perception is shaped. If you're a Western American European businessman, you talk to your colleagues, fellow businesspeople in India, and what they tell you is what really matters, not what the government tells you. On jobs, it's the impossible question for India. How will India possibly create the supposedly one million jobs a month that need to be created as a million young people join the labor force every month? The short answer, I'm afraid, is India will not create a million jobs a month. It's not going to happen. Narendra Modi's campaign for manufacturing renaissance in India is a good idea to some extent. Factory jobs would, of course, suck in some unskilled labor. But India should have done this 20 years ago when that sort of manufacturing still had a great future. We know that manufacturing is changing dramatically. All sorts of jobs are being automated. And among the very first jobs to be automated will be textile jobs in factories, for example. And India will be able to create some of those jobs for the Indian market, because it can force companies to have certain approaches to production because of their access to the Indian market. But if you want to export your way to prosperity, I think India will have to find new ways of doing so. And my suggestion for India would be to go for higher-skilled routes. So that's in tourism. That's in the sort of thing that Andhra Pradesh has done very well in engineering and high tech and so on. So I think India has to be more ambitious about the type of job it wants to create, because it's not only India that faces fundamental change in what our jobs, it's our own economies, our own societies, are going to be struggling in the coming decades, because all sorts of jobs are disappearing. Every day I was in Dallas this morning as the mayor of Frisco was explaining how flying cars were going to come to Frisco. And they could do away with taxi drivers, because they'll now be automated flying cars. Well, all sorts of jobs are going to go. And for India to cope with that, it is a phrase that Amartya said, but it needs to have high human capital. It needs to have people who are educated and healthy and who are able to adapt to this rapidly changing world. The idea that you'll just create enough low-skilled jobs to get through in a way that China did I think is too late, should have happened 30 years ago. Can I just interject on this point? Because you lay out two priorities for the future. One is dealing with the climate and environment issue. And the second is about the role of women. And a key part of this is not just the status of women in society, but it's also how do you reverse this trend of declining female labor force participation, which even as women are gaining in education, they don't seem to be joining the workforce, unless they gain a lot of education and sort of many advanced degrees. Tell us why. I mean, you could have chosen a lot of issues for two priorities and you chose women and environment. Talk us about women and what you see as the big challenge there. I mean, it's partly a personal response. I used to be a correspondent in Africa. And for all of Africa's problems, there was no difficulty in a strong woman being a successful entrepreneur or running a school in a great way. Nobody seems to sort of hold her back in a way that in North India, at least, women seem to be much more constrained and they're held back from engaging in business, in society in such a confident way that men might be so. A second observation was that within India, it just seemed to be clear that certain states in the South, the sort of Kerala's and Tamil Nadu, they had all sorts of aggressive development indicators, life expectancy, better nutrition rates, all sorts of positive things that were associated with better treatment of women. I mean, they went very closely together. If you had good education for girls as well as for boys, all sorts of other good things came along. If you had women's participation in the labor force, you had enormous economic gains. There are enough studies and explanations of why Sweden, for example, has flourished as a very, very successful European economy. But one of the key answers to why it does so well is that women have very, very high rates of participation in the formal labor force, in the formal workforce. They're not just expected to work for no pay in the family, they're actually expected to have a life beyond the family and to contribute, measured as well. So for me to choose that as a topic wasn't a difficult choice. What the answer will be is incredibly difficult. I don't pretend to know how India will solve this problem because as you, I think we're alluding to, even though in certain parts of India, incomes might be rising, women's participation might well be falling in certain places. And that gets to really naughty questions like culture and so on that I don't pretend to be in any way on the floor I should talk about. Or another one is as fertility rates decline, the sex ratio is getting worse, right? Yes, I mean it's a messy picture, but yes, we can see that because of technology, because of again urbanization, you might have hoped that some of these problems would start to solve themselves, but in fact, in many cases they get worse. And so there's not a nice linear progression that rising incomes means better condition for women, it's often not the case. And I was struck researching particular stories such as I wrote a Christmas piece, one of those three-page special Christmas pieces about the relationship of mother-in-laws to daughters-in-law. It was eye-opening for me. And what was striking to hear from people who'd done research or journalistic written books about the very elite of Indian society is how awful it could be. Even among the very richest families in Mumbai, how awful it could be treated as a daughter-in-law. So it was a very powerful decision. And did you get hate mail from many mothers-in-law? No, I used to get a lot of hate mail in India, but not from mothers-in-law. Should we take one or two more questions before we wrap up? So you've been very patient, this gentleman here in the red shirt. My name is K.G. Maum from SICE, South Asia Concentrator. I have question regarding India's party politics. You mentioned the weakness of the opposition party, India. And I noticed that there are major similarity between BGP and some traditional Lennon-less party. Lennon-less party? Yeah, Lennon-less party. Like they have quite a strong Khajai-like team. They have a stable, like central ideology, and they have a lot of affiliated social organization. So we agree that their party organization gave them special advantage over other parties. So will other party also learn those things from BGP and to be more like BGP in the future? Like develop some kind of such kind of, thank Lennon-less characteristics. Okay, yeah, you had a question, yeah, please. Hi, thank you both so much for this, this was great. I'm Emily, I'm a staff writer of foreign policy. And it seems to me that they're sort of, with respect to the international relations component, sort of a paradox in that on the one hand, if it's going to be the Indian century and India is going to get a more prominent place in the world, it sort of has to engage more, right? But on the other hand, and I believe you make this point in the delightful, readable book, thank you, that India is sort of hesitant to work with larger countries because it doesn't want to be the junior partner, right? So for example, engaging with the United States, sure, it's inevitable to a certain extent, but also, hey now, India at this point in time, at least, so but how, I mean, you're not in the Indian government, but how does the Indian government sort of get around this seeming catch 22? Thank you. Yeah, great. Well, on the second one, yeah, I think you're right. There is a difficulty there. Sometimes it may not be a sort of prickliness about being the junior partner. It might be a lack of capacity. I just struck at how many things fail to happen in India. When I first arrived, I think one of my first interviews with anyone was with the trade minister at the time, pulled in all the foreign correspondents to tell us about the trade deal that was coming up very soon with the EU that they were going to sign. And we asked them a little bit skeptically, really, you know, are you going to do this in the next three months, like you say? And said, well, maybe it'll take six months, but, you know, we're getting pretty close. And the trade deal is obviously still miles away to them. Who knows if it ever will happen? Now, I'm sure that the EU is to fault with them, you know, why we don't have a trade deal between India and the EU. I'm sure the EU is at blame for some of it. I think it's also obvious that India doesn't have the capacity to go out there and doesn't have the negotiators, doesn't have the structures, the institutions to really push forward fast on these things. But it is a problem. I think India has enormous ambitions internationally, at least Modi and others will talk up India's entry and so on. But then when push comes to shove and you say, well, how many of those diplomats do you have? Do you have any more than New Zealand yet? Do you really have any more than the Singaporean? Basically, we'll come up with some new figures that suggest it's slightly more than New Zealand now. But it's just so far behind where it needs to be. I know that in America, you don't think you need diplomats anymore, but I think you probably do. So India, if it's really going to be ambitious in these international goals, we'll have to build the institutions to get there as well. So I don't think it's just a sort of personality twittiness about being the junior partner. I think it's just having the ability to start delivering. Can I just push back on one element of that? There may be some Indian diplomats in the room. And I think... They're good diplomats. Yeah, well, so that's the point is that you talk to American diplomats and they say there may not be that many Indian counterparts, but damn, sometimes they run circles around us. I mean, they're very tenacious, very skilled negotiators, and they drive a very hard bargain. So... Yes, I didn't at all mean to besmirch Indian diplomats. I mean, part of the joy of my job was to roam around all of South Asia. And wherever I went, seeing Sri Lanka or Bangladesh or wherever, I would check in with Indian diplomats. And they were always a mine of immensely useful information and sharp analysis. It's not to make any comment about their individual ability. It's the institution as a whole. How well resourced is it? How ambitious is it? Or how capable is it to live on the ambitious goals that the politicians set? On the Leninist constitution of the BJP, it's a great observation. I think that the strength of the BJP at the moment is clearly a mixture of having a leader who is charismatic and a very good communicator. And, you know, unlike Raul Gandhi, tries out new ways of communicating these crazy new things like social media. So the leader matters. And if you took Modi out of the equation, if he fell under a bus tomorrow, would the BJP still be a very strong party? It would be less strong than it is. I think they clearly were partly enormously successful because of Modi, the individual. But you're right to point out that, yes, the RSS, the volunteers on the ground made a huge difference as well. And one of the things I enjoyed doing during the 2014 election was to go down to Bangalore and to hang out with Nandan Milakani for a couple of days as he tried to recreate a little cadre of, they weren't RSS, of course, they were sort of tech folk who were very liberal and thought they could use data and social media and so on to get him elected as a Congress MP. There are some in Congress and other parties, Abhavi party and so on, who will think about how to mobilize old-fashioned knocking on doors sorts of politics, getting people committed to the party beyond just adulation for the leader. But none of them have a structure that would rival the RSS at the moment. And I think Modi's ability to bring and to excite those RSS volunteers is a really important part of their calculation power to win in 2019. And that goes back to why this strategic ambiguity that we talked about before, why doesn't he come out and condemn the lynching of two people in a sand last week? It's because he needs to give something to those RSS volunteers in 2019 to tell them that he's very much from their part of the political spectrum. And it's much harder, I think, for a feeble liberal party like Congress to motivate people in the same way. But yeah, you're right, your observation is a good one. I think they will need to think seriously about how they're gonna do that. And the starting point is to get a new leader. So it's 6 p.m. and I'm always conscious of not getting between somebody and their drink. So why don't we formally end the conversation here? But I invite everyone to please stay. Just you can take the stairs, take the elevator downstairs in the first floor, they will have a reception, we'll have books. Adam has agreed to stay for a while and hang out and can answer your question. And I just wanna thank you again for coming. This, it's not easy to write a book that covers this much terrain and make it readable and accessible. So I hope all of you will pick up a copy and congratulations on the book and look forward to chatting with all of you. Thanks. Thanks, Minna. Don't want to say anything, as yet. How are you? You're good, how are you?