This is a transcript of my interview of Tiruvananthapuram MP, Shashi Tharoor, published in my paper, Business Line, today. Access it here:
Here is a Congress MP claiming to be proud to be a Hindu. I thought such outspokenness ought to be appreciated, encouraged and popularized. Hence this post, though out of place in a carnatic music blog.
Here is my raw, unedited portion of my interview. In the interests of keeping it short, I have only excised whatever he said about GST and the Budget session. Everything else is as was said.
He believes he is
misunderstood often because he speaks too fast. Author and
diplomat-turned-politician Shashi Tharoor has had to bear the brunt of
trenchant attacks by his own colleagues in the Congress party for being
not-so-trenchant in his criticism of the opposition, particularly of Prime
Minister Modi. Yet Mr Tharoor believes the Congress is his best platform for
serving the country.
Business Line caught
up with him while he was in Chennai to speak at The Hindu’s Lit for Life
festival. Excerpts from the interview:
(This interview took place on January 17, 2016)
At the recent The
Hindu’s Lit for Life festival, you answered a question on the rise of atheism.
Please amplify that, but first please tell us whether you are a believer.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXcWh9u2euTg6e3ckpNg-XEJT7YI0OQ95Sv4V5HuiiPrA0Vf_pZqrUAG-WxoF9_u57UyPzHA6Biq58IPlxY0DMZ6-apsNR5-Parv4RkSKByeNPUX68qyxkRiJMdMrIW4DtQlH2WhW5erY/s320/shashi+tharoor+photo.jpg)
The
question was is there increasing atheism, no I don’t think so, if anything
there was more atheism, agnosticism and disbelief even in the middle of the 20th
century particularly in reaction to the horrors to the first half of the
century which had witnessed so many wars, conflicts, holocaust to Hiroshima,
two World Wars, that I think that many people were much more willing to look at
secular, non religious approaches to life. Whereas today, religion seems to be
very much on the rise in people’s consciousness and I further asked the
question why is it that religion has become a primordial part of people’s
perception of their basic identity. Someone like Amartya Sen would argue that
all of us have multiple identities and that those multiple identities are all
as important, give equal weight to being an Oxbridge don or a cricket fan or a
music lover as to being born in a Hindu family. But I think we have to
recognise that people like Amartya Sen or for that matter myself are in a
minority in today’s world and more and more people when they have to search for
a sense of who they are seem to take refuge in religion as the principal
identity.
Don’t you?
I’m very
proud of being a Hindu. I am a worshipping Hindu in the sense that I pray and I
have read, though admittedly in English translation a fair amount of the
Upanishads, scriptures and so on, going back to my student days. I was
genuinely, intellectually very curious and I have a fairly decent collection of
books and translation about Hinduism. So, it is a religion that I have not just
practised routinely, but have thought about it and valued its philosophical
underpinnings.
Empirical evidence
shows rise in atheism?
I’m not
sure it is even statistically measureable. I know that in the Western world,
there is a little greater consciousness of it, so you got people like Richard
Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and few others writing extremely
trenchant, almost polemical books against religion. But they have always been
seen, I think, as a more vehement articulators of a fringe position, or at
least, a minority position. If at all religious beliefs have declined in America,
it would have declined from something like 88 per cent to 80 per cent—you are
not talking about a colossal rise in atheism. And even that figure I’m just
making up from the top of my head, I don’t know what the exact numbers are.
But in India,
and in most of the developing world, and in most of our neighbouring countries,
there is no doubt in my mind that there was a larger constituency for secular
life and secular politics than there is today. Certainly, in my own lifetime I
have seen significant changes. My father was a product of a nationalist
generation. He gave up his caste surname because Gandhiji had urged he give it
up in college. I grew up in an environment in which my parents never mentioned,
let alone ask, never mentioned the religion or caste of any friend or classmate
who came home to play, came home to a birthday party etc. We were never made to
feel conscious of such differences. Today that would seem to me to be almost
impossible. People are so much more conscious in India today of these markers of
identity, particularly religion and caste. And I have been struck by the extent
to which this has become more so than in the first plush
after Independence,
when national integration was the buzzword, secularism was taken for granted.
Is that becoming a problem?
Yes, it is
a problem. Right now we are seeing it as a problem because … once these markers
of identity have been used as instruments of political mobilisation then
political polarisation becomes an option as we are seeing with one party
seemingly deliberately using it as a tactic in the hope of winning more votes
from a particular community as a result. That kind of an approach would have
been considered reprehensible in, say, the 1960s India. Even in 1970s India.
Today it is openly discussed as a legitimate political tactic. There is a
decline, it seems to me, in the ground gained earlier by the secular forces.
But now that it has
failed to deliver, do you see a change?
I think
political circumstances would be a factor. For example, Ninan made the same
point and I agreed, that when you have coalition governance you have to dilute
extreme positions. Mr Vajpayee headed the BJP government which had 23 coalition
partners of which only one, Shiv Sena, shared its Hindutva agenda. Otherwise
parties like Telugu Desam and even the National Conference were totally
different … and if you wanted to keep them together and carry them along you
had to be anything but an RSS kind of leader.
Mr Modi
feels no such compulsion. In fact, he doesn’t even need the Shiv Sena. I think
in five years, it is going to be difficult to see the BJP, unless they develop
a breadth of vision that they have not yet shown at the top of their party, it
is difficult to see the BJP moving away from…
The narratives coming
out of Pakistan, is that the
Modi government has softened after Bihar elections.
I’ll tell
you why it is too early to tell, because this government has ….more ups and
downs in Pakistan’s
policy than a schoolboy’s yo-yo. If you look at the narrative of the Pakistan
policy in the last 18 months of Mr Modi – in the election campaign you attack
any opening of dialogue with Pakistan, you say talks and terror don’t go
together, you say how dare our government serve chicken biryani to Pakistani
leaders and then when you win the elections you call them for your
inauguration, I don’t know if you served chicken biryani, probably not, but you
also start exchanging sarees and shawls and exchanging sentimental messages to
each other’s mothers, then within two months you are having firing on the
border, disproportionate retaliation, heavy artillery being used, then you have
the saarc summit in Kathmandu where the Prime Minister of India is photographer
very ostentatiously reading a brochure while the Pakistani Prime Minister walks
past, then you saw the scheduling of foreign secretaries’ talks which gets
called off because the Pakistanis do what they’ve always done which is to talk
to Hurriyat, then you have cold war or cold peace between the two countries
suddenly broken unexpectedly, unpreparedly by ufa, then the conclusions of ufa
as declared by our own government are repudiated within 24 hours by the
Pakistani side, then out of the blue you have this warm dialogue in Paris ..,
then you have the unexpected meeting in Bangkok of National Security Advisers,
suddenly you have the Prime Minister going to Lahore, so given this pattern
over the last one and half years, it would be extremely difficult to discern
any coherence out of this. Yet, if there is a new coherent approach to Pakistan,
I think what we need from the Prime Minister—and I said this to him myself—is a
‘mann ki baat’ from him. He has to lay out his vision to the Nation. His own
supporters are confused as to what the policy is.
But before and after Bihar…?
There were
positives and negatives even before Bihar. My
own view is that this government has realised that its Pakistan policy was going nowhere.
But given the fact that everytime they tried a new policy initiative they’ve
dropped it very quickly, until this policy proceeds for some time, it is going
to be difficult for us to draw any definitive conclusions—let us give it some
time to show commitment. I will agree, however, that the fact that they did not
reflexively dump the whole process after the Pathankot attack is an encouraging
sign. On the other hand, it is also true that Pakistan showed much more
reconciliatory attitude instead of the usual denial and buster, they were
looking to it, they have it investigated.
Do you think they are
serious this time?
The problem
with Pakistan
is, we know, it is not one government. Pakistan
is a country where the civilian leadership has very often given the impression
of being either unable or unwilling to curb the so-called non-state actors who
are the ones doing damage to India.
From the Kargill war for a number of years we haven’t had Pakistani soldiers
doing the damage, it has been the Pakistani terrorists doing the damage. It is
assumed that they are armed, financed, trained, and perhaps even guided, by
elements within the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. There is enough
circumstantial evidence to ….this as well as interviews with some of those
survivors, Kasab in particular.
However, it
is also true there must be elements even within the Pakistani military that are
not privy to this policy. Widely believed that Kargill happened without the
then civilian Prime Minister even being briefed about.
So, the
question that comes up from this is, is it worth talking to the civilian
government if they don’t call the shots. On the other hand, is it even enough
to talk to the military government if there are elements within the military
who are doing their own thing. We don’t really know fully where this is coming
from.
My answer
is, I’m willing to offer this as an alternative strategy which is a unilateral
opening up of people-to-people contact. My logic is very clear. India can only gain by enlarging the space
within Pakistan
for a peace constituency which is otherwise only fairly narrow and limited. At
the moment the number of Pakistanis who have a stake in good relationship with India is very small, because our trade is
minimal, tourism is restricted, for a lot of people, India is essentially now a hostile
territory whether you war with them or not have war with them nothing will
change their lives. If India opened up this space, Pakistanis would travel
freely and frequently to India, maybe even doing work here, selling their
dresses, fashion designs, their movies, if we were even doing trade with
Pakistan army-owned businesses of which there are many, it means they have more
to lose from disruption and from military engagement. So, the idea is to
enlarge the peace constituency in such a way that more Pakitanis have a stake
in good relationship with India which circumscribes the options for those in
Pakistan who want to disrupt good relations with India. Then what happens is,
gradually, even the things that divide us will become less relevant. This is my
argument and obviously there are many in Pakistan who have no interest in
seeing this happen.
Pakistan has been
saying, first Kashmir. Do you see it changing
now?
It is
changing. Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, who was very much on the right wing of the
spectrum made a statement which I have quoted in my book, Pax Indica, that the
urgency of saving Kashmir now takes second place to the urgency of saving Pakistan.
And that I think is an interesting kind of approach—let’s put our national
interests first, Kashmir can follow.
There are
so many Indian goods that are shipped to Dubai,
repackaged and sold at three times the price in Pakistan. Imagine—if this could be
traded directly! How much would Pakistanis would benefit. I’ve hardly come
across a Pakistani national who has come to India and not gone away entranced
or being fascinated by the country, enjoyed contacts, experiences—this is the
neighbour very much they would like to be more
Third, I
think that the people to people contact always has a very good chance,
particularly between Pakistanis and North Indians, not only with them, but
particularly with them, the affinities are far, far, far greater than … one
sees this very easily abroad. Throughout my UN career, I was witness to very
close friendship between Indians and Pakistanis which had literally tossed out
the national identity issue completely. They were friends to the extent that if
an Indian family had to go out of town, they would be happy to leave their
child with the Pakistani family, or where a Pakistani family is going to a
movie they would invite the Indian child to come along…I mean, this kind of
relationship I have seen among some people, and I think that very often you
people, for example, Pakistani taxi drivers in New York, when they realise that
they was an Indian (passenger) they would not want to take money from. You are
a brother. Only our politicians are divided.
Downsides of that is
that it would make it easier for terrorists to sneak in, right?
This is the
argument that is made, to which my answer is, did the terrorist of 26/11 apply
for a visa? Did the terrorist of Pathankot apply for a visa.
But you still make it
easier for them?
Look. If
you find that there is this kind of a thing is happening, then your own basic
security .. if a Pakistani applies for a visa, comes in by either road or train
and his luggage is full of RDX then there is something wrong with your checking
system. I would be willing to accept a rule that you check the baggage of Pakistani
travellers more easier than others. In any case, I’d give visas to rather known
quantities. I mean, there is a whole category of Pakistanis you know are not
terrorists—diplomats, retired diplomats, there are business people with some
prominence and visibility heading large companies. There are fashion designers,
actors, journalists, singers, painters—there is a whole collection of people
who are at the moment, sometimes find it relatively easy to get a visa but very
often don’t—if you like, these are the kinds of people who are asking
influential Indian friends to help them out. Let us make it easy for them to
get a visa in the first place. Let us not have a ceiling on the number of
visas. We cap it right now, at 6,000 of whatever it is. Lift the thing and say,
who ever applies we see no reason…you know, somebody applies and it is known
that his main credential is that he is a member of the Jamat-i-dawa, the parent
orgnaisation of LeT, then you still don’t deny him a visa, but you make sure he
is shadowed when he lands in India. He may even lead you to some useful
handlers.
Do you think the
perception of India
globally has changed, since this government came?
Not so much
since this government came, but…I went to America as a student, the image was
still … beds of nails, snake charmers, at best Maharajas and the palaces.
Today, every Indian is a mathematics wizard, software geek, ….guru or a doctor,
that’s the sort of perception that has been created and that is very much
reflected in the respect that India
gets from Western countries and from the public.
Having said
that this government has been good at a certain amount of salesmanship, Mr Modi
has brought a lot of personal energy to the pursuit of foreign policy through
his travels and speeches. But a salesman is only as good as the product he
sells. He cannot indefinitely sell an empty package.
But isn’t the product
good?
The
economics he is selling has so far been only slogans and speeches. You cannot
keep selling empty package indefinitely. Where have you re-written business
regulations in this country? Where have you eliminated the obstacles to opening
up business … to investing, to recruiting and dismissing labour, all the things
that investors are looking for. Where
have you eliminated some of the hurdles in the tax system? You haven’t, you
haven’t, you haven’t.
You have
actually not lifted a finger. You made fine speeches but not implemented one.
Here is a perspective.
There was nothing wrong with UPA’s governance, especially its economic
administration. The only problem was corruption. Now, the Modi government is
following the same policies as the UPA’s, and there is no corruption. Isn’t
that progress?
Is it
really true that there is no corruption?
Far, far less
Frankly,
I’m completely innocent of all of this. I genuinely don’t know how much
corruption there was, if you all say there was I have to believe you, my
impression is that the daily texture of life of the people of India has not
improved in that respect. That is, we can’t think of corruption only in terms
of government contracts. That may or may not be there now, I’d like to believe
you that it has gone down. But corruption is also of the poor pregnant woman
who goes to a government hospital, and is forced to deliver on the floor
because she can’t afford to bribe somebody there, or a widow can’t get her
husband’s pension because she can’t bribe the clerk, or the son or daughter who
loses father or mother, and can’t get the death certificate issued without
paying somebody in the municipality. These are the kinds of corruption that are
affecting the texture of the lives of a vast majority of our population. There,
I’m not sure there has been much improvement.
Why are you with the
Congress?
I was in my
pre-political days been a critic of all the parties on various grounds.
I don’t see the party
being fair to you.
That’s
another matter. But I’m in the Congress when I was approached by all the
parties when I stepped down from the Secretary-Generalship race and I was
deciding whether to leave the UN or not, in fact the first party to approach me
was the BJP in the form of a former cabinet minister in the Vajpayee government
who came to see me in my office in New York. I said, frankly I have profound
differences of principle with the BJP, what you might call ideological
differences. Secondly, as far as the economics are concerned, they seemed to be
saying India Shining, without really caring who India was shining for, whether it
was shining for everyone. On the other hand, the Left—CPM is very strong in
Kerala initially very friendly to me—the problem with them is that they say
they are for the poor but they seem to obstruct every progressive reform that
help the poor cease to be poor. The logic is clear: when the poor is no longer
poor, then there is no one to vote for the CPM so why should you want to remove
poverty? They’ve opposed everything—they opposed introduction of computers,
they opposed introduction of mobile phones, they have a 19th century
ideology and a 19th century mentality and they are simply not right
for the 21st century. The Congress, on the other hand, post-1991,
was no longer the party of state-ism, bureaucratic control of the economy and
of the Emergency. It was now a party that had liberalised India, and itself had become a
socially liberal as well as economically progressive party that believed in
economic growth because it had presided over economic growth, but wanted to
re-distribute the fruits of that growth to the weakest of society. And that was
an approach I liked. My intellectual traditions come from people like Rajaji
and Masani of Swatantra party, and one of the principles of swatantra party
which was not really a laisse-faire free-enterprise party but one whose core
principles was social justice. I believe the Congress party today is the party
that most embodies a commitment to both liberal economics and social justice.
I don’t
make any bones about the fact that within the party in economic terms and other
terms I’m probably being seen as being on the right of the party. But I’m not
alone there. Not everybody in the party is like Mani Shankar Aiyar declaring
himself to be a self professed Marxist, there are many in the party like Mr
Chidambaram, Mr Manmohan Singh, who would not think in those terms.
Is the party allowing
you to serve the country in the manner that you want?
Look, I’ve
had my ups and downs, I’m not going to pretend otherwise and I have had my
frustrations. But I still believe that in a democracy, Parliamentary politics is the best vehicle to bring about
change. The alternative
If you had been with
the BJP would you have been able to serve your country better?
In the BJP,
I would have been in a party led by the RSS. There is no way I could have
served my country better. There are people in the BJP I respect and can
objectively say they are doing good work and are not burdened by the baggage of
Hindutva. But the truth is that that baggage is so indispensable to the core
DNA of the BJP that it makes it an unviable option.
And for me in
any case, I do believe in political loyalty. Having come into the Congress
party, having been given my opportunities by the Congress party, I’m strongly
loyal to the party and its leadership and I don’t want to move away.
And you have been
called a chameleon!
Wrongly. I
think there was a profound misunderstanding of the things I said and wrote. For
example, on Swacch Bharat, in my book on India Shastra, I wrote in entirety
what I wrote that that time. No fair-minded person can say that I was an uncritical
endorser of Mr Modi’s approach to Swacch Bharat. I said, as an Indian citizen
it was my duty to honour an appeal, a non-political appeal from the Prime
Minister for a national cause and I still stand by that.
But I went in with my eyes open and the proof
of that is what I had written at that time. It was on NDTV.com, it is now
published in hardcover in India Shastra, please look at it, my position has not
changed one bit and I was always…I know I was attacked from within my own party
but people don’t take the trouble to read and had clearly not understood what I
had said.
That ‘chameleon’
description of you was in the context of your ‘Modi 2.0’ comment.
You see
what is interesting is I was setting the yardstick with which I was going to
judge him. First of all, it was a question mark. In fact, it is amusing that
some of my critics in the party used the very words that I used without
realising they were my words, they only read Times of India’s paraphrase of my
article, they didn’t read the original article in Huffington Post. I said ‘Is
there a Modi 2.0? It is too early to tell’. That completely was left out by the
Times of India. “Mr Tharoor hails Modi 2.0” without realising what I was saying
was ‘is he heralding a change from the politics of identity, is he moving away
from Hindutva baggage to sab ka saath, sab ka vikaas, this is the right message
and we should support him for this, we should we judge him on this basis.
Are you friends with
Mani Shankar Aiyar now?(It was Mani Shankar Aiyar who called Shashi Tharoor a
‘chameleon’.)
I suppose
as human beings and socially, we are friends. He came to my wedding. I have
been to his house for dinner, he came to my house for dinner. But politically
clearly he has no respect for my views and I must admit that I have limited
respect for his.
--ends--