I'm proud to be Hindu: Shashi Tharoor (Sorry, this is a non-Carnatic music post)

This is a transcript of my interview of Tiruvananthapuram MP, Shashi Tharoor, published in my paper, Business Line, today. Access it here:  goo.gl/dAQjM5 

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.

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 20^th 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 19^th century ideology and a 19^th century mentality and they are simply not right for the 21^st 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.

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