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0:01:04 Liberalism is the dominant political ideology of our time.
0:01:15 It’s ideals of people free to choose how they live and who governs them triumphs in the 19th and 20th centuries,
0:01:19 defeating rivals like monarchy, fascism and communism.
0:01:22 But today, liberalism’s dominance is in trouble.
0:01:26 It’s most dangerous threats coming from inside its own historic borders.
0:01:30 From the United States to Hungary to Turkey to the Philippines,
0:01:34 politicians are running for office on platforms that challenge liberalism’s most basic premises,
0:01:36 and they’re winning.
0:01:46 One of the most important countries currently in crisis is India,
0:01:50 once seen as proof that liberalism can thrive outside the West.
0:01:54 India’s current government is now tearing the foundations of liberalism apart.
0:02:01 The world’s largest country is at risk of becoming the world’s largest authoritarian country.
0:02:08 I’m Zach Beecham, in Froshawn Illing, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:18 [Music]
0:02:25 In the recent parliamentary elections, voters delivered a stinging rebuke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government,
0:02:32 taking away its parliamentary majority and forcing it to rely on the support of smaller parties to stay in power.
0:02:36 Indian liberalism isn’t out of the woods, Modi is still the Prime Minister,
0:02:39 but it’s a lot healthier than many have suggested.
0:02:47 So what should the world learn from India’s situation, both the crisis of its liberalism and its recent efforts to fight back?
0:02:51 To find out, I reached out to the political scientist Pratap Banu Mehta.
0:02:54 Widely recognized as one of India’s leading scholars,
0:03:01 he’s published extensively on Indian democracy and also helped lead two of India’s top research institutions.
0:03:05 We’re both speakers at a new conference called Liberalism in the 21st Century,
0:03:12 which convenes some of the world’s brightest minds, and me, to discuss the big questions about liberalism and what we can do to preserve it.
0:03:18 So I hoped that we could give you all a little window into what this exciting event will be like
0:03:23 by essentially staging the kind of conversation that Pratap and I hope to have on the sidelines.
0:03:29 Pratap, welcome to the Gray Area.
0:03:31 Really delighted to be here.
0:03:39 So look, we’re here to talk about liberalism and what it means to be liberal to start with, right?
0:03:42 Because you can’t talk about how liberalism is doing in one place or the other,
0:03:47 and India or the United States or around the world without, you know, talking about what liberalism is first.
0:03:49 So like, let’s start with that.
0:03:55 To my mind, liberalism is a sort of set of moral and philosophical principles,
0:04:03 which is that the purpose of government is to encourage or permit really individuals to live life according to their own vision,
0:04:07 their own idea of what it means to be a good person to live a meaningful life.
0:04:09 And some things follow from that, right?
0:04:15 So democracy is one implication of that because you can’t have people choosing their own lives if they don’t, you know,
0:04:22 get to determine the government that runs them, individual rights follow from that for obvious reasons, including property rights.
0:04:29 But those things, which are often defined as primary to liberalism, I think are sort of secondary to the moral core of the doctrine.
0:04:30 At least that’s how I see it.
0:04:37 But I’m curious, Pratap, before we really get started to begin with your own definition and see how it compares to mine.
0:04:43 So let me begin with talking about an elemental experience that is at the core of liberalism,
0:04:48 because I think the definition flows out from it and it’s a variation of what you said.
0:04:55 So in many aspects of our lives, right, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve government.
0:05:03 We often have this thought that something would be unjustified if it were to be imposed upon us.
0:05:06 Sometimes we say that about our parents.
0:05:10 Sometimes we might say that about classmates, right?
0:05:12 I mean, don’t force me to do something.
0:05:20 It’s a source of resentment. I mean, we often resent the fact that we are being made to do things against our will in some ways.
0:05:32 And I think liberalism actually flows out of that elemental experience that any demand of authority over us needs to be justified to us.
0:05:41 And the reason I think I’m beginning with this thought is because often there is a kind of debate, are liberal principles universal?
0:05:44 Is liberalism a universal creed?
0:05:49 And I often find that if you begin at a philosophical level, we kind of start tying ourselves into knots,
0:05:54 while our property rights universal is autonomy universal.
0:06:04 But if you begin with this very elemental experience, you often find almost everybody has at some point used something like that argument,
0:06:11 that if you’re being forced to do something that you would not agree to, it violates something important about you.
0:06:21 And then I think a lot of other apparatus gets built up on it, what institutions protect them, where is that thought appropriate and so forth.
0:06:28 I like the way that our two accounts of what it means to be a liberal sort of separate out into a negative and a positive aspect.
0:06:36 For you, the root of liberalism is don’t do that to me, and you owe me at least a justification if you’re going to do that.
0:06:46 The version that I laid out is more what do I want out of life when I’m not being interfered with and that I should have the ability to be free from interference,
0:06:50 which I think should be defined capaciously, including, for example, poverty.
0:06:56 Even though no one is forcing you to do something by virtue of being poor, the sort of opaque functionings of the market are.
0:06:58 And I actually completely agree with you.
0:07:01 I mean, I think liberalism is an affirmative vision as well.
0:07:03 It’s not simply a series of prohibitions.
0:07:08 All that liberalism requires is, in a sense, just universalizing that thought,
0:07:13 that if you think it is morally important that something not be imposed on you,
0:07:16 perhaps you should extend that same curtsy to others as well.
0:07:29 But I think in this context, I just feel sometimes even this moral core has been lost because liberalism has now just become so encumbered by its kind of entanglement with western history,
0:07:34 this mistake we make that liberalism is specifically western or imperial or something like that.
0:07:38 Yeah, I want to talk about that because it’s been a hobby horse of mine for years.
0:07:42 And, you know, I get the other point of view here because I share yours, right?
0:07:50 But I understand why you would say, well, look, like liberalism is this tradition that we identify with a certain set of thinkers who are all European men,
0:07:59 all born roughly between the 16th and 19th century, and that those people had a particular set of concerns.
0:08:00 They often had their biases.
0:08:04 And you say, OK, well, I mean, liberalism is this.
0:08:06 Historically, this is what liberalism is.
0:08:09 And you can say whatever you want about what it might be abstractly.
0:08:19 But in actual context, liberalism is this set of ideas that emerged from the West and co-traveled with the development of racism and imperialism.
0:08:22 And this is really intrinsically a Western concept.
0:08:28 I’m just curious what you make of this argument as someone who works on liberalism in a decidedly non-Western context.
0:08:37 Look, I would actually reject the premise of this argument because I do think it is important to tell global history well.
0:08:45 Because it almost sounds when people say liberalism was invented in the 17th century, it almost sounds like there were no traditions of religious toleration,
0:08:53 no traditions that acknowledged value pluralism, for example, one other tenant of liberalism in some senses, in different traditions.
0:08:56 Those have actually been quite ubiquitous across the world.
0:09:04 So that’s why I actually resist the thought that one should begin with the history of liberalism in the 17th century.
0:09:07 Yes, there is a particular historical form of liberalism.
0:09:17 Liberalism arises in the 17th century Europe because there is a kind of history of religious persecution and religious intolerance.
0:09:23 The first wave of liberalism is in a sense a response to the problem of religious tolerance and religious pluralism.
0:09:32 Now, there are other parts of the world where theological intolerance was actually not a political problem at all.
0:09:37 It takes it to be a natural fact that different people will have different religious beliefs.
0:09:46 India had a different kind of intolerance, which was more social intolerance, which is to say that people are arranged in a kind of hierarchical order.
0:09:56 So for India, the emphasis will be on surmounting that legacy of inequality, the legacy of a caste society.
0:10:01 The sources and enemies of liberalism are actually different in different societies.
0:10:08 And I think a proper global account of liberalism has to actually take that variation into account.
0:10:10 You know, I don’t want to romanticize the past.
0:10:15 India also had its original sin in the form of kind of inequality and caste.
0:10:23 But at least on the question of theological philosophical intolerance, you know, the question actually never arose in quite the same form.
0:10:27 It did actually in the post-Christian Western world.
0:10:33 So I think one of the interesting things in the history of liberalism, as you know, there’s a kind of obsession with the self.
0:10:37 There’s not just a moral privileging of the rights of the individuals.
0:10:40 There’s almost a kind of valorization of individualism.
0:10:50 And I think one of the interesting things when I look at these Indian traditions, Emperor Ashoka, Buddhism, Jainism, parts of the Mahabharat,
0:11:06 is that they are also asking an interesting moral psychology question for liberals, which is what is it that leads people to want to dominate other people, right?
0:11:11 It’s not just a question of, you know, conviction that I’m right and you’re wrong.
0:11:22 There is also something about the way we construct our own identities in our own selves that lies at the base of this desire for domination.
0:11:30 So one of the things you actually find in a lot of these texts is that if you want a liberal culture, right, where you don’t seek to dominate others,
0:11:33 you respect other people’s beliefs and so forth,
0:11:43 you will actually have to ask a deeper and profound question, what kind of people do we have to be where that thought comes naturally to us?
0:11:46 That’s not just a question of philosophical doctrine.
0:11:50 That’s almost a question of temperament of moral psychology.
0:11:52 So I’m going to ask you a big question now.
0:11:53 We talk about Indian politics today.
0:11:55 We’re talking about a modern state.
0:12:10 One forged as a consequence of an encounter with British colonialism and the Mughal Empire before that and, you know, all sorts of complex historical developments that bridged from, you know, over 2,000 years ago to today.
0:12:24 So when we talk about liberalism in its modern Indian form, how did these various different proto-liberal ideas in the Indian tradition interact with more recent developments to produce what we might now call Indian liberalism?
0:12:29 No, that’s a profound question.
0:12:32 So I think there are a couple of different ways of talking about this.
0:12:44 So one, you’re absolutely right, right, that the presence of the modern state and not just the modern state, the modern world as a whole, make a difference to how you think about liberalism and what institutions are appropriate.
0:12:47 Now, one way of thinking about the Indian dilemma is the following.
0:12:56 Unlike many Western traditions, theological intolerance has not been at the center of Indian debates.
0:13:08 What has been at the center of Indian debates is a different kind of social power, namely the power exercised by communities over individuals within them.
0:13:11 Often they will exercise power over women within communities.
0:13:19 Often they will exercise power over the ability of individuals to exit communities, to convert, for example.
0:13:34 And when the Indian constitution was being made, I think one of the interesting things about the Indian constitution is many of the framers of the Indian constitution, the modernist framers, Ambedkar Nehru, who are actually very important figures in the history of liberalism.
0:13:51 For them, the big worry was that if the state was not empowered to reform communities, it is quite possible that you could actually end up with a state that is liberal in its broad constitutional structure.
0:14:02 But so much social power is exercised by communities over individuals that most individuals still find the social systems they live in actually quite oppressive, right?
0:14:08 So caste is one example where, in principle, you could say, look, you know, the state should be completely neutral.
0:14:12 It shouldn’t particularly care how people define their identities.
0:14:22 But if caste structures social power, it is going to have profound implications for the kind of freedoms individuals actually exercise.
0:14:28 The state might say people should be free to choose whatever lifestyle they want.
0:14:39 But does that mean as a society we can exclude people from taking water from the well in our village just because they happen to be from a lower caste?
0:14:55 So I think Indian liberalism was actually profoundly shaped by that experience of social power, not the experience of state power oppressing particular religions in the way in which I think was perhaps more characteristic of the European world.
0:14:57 So I think that’s one big difference.
0:15:12 So so many of the debates in Indian liberalism are actually preoccupied, therefore, with the question of social justice, with the question of how can the state dismantle social power so that individuals are freed not just from the state,
0:15:25 but from very oppressive forms of social power which may not have the sanction of the state behind them, but still can mutilate the dignity of individuals in quite profound ways.
0:15:33 You just mentioned Bir and Bedkar who, for listeners who don’t know Indian constitutional history, is the chair of the committee that wrote the Indian constitution.
0:15:45 He himself was from the lowest caste on the Hindu caste hierarchy and was preoccupied for very understandable reasons with ensuring that the constitution would grant equality and even work to improve their social status.
0:15:54 And one thing that he said, or about two months before the Indian constitution went into effect, really, I think resonates with what you’re saying about the nature and the identity of Indian liberalism.
0:16:03 He says, “In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man, one value.
0:16:06 How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
0:16:12 If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.
0:16:24 We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy, which this assembly has so laboriously built up.”
0:16:31 One reason I think about it now is it almost got the current crisis of Indian democracy backwards.
0:16:36 So Prime Minister Narendra Modi is currently, no doubt, a threat to Indian liberalism.
0:16:43 He’s not the voice of the dispossessed. His party, BJP, is traditionally the party of the upper caste and the wealthy, right?
0:16:57 It’s expanded, it’s appeal across caste and it primarily operates like its main argument ideologically against Indian liberalism has been an almost un-Indian sectarian argument, which is that Muslims don’t belong here.
0:16:58 It’s not their country.
0:16:59 India is a Hindu country.
0:17:06 It’s like it’s saying, “Okay, Indian liberalism, you’re concerned with these other things, whatever.
0:17:15 We’re going to import these arguments that we’re not part of Indian tradition, the sectarianism, that’s much more of a Western phenomenon historically.”
0:17:17 So I’m curious, right?
0:17:24 How does this challenge, was this challenge anticipated to a great degree by the framers of Indian liberalism?
0:17:33 Did they anticipate it and just not build in protections for it or what happened to give rise to Hindutva or Hindu nationalism as such a potent force in India?
0:17:43 It’s a wonderful question because I think it allows us to introduce, I think, one subject we haven’t named in this discussion so far, which I think is very important in the history of liberalism, right?
0:17:46 Which is the question of nationalism.
0:17:54 Now, I would argue that Hindutva is actually a very modern phenomenon.
0:18:03 What makes the emergence of Hindutva possible is the rise of the modern nation state, because apart from liberalism being universalized, right?
0:18:10 The one ideology that has become global in the 19th and 20th centuries has been nationalism.
0:18:25 Now, once this idea got around in the late 18th and 19th century, that we can institutionalize something like liberal democracy, only in a nation-state form.
0:18:36 It naturally led to two questions, which is one is how do we define who the people are and who gets to be a member of a particular society?
0:18:39 How does 19th century Europe respond to that idea?
0:18:54 How does it respond by defining nations in terms of particular ethnic characteristics, you know, so either a language, in some cases a religion, or even where it formally doesn’t define them that way.
0:18:59 They were taken to be unproblematically majoritarian countries.
0:19:07 In the process of that nation-state formation in 19th century Europe, you get enormous bloodshed and homogenization of populations.
0:19:17 That’s the process which then unleashes the quest to create somewhat more homogenous nation-states with cohesive identities.
0:19:21 And the result was a kind of moral catastrophe for Europe.
0:19:26 Nationalism, two world wars, entirely a kind of product of that.
0:19:36 Now, what was interesting about the Indian national movement was that it saw that history and said, look,
0:19:44 if you want to avoid the catastrophes of Europe, you have to think of nationalism very differently.
0:19:55 If you try and institutionalize that kind of a nation-state in the Indian context, the only logical conclusion would be immense violence,
0:20:01 displacement of people in the quest for creating homogenous nation-states.
0:20:07 So the modern Indian problem from 1857 onwards, ever since kind of modern politics entered India,
0:20:12 is there was the sense, look, there are these two communities, Hindus and Muslims in particular.
0:20:21 And the big question was, how is power going to be shared amongst these communities if you are actually going to have a democratic society?
0:20:27 And liberalism has always had a difficulty with the nationalism question because it has a theory of the state.
0:20:29 It has a theory of the good life.
0:20:32 It doesn’t have a clear theory of membership.
0:20:46 It doesn’t have a clear sociological theory of what produces the forms of identification that allow communities to function as democracies with deep allegiance.
0:20:56 So I would actually argue that what Narendra Modi is trying to do, he’s actually trying to import the fantasy of a European-style nationalism.
0:21:05 In a context where its consequences like in Europe will be full of conflict and violence.
0:21:22 After a short break, Pratap and I get into Indian liberalism’s current crisis and Narendra Modi’s outsized role in causing it.
0:21:24 Stay with us.
0:21:33 [Music]
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0:25:13 As much as India might seem like hostile territory for Indian-style nationalism, Narendra Modi has been surprisingly good at creating an Indian version.
0:25:23 Despite the predictably bad consequences, we can talk about everything from discrimination in state policy to the rise of lynching and cow vigilantism inside India under Modi’s government.
0:25:34 It’s proof that his particular mode of ginning up nationalism is producing predictable violence in the ways that India’s great founding generation had anticipated.
0:25:39 They knew that this was a likely consequence of this version of nationalism coming in from Europe.
0:25:45 Yet, up until the most recent election, Modi was seen as the hegemonic force in Indian politics.
0:25:51 BJP party had just won two dominant national elections and they really seemed politically untouchable.
0:25:59 How did that happen? How do they get so strong? Is it primarily a story about the spread of Hindutva, its appeal to the Indian population,
0:26:08 or is it primarily about the traditional stalwarts of Indian democracy basically discrediting themselves in the eyes of the public through scandal and corruption and stuff like that?
0:26:15 Of course, part of the story is the liberal establishment discrediting itself and we can talk about it in a second.
0:26:26 But I want to take a kind of slightly longer historical view of Narendra Modi’s rise because I think it’s often presented as if there was this great history of Indian liberalism and then along comes Narendra Modi.
0:26:28 Right. No, it’s not that. It’s not that.
0:26:41 Let’s not forget one very important fact about Indian history that the great tradition of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, that post-national liberalism that they were trying to carve out.
0:26:54 It already had one major defeat in the 1930s and 1940s, namely the partition of India and a horrific partition, millions of people displaced, almost two million casualties.
0:27:01 And in that sense, you could say actually that nationalist project already registered its failure and Gandhi certainly thought it was a failure.
0:27:05 I mean, he mourned 1947 as much as he celebrated it.
0:27:21 India nevertheless still decides that despite partition, it’s not going to complete the logic of partition, which is what Narendra Modi wants, which is it’s not going to admit that India is a state or a nation only of the Hindus.
0:27:24 So it decides to continue with that experiment.
0:27:35 So you could actually say, I mean, the novelty is not Narendra Modi, that this has been actually an undercurrent in Indian nationalism ever since its inception.
0:27:50 It already had a kind of victory, a tragic macabre victory along with Muslim separatism, but that partition, the aftermath of that violence, Gandhi’s assassination allowed India’s second chance as it were.
0:28:07 The way in which I think that experience took shape was by bracketing a few controversial questions, or should each religious community have its own distinct set of laws governing marriage inheritance and so forth.
0:28:09 Freedom of expression.
0:28:28 The Congress Party lost a lot of credibility in the 1980s on the question of personal laws, rather than saying that the state is going to protect the individual freedom of every single individual, regardless of which community you belong to.
0:28:34 It actually started construing secularism as a competitive race between communities.
0:28:46 If you grant Muslims the right to personal law, let’s reimagine or at least reinvigorate in some sense as Hindu control over temples and so on and so forth.
0:28:51 That actually in a sense started creating this politics of majority versus minority.
0:29:00 And once you frame politics that way, at some point, you know, the majority and Hindu nationalist said, Hey, why do we need the minorities at all?
0:29:07 I mean, the joke about Congress used to be that it in the 1980s that it was trying to run Hindu nationalism and Muslim nationalism together.
0:29:11 And at some point, Hindu nationalism says, Why do we need them, right?
0:29:14 It lost trust of both communities.
0:29:26 Muslims stopped voting for the Congress Party, and it lost trust of many Hindus who thought that secularism had become another by word for political opportunism.
0:29:35 Right. So the difficulty, I think, for Indian liberals is that we just have not been true to our own convictions.
0:29:44 The point we started out with that fundamentally liberalism is about protecting the dignity and freedom of individuals.
0:29:53 That created fertile ground for a politician like Narendra Modi to appeal to Hindus, right, on these sort of narrow sectarian lines.
0:29:59 But I think one of his principal innovations was figuring out a way to cast against religion, right?
0:30:03 You talk about caste as being this essential concern for Indian liberalism.
0:30:21 Well, Modi’s argument, it’s sort of in some ways took on this liberal skin of being a caste emancipator of saying all of you Hindus are included in the Hindu polity so long as you unite against Muslims.
0:30:32 Now, I don’t think he– I mean, it’s clear from the last election results, which we’ll get to in a second, that he didn’t fully persuade lower caste individuals of this forever.
0:30:49 But a lot of his political success was picking up one of the main promises of Indian liberalism, the idea of challenging the caste system and ensuring true equality of all persons and marrying it to a deeply liberal ideology that blamed division inside Hindus on Muslims and on the threats posed by Muslims.
0:30:59 It strikes me that picking at a seam of liberalism, you can say even a liberal failure to fully address caste divisions was one of its genius political adaptations.
0:31:00 You’re right.
0:31:18 And you’ve laid your finger on something actually very, very important that the failure of the liberal left centrist secular establishment to actually convincingly tackle the question of caste and caste inequalities.
0:31:32 So this is something Mr. Modi could exploit very easily where liberals would profess the abstract principles, but actually did not do a very good job at incorporating backward caste and Dalits.
0:31:46 And one of Modi’s great achievements was not just to actually say that, you know, Hindus can unite and the divisions of caste can be overcome under this rubric of Hindu ideology.
0:31:47 Right.
0:31:53 With him, part of the appeal was his performative enactment of that.
0:32:04 He is from another backward caste, which is not the lowest on the caste hierarchy, which is not the lowest class of ex ex untouchables, but you know, still kind of considered one of the kind of marginalized communities.
0:32:13 And he could for quite a while and still I think in some sections actually produce a kind of identification with his biography.
0:32:23 That even the most well intentioned liberal in the 1980s and 1990s could not or the Gandhi family sees doing so for quite a while.
0:32:28 I mean, all he had to do was point in them and say, look, these are privileged elites.
0:32:32 I think a second important thing to remember I think about the Hindutva movement.
0:32:39 So when we think of groups that you need to incorporate into this movement, there are three principle non upper caste groups, right?
0:32:42 There’s the former untouchables, the Dalits.
0:32:44 There’s the other backward caste.
0:32:48 And then there’s this large group called the tribals.
0:33:07 And one of the things the Hindutva movement has actually been quite good at is building out grassroots movements, building out schools, social services, using a range of civil society organizations to normalize their presence in these communities.
0:33:16 And I think what the liberal and centrist forces lacked for the last 25, 30 years in India is actually any social movement attached to them.
0:33:30 Once liberals acquired state power, we forgot the fact that so much of the work of cultural and social reproduction happens in families, happens in civil society, happens in religious institutions.
0:33:38 And those are the institutions that the Hindutva movement was much more successful in engaging than I think the liberals and centrist were.
0:33:53 After one more short break, we’ll discuss what the recent Indian election says about voters appetite for Modi’s authoritarianism. Stay with us.
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0:34:57 The most recent election results pose an interesting puzzle as to how to think about Indian liberalism and its health going forward.
0:35:01 On the one hand, like let’s not sugarcoat it, Narendra Modi won a third term in office.
0:35:09 On the other hand, he was vowing to get 400 seats in the lower Indian House of Parliament that determines control of the government.
0:35:17 He didn’t even come close. His party got 240 seats and he did to form a coalition government to even have a bare majority.
0:35:25 So on the one hand, it’s not the end of Hindutva, but it is a real defeat.
0:35:43 Based on what we’re seeing, how do you interpret the mood of Indian voters towards not just Modi in general, but towards specifically the way in which he has taken an ideological hammer to the secularism at the heart of Indian liberalism?
0:35:48 One, it is a kind of defeat for Narendra Modi personally, actually.
0:36:01 For the first time, the BJP has lost many of the seats where he campaigned, and not just campaigned, but gave actually some of his more disturbing political speeches targeting Muslims.
0:36:11 Narendra Modi’s promise ten years ago, and maybe even five years ago when he ran for reelection, was that he was promising two things simultaneously.
0:36:21 He was tapping into that long-standing undercurrent of Hindu nationalism, but he was also promising a kind of economic modernism.
0:36:32 He ran on his ability to deliver economic growth, to deliver better social services, and for a while that actually worked.
0:36:38 I mean, in some ways, there are certain flagship schemes he did very well.
0:36:42 Infrastructure, this government’s performance has actually been reasonably good.
0:36:49 There are particular schemes that mattered to women in the first phase, building toilets, electricity connections, gas connections.
0:36:58 India did not do as well as Narendra Modi claims it did, but by any measure, they were not inconsiderable achievements.
0:37:05 But what has happened, I think, is that that welfare coalition has run its course.
0:37:07 So, what’s the big takeaway?
0:37:15 The big takeaway to me from this is that there is a kind of structural crisis in the Indian economy.
0:37:20 India has been very good at producing 6 to 8% economic growth.
0:37:24 It has largely benefited the top 20, 30%.
0:37:33 You can compensate by doling out a few welfare schemes every 5 or 10 years.
0:37:49 But you have still not solved the fundamental problem, which is, how does this economy produce good productive jobs that allow people to transition from agriculture ruler jobs into high-paying productive jobs?
0:37:58 So, what that means is that the economy is something that will make any governance structure periodically vulnerable.
0:38:08 And I think what was remarkable about Modi’s speeches this election is it was the first election where you just had the sense that he had absolutely nothing new to offer.
0:38:16 It was like a repetitive record of the same schemes that he was talking about 5 years ago.
0:38:36 So, I actually don’t think it’s a repudiation of Hindutva as much as it is a certain fatigue with Narendra Modi, as much as it is a concern that he has not been quite able to address some of the core structural contradictions of the Indian economy.
0:38:47 And this time, he was not able to go to the waters with anything that looked half-credible and say, “Look, this is going to be my game plan for the next 5 to 10 years.”
0:38:58 One thing I think that’s telling about that is it takes the legs out of this narrative of global liberal crisis or global liberal exhaustion specifically.
0:39:05 Every country has problems, and not every government in any country is going to solve them.
0:39:20 And it could be that a lot of what people interpret as malaise with liberalism as a governing philosophy, I mean in India, sure, but in the United States elsewhere, is actually just a frustration that long-running problems haven’t been addressed, whatever those problems are.
0:39:44 And that leads people to blame people in power, and they may try something new, but whatever the new thing is, even if it’s profoundly illiberal, will not be able to solve all the problems either, which is to say it will generate its own series of faults, weak points that can be exploited by liberals and their allies, which makes me wonder, are we overstating the crisis of global liberalism?
0:39:49 Has the selection made you a little bit more optimistic about where liberalism is headed?
0:40:18 So let me both agree and disagree with you. Yes, it is true that a lot of the dissatisfaction with liberalism may not be a revolt against liberal values per se. It is a certain kind of dissatisfaction against liberal political formations for their inability to govern, for their inability to produce the kind of economic growth and address long-standing social and economic problems, right?
0:40:36 But when that critique of the liberal establishment gives an opportunity to somebody like a Modi, or possibly somebody like a Trump, or God forbid in Germany, you know, AFT five years from now or something like that, right?
0:40:53 There is a real danger that if they come to power and stay long enough, they can actually not just create the conditions where liberalism is extinguished. They can actually create the conditions for something far worse.
0:41:04 So in that sense, I think the crisis of liberalism cannot be overstated, that when people like Modi are empowered and seem to be coasting along, you should worry about liberalism.
0:41:21 And as you have yourself documented, that illiberalism was being manifest in very concrete ways, political opponents of the regime were being targeted, civil liberties were being impugned, independent institutions were being assaulted, minorities were being relegated to second-class citizens.
0:41:40 So I actually do think the crisis was, I think, real. But the implication of what you’re saying is to me quite profound because it says that the diagnosis of that crisis and the solution to that crisis is not going to be another philosophical debate on liberalism.
0:41:52 We’re spending too much energy trying to, you know, define what’s the difference between cold war liberalism and contemporary liberalism and, you know, how individualist liberalism is.
0:42:08 I mean, those are worthy debates for us, but they really aren’t politically salient. The politically salient question is, how do you get political parties that are broadly sympathetic to liberal values?
0:42:21 To also become effective governing parties. So the future of liberalism in the United States is not going to turn on, I don’t think, a philosophical debate over liberalism.
0:42:37 It’s going to turn on, at what point do voters say, look, we think this formation has a better solution to our health care crisis, our housing crisis, our drugs crisis, our cost of living crisis.
0:42:47 Our lack of investment in infrastructure. They were willing to give Barack Obama a chance. Then they gave Trump a chance. Now they might give him Trump a chance back again.
0:42:57 And I think it’s a little bit odd to me to say that the same populations in a five year space have gone from kind of proto fascist to proto liberal to proto fascist back again.
0:43:09 That can’t be right, right? I mean, that’s, that’s, you know, that fundamentally what’s going on is the phenomenon that you’re describing, which is there are problems that matter to them.
0:43:20 And they’re not finding convincing answers in particular political formations, and they’re willing to risk something unorthodox.
0:43:30 Now you and I as liberals may think that those other parties are deal breakers. One should not take those risks.
0:43:47 But, you know, if you’re a voter who’s seen consistent tenure stagnation in wages, your subjective perception, at least as your quality of life is not improved, and your cultural identity seems to be under threat, maybe you’re willing to take those risks.
0:43:52 So I think the answer has got to be liberal governance more than liberal values.
0:43:59 I think a lot of this terrain is going to be settled on these actually very concrete issues.
0:44:08 And so if the Congress party now has a chance in some of the states that it governs in India, it’s going to solidify its control.
0:44:20 Not by necessarily waging just an ideological war, but by actually showing that all things considered, it’s a better bet than its alternative.
0:44:26 I actually am not fully sure I agree on with our point of consensus that seemed to emerge there, right?
0:44:32 I have a view that a significant portion of the population is revolting against liberal ideals, right?
0:44:38 And the question is what to do with the people who are willing to side with illiberals, even if they don’t necessarily share their ideas.
0:44:41 And that could prove to be the politically decisive persuasive vote.
0:44:48 But I don’t mean to minimize the genuine ideological conviction of many supporters of the BJP or many supporters of Trump.
0:44:50 I think that’s actually the hard core of it.
0:44:52 I mean, at least that’s what I argue in my book.
0:44:55 So I better stand by it on this podcast.
0:45:00 But your point about liberal governance and politics is well taken.
0:45:02 So can I just clarify one thing?
0:45:05 Because I actually agreed with your book and I’ve learned a lot from it.
0:45:11 And I’m the last person, if you kind of see my columns over the years, to actually argue that ideology is instrumental.
0:45:14 I actually think people are quite sincere about the beliefs.
0:45:15 So we agree on everything?
0:45:16 Yeah, no, no.
0:45:29 The context in which I was making this point, which is, look, I think that there will be a lot of people who very genuinely and sincerely and actually for good reason are suspicious of liberal ideals.
0:45:37 Think liberal ideals do not lead to the kinds of worthy leading of the kinds of life that they think are worth leading.
0:45:44 That liberal ideals actually even some cases undermine their capacity to leave the kinds of lives they want to lead.
0:45:47 I think those are actually quite serious and valid critiques.
0:45:56 The only reason I was, I think, foregrounding the governance issue is my sense is that in modern societies, that critique of liberalism will always remain an undercurrent.
0:46:09 It’s just a question of, can liberal parties, liberal institutions produce enough governance to actually carve out sustainable electoral majorities?
0:46:18 I think the cultural, philosophical, ideological battle, I think the stakes, in a sense, become much lower of those battles.
0:46:29 If you have a kind of political scenario where you can actually trust the other guys on at least some things you care about, as opposed to, you know, them being kind of disasters all around.
0:46:32 So it’s only in that very kind of limited political context.
0:46:35 Otherwise, I have to take the water of ideas completely seriously.
0:46:37 We’re going to leave it there.
0:46:41 Pratap Anumeta, thank you so much for joining me.
0:46:43 I just really appreciate this chance to chat.
0:46:44 Thank you so much.
0:46:47 It’s always great, great pleasure to learn from you.
0:46:58 [music]
0:46:59 All right.
0:47:01 Thanks for listening to this conversation.
0:47:06 I really liked doing it, and I hope you guys like listening to it too.
0:47:14 My favorite part about it was at the beginning, when Pratap and I were discussing what liberalism is and what the Indian version of it is.
0:47:24 And I think proof positive that the common story that the world outside the West is not fertile soil for liberalism to bloom is just simply false.
0:47:29 And I want to hear if you agree with me that that was the most interesting part, or what else you thought of the episode.
0:47:32 Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:47:33 Sean reads all the emails.
0:47:36 I’d like to, but I don’t have access to the inbox.
0:47:39 And make sure to rate and review the podcast.
0:47:42 I think it’s really great, but I’m biased.
0:47:53 This episode was produced by John Ehrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:47:56 New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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0:01:04 Liberalism is the dominant political ideology of our time.
0:01:15 It’s ideals of people free to choose how they live and who governs them triumphs in the 19th and 20th centuries,
0:01:19 defeating rivals like monarchy, fascism and communism.
0:01:22 But today, liberalism’s dominance is in trouble.
0:01:26 It’s most dangerous threats coming from inside its own historic borders.
0:01:30 From the United States to Hungary to Turkey to the Philippines,
0:01:34 politicians are running for office on platforms that challenge liberalism’s most basic premises,
0:01:36 and they’re winning.
0:01:46 One of the most important countries currently in crisis is India,
0:01:50 once seen as proof that liberalism can thrive outside the West.
0:01:54 India’s current government is now tearing the foundations of liberalism apart.
0:02:01 The world’s largest country is at risk of becoming the world’s largest authoritarian country.
0:02:08 I’m Zach Beecham, in Froshawn Illing, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:18 [Music]
0:02:25 In the recent parliamentary elections, voters delivered a stinging rebuke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government,
0:02:32 taking away its parliamentary majority and forcing it to rely on the support of smaller parties to stay in power.
0:02:36 Indian liberalism isn’t out of the woods, Modi is still the Prime Minister,
0:02:39 but it’s a lot healthier than many have suggested.
0:02:47 So what should the world learn from India’s situation, both the crisis of its liberalism and its recent efforts to fight back?
0:02:51 To find out, I reached out to the political scientist Pratap Banu Mehta.
0:02:54 Widely recognized as one of India’s leading scholars,
0:03:01 he’s published extensively on Indian democracy and also helped lead two of India’s top research institutions.
0:03:05 We’re both speakers at a new conference called Liberalism in the 21st Century,
0:03:12 which convenes some of the world’s brightest minds, and me, to discuss the big questions about liberalism and what we can do to preserve it.
0:03:18 So I hoped that we could give you all a little window into what this exciting event will be like
0:03:23 by essentially staging the kind of conversation that Pratap and I hope to have on the sidelines.
0:03:29 Pratap, welcome to the Gray Area.
0:03:31 Really delighted to be here.
0:03:39 So look, we’re here to talk about liberalism and what it means to be liberal to start with, right?
0:03:42 Because you can’t talk about how liberalism is doing in one place or the other,
0:03:47 and India or the United States or around the world without, you know, talking about what liberalism is first.
0:03:49 So like, let’s start with that.
0:03:55 To my mind, liberalism is a sort of set of moral and philosophical principles,
0:04:03 which is that the purpose of government is to encourage or permit really individuals to live life according to their own vision,
0:04:07 their own idea of what it means to be a good person to live a meaningful life.
0:04:09 And some things follow from that, right?
0:04:15 So democracy is one implication of that because you can’t have people choosing their own lives if they don’t, you know,
0:04:22 get to determine the government that runs them, individual rights follow from that for obvious reasons, including property rights.
0:04:29 But those things, which are often defined as primary to liberalism, I think are sort of secondary to the moral core of the doctrine.
0:04:30 At least that’s how I see it.
0:04:37 But I’m curious, Pratap, before we really get started to begin with your own definition and see how it compares to mine.
0:04:43 So let me begin with talking about an elemental experience that is at the core of liberalism,
0:04:48 because I think the definition flows out from it and it’s a variation of what you said.
0:04:55 So in many aspects of our lives, right, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve government.
0:05:03 We often have this thought that something would be unjustified if it were to be imposed upon us.
0:05:06 Sometimes we say that about our parents.
0:05:10 Sometimes we might say that about classmates, right?
0:05:12 I mean, don’t force me to do something.
0:05:20 It’s a source of resentment. I mean, we often resent the fact that we are being made to do things against our will in some ways.
0:05:32 And I think liberalism actually flows out of that elemental experience that any demand of authority over us needs to be justified to us.
0:05:41 And the reason I think I’m beginning with this thought is because often there is a kind of debate, are liberal principles universal?
0:05:44 Is liberalism a universal creed?
0:05:49 And I often find that if you begin at a philosophical level, we kind of start tying ourselves into knots,
0:05:54 while our property rights universal is autonomy universal.
0:06:04 But if you begin with this very elemental experience, you often find almost everybody has at some point used something like that argument,
0:06:11 that if you’re being forced to do something that you would not agree to, it violates something important about you.
0:06:21 And then I think a lot of other apparatus gets built up on it, what institutions protect them, where is that thought appropriate and so forth.
0:06:28 I like the way that our two accounts of what it means to be a liberal sort of separate out into a negative and a positive aspect.
0:06:36 For you, the root of liberalism is don’t do that to me, and you owe me at least a justification if you’re going to do that.
0:06:46 The version that I laid out is more what do I want out of life when I’m not being interfered with and that I should have the ability to be free from interference,
0:06:50 which I think should be defined capaciously, including, for example, poverty.
0:06:56 Even though no one is forcing you to do something by virtue of being poor, the sort of opaque functionings of the market are.
0:06:58 And I actually completely agree with you.
0:07:01 I mean, I think liberalism is an affirmative vision as well.
0:07:03 It’s not simply a series of prohibitions.
0:07:08 All that liberalism requires is, in a sense, just universalizing that thought,
0:07:13 that if you think it is morally important that something not be imposed on you,
0:07:16 perhaps you should extend that same curtsy to others as well.
0:07:29 But I think in this context, I just feel sometimes even this moral core has been lost because liberalism has now just become so encumbered by its kind of entanglement with western history,
0:07:34 this mistake we make that liberalism is specifically western or imperial or something like that.
0:07:38 Yeah, I want to talk about that because it’s been a hobby horse of mine for years.
0:07:42 And, you know, I get the other point of view here because I share yours, right?
0:07:50 But I understand why you would say, well, look, like liberalism is this tradition that we identify with a certain set of thinkers who are all European men,
0:07:59 all born roughly between the 16th and 19th century, and that those people had a particular set of concerns.
0:08:00 They often had their biases.
0:08:04 And you say, OK, well, I mean, liberalism is this.
0:08:06 Historically, this is what liberalism is.
0:08:09 And you can say whatever you want about what it might be abstractly.
0:08:19 But in actual context, liberalism is this set of ideas that emerged from the West and co-traveled with the development of racism and imperialism.
0:08:22 And this is really intrinsically a Western concept.
0:08:28 I’m just curious what you make of this argument as someone who works on liberalism in a decidedly non-Western context.
0:08:37 Look, I would actually reject the premise of this argument because I do think it is important to tell global history well.
0:08:45 Because it almost sounds when people say liberalism was invented in the 17th century, it almost sounds like there were no traditions of religious toleration,
0:08:53 no traditions that acknowledged value pluralism, for example, one other tenant of liberalism in some senses, in different traditions.
0:08:56 Those have actually been quite ubiquitous across the world.
0:09:04 So that’s why I actually resist the thought that one should begin with the history of liberalism in the 17th century.
0:09:07 Yes, there is a particular historical form of liberalism.
0:09:17 Liberalism arises in the 17th century Europe because there is a kind of history of religious persecution and religious intolerance.
0:09:23 The first wave of liberalism is in a sense a response to the problem of religious tolerance and religious pluralism.
0:09:32 Now, there are other parts of the world where theological intolerance was actually not a political problem at all.
0:09:37 It takes it to be a natural fact that different people will have different religious beliefs.
0:09:46 India had a different kind of intolerance, which was more social intolerance, which is to say that people are arranged in a kind of hierarchical order.
0:09:56 So for India, the emphasis will be on surmounting that legacy of inequality, the legacy of a caste society.
0:10:01 The sources and enemies of liberalism are actually different in different societies.
0:10:08 And I think a proper global account of liberalism has to actually take that variation into account.
0:10:10 You know, I don’t want to romanticize the past.
0:10:15 India also had its original sin in the form of kind of inequality and caste.
0:10:23 But at least on the question of theological philosophical intolerance, you know, the question actually never arose in quite the same form.
0:10:27 It did actually in the post-Christian Western world.
0:10:33 So I think one of the interesting things in the history of liberalism, as you know, there’s a kind of obsession with the self.
0:10:37 There’s not just a moral privileging of the rights of the individuals.
0:10:40 There’s almost a kind of valorization of individualism.
0:10:50 And I think one of the interesting things when I look at these Indian traditions, Emperor Ashoka, Buddhism, Jainism, parts of the Mahabharat,
0:11:06 is that they are also asking an interesting moral psychology question for liberals, which is what is it that leads people to want to dominate other people, right?
0:11:11 It’s not just a question of, you know, conviction that I’m right and you’re wrong.
0:11:22 There is also something about the way we construct our own identities in our own selves that lies at the base of this desire for domination.
0:11:30 So one of the things you actually find in a lot of these texts is that if you want a liberal culture, right, where you don’t seek to dominate others,
0:11:33 you respect other people’s beliefs and so forth,
0:11:43 you will actually have to ask a deeper and profound question, what kind of people do we have to be where that thought comes naturally to us?
0:11:46 That’s not just a question of philosophical doctrine.
0:11:50 That’s almost a question of temperament of moral psychology.
0:11:52 So I’m going to ask you a big question now.
0:11:53 We talk about Indian politics today.
0:11:55 We’re talking about a modern state.
0:12:10 One forged as a consequence of an encounter with British colonialism and the Mughal Empire before that and, you know, all sorts of complex historical developments that bridged from, you know, over 2,000 years ago to today.
0:12:24 So when we talk about liberalism in its modern Indian form, how did these various different proto-liberal ideas in the Indian tradition interact with more recent developments to produce what we might now call Indian liberalism?
0:12:29 No, that’s a profound question.
0:12:32 So I think there are a couple of different ways of talking about this.
0:12:44 So one, you’re absolutely right, right, that the presence of the modern state and not just the modern state, the modern world as a whole, make a difference to how you think about liberalism and what institutions are appropriate.
0:12:47 Now, one way of thinking about the Indian dilemma is the following.
0:12:56 Unlike many Western traditions, theological intolerance has not been at the center of Indian debates.
0:13:08 What has been at the center of Indian debates is a different kind of social power, namely the power exercised by communities over individuals within them.
0:13:11 Often they will exercise power over women within communities.
0:13:19 Often they will exercise power over the ability of individuals to exit communities, to convert, for example.
0:13:34 And when the Indian constitution was being made, I think one of the interesting things about the Indian constitution is many of the framers of the Indian constitution, the modernist framers, Ambedkar Nehru, who are actually very important figures in the history of liberalism.
0:13:51 For them, the big worry was that if the state was not empowered to reform communities, it is quite possible that you could actually end up with a state that is liberal in its broad constitutional structure.
0:14:02 But so much social power is exercised by communities over individuals that most individuals still find the social systems they live in actually quite oppressive, right?
0:14:08 So caste is one example where, in principle, you could say, look, you know, the state should be completely neutral.
0:14:12 It shouldn’t particularly care how people define their identities.
0:14:22 But if caste structures social power, it is going to have profound implications for the kind of freedoms individuals actually exercise.
0:14:28 The state might say people should be free to choose whatever lifestyle they want.
0:14:39 But does that mean as a society we can exclude people from taking water from the well in our village just because they happen to be from a lower caste?
0:14:55 So I think Indian liberalism was actually profoundly shaped by that experience of social power, not the experience of state power oppressing particular religions in the way in which I think was perhaps more characteristic of the European world.
0:14:57 So I think that’s one big difference.
0:15:12 So so many of the debates in Indian liberalism are actually preoccupied, therefore, with the question of social justice, with the question of how can the state dismantle social power so that individuals are freed not just from the state,
0:15:25 but from very oppressive forms of social power which may not have the sanction of the state behind them, but still can mutilate the dignity of individuals in quite profound ways.
0:15:33 You just mentioned Bir and Bedkar who, for listeners who don’t know Indian constitutional history, is the chair of the committee that wrote the Indian constitution.
0:15:45 He himself was from the lowest caste on the Hindu caste hierarchy and was preoccupied for very understandable reasons with ensuring that the constitution would grant equality and even work to improve their social status.
0:15:54 And one thing that he said, or about two months before the Indian constitution went into effect, really, I think resonates with what you’re saying about the nature and the identity of Indian liberalism.
0:16:03 He says, “In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man, one value.
0:16:06 How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
0:16:12 If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.
0:16:24 We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy, which this assembly has so laboriously built up.”
0:16:31 One reason I think about it now is it almost got the current crisis of Indian democracy backwards.
0:16:36 So Prime Minister Narendra Modi is currently, no doubt, a threat to Indian liberalism.
0:16:43 He’s not the voice of the dispossessed. His party, BJP, is traditionally the party of the upper caste and the wealthy, right?
0:16:57 It’s expanded, it’s appeal across caste and it primarily operates like its main argument ideologically against Indian liberalism has been an almost un-Indian sectarian argument, which is that Muslims don’t belong here.
0:16:58 It’s not their country.
0:16:59 India is a Hindu country.
0:17:06 It’s like it’s saying, “Okay, Indian liberalism, you’re concerned with these other things, whatever.
0:17:15 We’re going to import these arguments that we’re not part of Indian tradition, the sectarianism, that’s much more of a Western phenomenon historically.”
0:17:17 So I’m curious, right?
0:17:24 How does this challenge, was this challenge anticipated to a great degree by the framers of Indian liberalism?
0:17:33 Did they anticipate it and just not build in protections for it or what happened to give rise to Hindutva or Hindu nationalism as such a potent force in India?
0:17:43 It’s a wonderful question because I think it allows us to introduce, I think, one subject we haven’t named in this discussion so far, which I think is very important in the history of liberalism, right?
0:17:46 Which is the question of nationalism.
0:17:54 Now, I would argue that Hindutva is actually a very modern phenomenon.
0:18:03 What makes the emergence of Hindutva possible is the rise of the modern nation state, because apart from liberalism being universalized, right?
0:18:10 The one ideology that has become global in the 19th and 20th centuries has been nationalism.
0:18:25 Now, once this idea got around in the late 18th and 19th century, that we can institutionalize something like liberal democracy, only in a nation-state form.
0:18:36 It naturally led to two questions, which is one is how do we define who the people are and who gets to be a member of a particular society?
0:18:39 How does 19th century Europe respond to that idea?
0:18:54 How does it respond by defining nations in terms of particular ethnic characteristics, you know, so either a language, in some cases a religion, or even where it formally doesn’t define them that way.
0:18:59 They were taken to be unproblematically majoritarian countries.
0:19:07 In the process of that nation-state formation in 19th century Europe, you get enormous bloodshed and homogenization of populations.
0:19:17 That’s the process which then unleashes the quest to create somewhat more homogenous nation-states with cohesive identities.
0:19:21 And the result was a kind of moral catastrophe for Europe.
0:19:26 Nationalism, two world wars, entirely a kind of product of that.
0:19:36 Now, what was interesting about the Indian national movement was that it saw that history and said, look,
0:19:44 if you want to avoid the catastrophes of Europe, you have to think of nationalism very differently.
0:19:55 If you try and institutionalize that kind of a nation-state in the Indian context, the only logical conclusion would be immense violence,
0:20:01 displacement of people in the quest for creating homogenous nation-states.
0:20:07 So the modern Indian problem from 1857 onwards, ever since kind of modern politics entered India,
0:20:12 is there was the sense, look, there are these two communities, Hindus and Muslims in particular.
0:20:21 And the big question was, how is power going to be shared amongst these communities if you are actually going to have a democratic society?
0:20:27 And liberalism has always had a difficulty with the nationalism question because it has a theory of the state.
0:20:29 It has a theory of the good life.
0:20:32 It doesn’t have a clear theory of membership.
0:20:46 It doesn’t have a clear sociological theory of what produces the forms of identification that allow communities to function as democracies with deep allegiance.
0:20:56 So I would actually argue that what Narendra Modi is trying to do, he’s actually trying to import the fantasy of a European-style nationalism.
0:21:05 In a context where its consequences like in Europe will be full of conflict and violence.
0:21:22 After a short break, Pratap and I get into Indian liberalism’s current crisis and Narendra Modi’s outsized role in causing it.
0:21:24 Stay with us.
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0:25:13 As much as India might seem like hostile territory for Indian-style nationalism, Narendra Modi has been surprisingly good at creating an Indian version.
0:25:23 Despite the predictably bad consequences, we can talk about everything from discrimination in state policy to the rise of lynching and cow vigilantism inside India under Modi’s government.
0:25:34 It’s proof that his particular mode of ginning up nationalism is producing predictable violence in the ways that India’s great founding generation had anticipated.
0:25:39 They knew that this was a likely consequence of this version of nationalism coming in from Europe.
0:25:45 Yet, up until the most recent election, Modi was seen as the hegemonic force in Indian politics.
0:25:51 BJP party had just won two dominant national elections and they really seemed politically untouchable.
0:25:59 How did that happen? How do they get so strong? Is it primarily a story about the spread of Hindutva, its appeal to the Indian population,
0:26:08 or is it primarily about the traditional stalwarts of Indian democracy basically discrediting themselves in the eyes of the public through scandal and corruption and stuff like that?
0:26:15 Of course, part of the story is the liberal establishment discrediting itself and we can talk about it in a second.
0:26:26 But I want to take a kind of slightly longer historical view of Narendra Modi’s rise because I think it’s often presented as if there was this great history of Indian liberalism and then along comes Narendra Modi.
0:26:28 Right. No, it’s not that. It’s not that.
0:26:41 Let’s not forget one very important fact about Indian history that the great tradition of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, that post-national liberalism that they were trying to carve out.
0:26:54 It already had one major defeat in the 1930s and 1940s, namely the partition of India and a horrific partition, millions of people displaced, almost two million casualties.
0:27:01 And in that sense, you could say actually that nationalist project already registered its failure and Gandhi certainly thought it was a failure.
0:27:05 I mean, he mourned 1947 as much as he celebrated it.
0:27:21 India nevertheless still decides that despite partition, it’s not going to complete the logic of partition, which is what Narendra Modi wants, which is it’s not going to admit that India is a state or a nation only of the Hindus.
0:27:24 So it decides to continue with that experiment.
0:27:35 So you could actually say, I mean, the novelty is not Narendra Modi, that this has been actually an undercurrent in Indian nationalism ever since its inception.
0:27:50 It already had a kind of victory, a tragic macabre victory along with Muslim separatism, but that partition, the aftermath of that violence, Gandhi’s assassination allowed India’s second chance as it were.
0:28:07 The way in which I think that experience took shape was by bracketing a few controversial questions, or should each religious community have its own distinct set of laws governing marriage inheritance and so forth.
0:28:09 Freedom of expression.
0:28:28 The Congress Party lost a lot of credibility in the 1980s on the question of personal laws, rather than saying that the state is going to protect the individual freedom of every single individual, regardless of which community you belong to.
0:28:34 It actually started construing secularism as a competitive race between communities.
0:28:46 If you grant Muslims the right to personal law, let’s reimagine or at least reinvigorate in some sense as Hindu control over temples and so on and so forth.
0:28:51 That actually in a sense started creating this politics of majority versus minority.
0:29:00 And once you frame politics that way, at some point, you know, the majority and Hindu nationalist said, Hey, why do we need the minorities at all?
0:29:07 I mean, the joke about Congress used to be that it in the 1980s that it was trying to run Hindu nationalism and Muslim nationalism together.
0:29:11 And at some point, Hindu nationalism says, Why do we need them, right?
0:29:14 It lost trust of both communities.
0:29:26 Muslims stopped voting for the Congress Party, and it lost trust of many Hindus who thought that secularism had become another by word for political opportunism.
0:29:35 Right. So the difficulty, I think, for Indian liberals is that we just have not been true to our own convictions.
0:29:44 The point we started out with that fundamentally liberalism is about protecting the dignity and freedom of individuals.
0:29:53 That created fertile ground for a politician like Narendra Modi to appeal to Hindus, right, on these sort of narrow sectarian lines.
0:29:59 But I think one of his principal innovations was figuring out a way to cast against religion, right?
0:30:03 You talk about caste as being this essential concern for Indian liberalism.
0:30:21 Well, Modi’s argument, it’s sort of in some ways took on this liberal skin of being a caste emancipator of saying all of you Hindus are included in the Hindu polity so long as you unite against Muslims.
0:30:32 Now, I don’t think he– I mean, it’s clear from the last election results, which we’ll get to in a second, that he didn’t fully persuade lower caste individuals of this forever.
0:30:49 But a lot of his political success was picking up one of the main promises of Indian liberalism, the idea of challenging the caste system and ensuring true equality of all persons and marrying it to a deeply liberal ideology that blamed division inside Hindus on Muslims and on the threats posed by Muslims.
0:30:59 It strikes me that picking at a seam of liberalism, you can say even a liberal failure to fully address caste divisions was one of its genius political adaptations.
0:31:00 You’re right.
0:31:18 And you’ve laid your finger on something actually very, very important that the failure of the liberal left centrist secular establishment to actually convincingly tackle the question of caste and caste inequalities.
0:31:32 So this is something Mr. Modi could exploit very easily where liberals would profess the abstract principles, but actually did not do a very good job at incorporating backward caste and Dalits.
0:31:46 And one of Modi’s great achievements was not just to actually say that, you know, Hindus can unite and the divisions of caste can be overcome under this rubric of Hindu ideology.
0:31:47 Right.
0:31:53 With him, part of the appeal was his performative enactment of that.
0:32:04 He is from another backward caste, which is not the lowest on the caste hierarchy, which is not the lowest class of ex ex untouchables, but you know, still kind of considered one of the kind of marginalized communities.
0:32:13 And he could for quite a while and still I think in some sections actually produce a kind of identification with his biography.
0:32:23 That even the most well intentioned liberal in the 1980s and 1990s could not or the Gandhi family sees doing so for quite a while.
0:32:28 I mean, all he had to do was point in them and say, look, these are privileged elites.
0:32:32 I think a second important thing to remember I think about the Hindutva movement.
0:32:39 So when we think of groups that you need to incorporate into this movement, there are three principle non upper caste groups, right?
0:32:42 There’s the former untouchables, the Dalits.
0:32:44 There’s the other backward caste.
0:32:48 And then there’s this large group called the tribals.
0:33:07 And one of the things the Hindutva movement has actually been quite good at is building out grassroots movements, building out schools, social services, using a range of civil society organizations to normalize their presence in these communities.
0:33:16 And I think what the liberal and centrist forces lacked for the last 25, 30 years in India is actually any social movement attached to them.
0:33:30 Once liberals acquired state power, we forgot the fact that so much of the work of cultural and social reproduction happens in families, happens in civil society, happens in religious institutions.
0:33:38 And those are the institutions that the Hindutva movement was much more successful in engaging than I think the liberals and centrist were.
0:33:53 After one more short break, we’ll discuss what the recent Indian election says about voters appetite for Modi’s authoritarianism. Stay with us.
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0:34:57 The most recent election results pose an interesting puzzle as to how to think about Indian liberalism and its health going forward.
0:35:01 On the one hand, like let’s not sugarcoat it, Narendra Modi won a third term in office.
0:35:09 On the other hand, he was vowing to get 400 seats in the lower Indian House of Parliament that determines control of the government.
0:35:17 He didn’t even come close. His party got 240 seats and he did to form a coalition government to even have a bare majority.
0:35:25 So on the one hand, it’s not the end of Hindutva, but it is a real defeat.
0:35:43 Based on what we’re seeing, how do you interpret the mood of Indian voters towards not just Modi in general, but towards specifically the way in which he has taken an ideological hammer to the secularism at the heart of Indian liberalism?
0:35:48 One, it is a kind of defeat for Narendra Modi personally, actually.
0:36:01 For the first time, the BJP has lost many of the seats where he campaigned, and not just campaigned, but gave actually some of his more disturbing political speeches targeting Muslims.
0:36:11 Narendra Modi’s promise ten years ago, and maybe even five years ago when he ran for reelection, was that he was promising two things simultaneously.
0:36:21 He was tapping into that long-standing undercurrent of Hindu nationalism, but he was also promising a kind of economic modernism.
0:36:32 He ran on his ability to deliver economic growth, to deliver better social services, and for a while that actually worked.
0:36:38 I mean, in some ways, there are certain flagship schemes he did very well.
0:36:42 Infrastructure, this government’s performance has actually been reasonably good.
0:36:49 There are particular schemes that mattered to women in the first phase, building toilets, electricity connections, gas connections.
0:36:58 India did not do as well as Narendra Modi claims it did, but by any measure, they were not inconsiderable achievements.
0:37:05 But what has happened, I think, is that that welfare coalition has run its course.
0:37:07 So, what’s the big takeaway?
0:37:15 The big takeaway to me from this is that there is a kind of structural crisis in the Indian economy.
0:37:20 India has been very good at producing 6 to 8% economic growth.
0:37:24 It has largely benefited the top 20, 30%.
0:37:33 You can compensate by doling out a few welfare schemes every 5 or 10 years.
0:37:49 But you have still not solved the fundamental problem, which is, how does this economy produce good productive jobs that allow people to transition from agriculture ruler jobs into high-paying productive jobs?
0:37:58 So, what that means is that the economy is something that will make any governance structure periodically vulnerable.
0:38:08 And I think what was remarkable about Modi’s speeches this election is it was the first election where you just had the sense that he had absolutely nothing new to offer.
0:38:16 It was like a repetitive record of the same schemes that he was talking about 5 years ago.
0:38:36 So, I actually don’t think it’s a repudiation of Hindutva as much as it is a certain fatigue with Narendra Modi, as much as it is a concern that he has not been quite able to address some of the core structural contradictions of the Indian economy.
0:38:47 And this time, he was not able to go to the waters with anything that looked half-credible and say, “Look, this is going to be my game plan for the next 5 to 10 years.”
0:38:58 One thing I think that’s telling about that is it takes the legs out of this narrative of global liberal crisis or global liberal exhaustion specifically.
0:39:05 Every country has problems, and not every government in any country is going to solve them.
0:39:20 And it could be that a lot of what people interpret as malaise with liberalism as a governing philosophy, I mean in India, sure, but in the United States elsewhere, is actually just a frustration that long-running problems haven’t been addressed, whatever those problems are.
0:39:44 And that leads people to blame people in power, and they may try something new, but whatever the new thing is, even if it’s profoundly illiberal, will not be able to solve all the problems either, which is to say it will generate its own series of faults, weak points that can be exploited by liberals and their allies, which makes me wonder, are we overstating the crisis of global liberalism?
0:39:49 Has the selection made you a little bit more optimistic about where liberalism is headed?
0:40:18 So let me both agree and disagree with you. Yes, it is true that a lot of the dissatisfaction with liberalism may not be a revolt against liberal values per se. It is a certain kind of dissatisfaction against liberal political formations for their inability to govern, for their inability to produce the kind of economic growth and address long-standing social and economic problems, right?
0:40:36 But when that critique of the liberal establishment gives an opportunity to somebody like a Modi, or possibly somebody like a Trump, or God forbid in Germany, you know, AFT five years from now or something like that, right?
0:40:53 There is a real danger that if they come to power and stay long enough, they can actually not just create the conditions where liberalism is extinguished. They can actually create the conditions for something far worse.
0:41:04 So in that sense, I think the crisis of liberalism cannot be overstated, that when people like Modi are empowered and seem to be coasting along, you should worry about liberalism.
0:41:21 And as you have yourself documented, that illiberalism was being manifest in very concrete ways, political opponents of the regime were being targeted, civil liberties were being impugned, independent institutions were being assaulted, minorities were being relegated to second-class citizens.
0:41:40 So I actually do think the crisis was, I think, real. But the implication of what you’re saying is to me quite profound because it says that the diagnosis of that crisis and the solution to that crisis is not going to be another philosophical debate on liberalism.
0:41:52 We’re spending too much energy trying to, you know, define what’s the difference between cold war liberalism and contemporary liberalism and, you know, how individualist liberalism is.
0:42:08 I mean, those are worthy debates for us, but they really aren’t politically salient. The politically salient question is, how do you get political parties that are broadly sympathetic to liberal values?
0:42:21 To also become effective governing parties. So the future of liberalism in the United States is not going to turn on, I don’t think, a philosophical debate over liberalism.
0:42:37 It’s going to turn on, at what point do voters say, look, we think this formation has a better solution to our health care crisis, our housing crisis, our drugs crisis, our cost of living crisis.
0:42:47 Our lack of investment in infrastructure. They were willing to give Barack Obama a chance. Then they gave Trump a chance. Now they might give him Trump a chance back again.
0:42:57 And I think it’s a little bit odd to me to say that the same populations in a five year space have gone from kind of proto fascist to proto liberal to proto fascist back again.
0:43:09 That can’t be right, right? I mean, that’s, that’s, you know, that fundamentally what’s going on is the phenomenon that you’re describing, which is there are problems that matter to them.
0:43:20 And they’re not finding convincing answers in particular political formations, and they’re willing to risk something unorthodox.
0:43:30 Now you and I as liberals may think that those other parties are deal breakers. One should not take those risks.
0:43:47 But, you know, if you’re a voter who’s seen consistent tenure stagnation in wages, your subjective perception, at least as your quality of life is not improved, and your cultural identity seems to be under threat, maybe you’re willing to take those risks.
0:43:52 So I think the answer has got to be liberal governance more than liberal values.
0:43:59 I think a lot of this terrain is going to be settled on these actually very concrete issues.
0:44:08 And so if the Congress party now has a chance in some of the states that it governs in India, it’s going to solidify its control.
0:44:20 Not by necessarily waging just an ideological war, but by actually showing that all things considered, it’s a better bet than its alternative.
0:44:26 I actually am not fully sure I agree on with our point of consensus that seemed to emerge there, right?
0:44:32 I have a view that a significant portion of the population is revolting against liberal ideals, right?
0:44:38 And the question is what to do with the people who are willing to side with illiberals, even if they don’t necessarily share their ideas.
0:44:41 And that could prove to be the politically decisive persuasive vote.
0:44:48 But I don’t mean to minimize the genuine ideological conviction of many supporters of the BJP or many supporters of Trump.
0:44:50 I think that’s actually the hard core of it.
0:44:52 I mean, at least that’s what I argue in my book.
0:44:55 So I better stand by it on this podcast.
0:45:00 But your point about liberal governance and politics is well taken.
0:45:02 So can I just clarify one thing?
0:45:05 Because I actually agreed with your book and I’ve learned a lot from it.
0:45:11 And I’m the last person, if you kind of see my columns over the years, to actually argue that ideology is instrumental.
0:45:14 I actually think people are quite sincere about the beliefs.
0:45:15 So we agree on everything?
0:45:16 Yeah, no, no.
0:45:29 The context in which I was making this point, which is, look, I think that there will be a lot of people who very genuinely and sincerely and actually for good reason are suspicious of liberal ideals.
0:45:37 Think liberal ideals do not lead to the kinds of worthy leading of the kinds of life that they think are worth leading.
0:45:44 That liberal ideals actually even some cases undermine their capacity to leave the kinds of lives they want to lead.
0:45:47 I think those are actually quite serious and valid critiques.
0:45:56 The only reason I was, I think, foregrounding the governance issue is my sense is that in modern societies, that critique of liberalism will always remain an undercurrent.
0:46:09 It’s just a question of, can liberal parties, liberal institutions produce enough governance to actually carve out sustainable electoral majorities?
0:46:18 I think the cultural, philosophical, ideological battle, I think the stakes, in a sense, become much lower of those battles.
0:46:29 If you have a kind of political scenario where you can actually trust the other guys on at least some things you care about, as opposed to, you know, them being kind of disasters all around.
0:46:32 So it’s only in that very kind of limited political context.
0:46:35 Otherwise, I have to take the water of ideas completely seriously.
0:46:37 We’re going to leave it there.
0:46:41 Pratap Anumeta, thank you so much for joining me.
0:46:43 I just really appreciate this chance to chat.
0:46:44 Thank you so much.
0:46:47 It’s always great, great pleasure to learn from you.
0:46:58 [music]
0:46:59 All right.
0:47:01 Thanks for listening to this conversation.
0:47:06 I really liked doing it, and I hope you guys like listening to it too.
0:47:14 My favorite part about it was at the beginning, when Pratap and I were discussing what liberalism is and what the Indian version of it is.
0:47:24 And I think proof positive that the common story that the world outside the West is not fertile soil for liberalism to bloom is just simply false.
0:47:29 And I want to hear if you agree with me that that was the most interesting part, or what else you thought of the episode.
0:47:32 Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:47:33 Sean reads all the emails.
0:47:36 I’d like to, but I don’t have access to the inbox.
0:47:39 And make sure to rate and review the podcast.
0:47:42 I think it’s really great, but I’m biased.
0:47:53 This episode was produced by John Ehrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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0:48:23 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Authoritarian tendencies have been on the rise globally and the liberal world order is on the decline. One hotspot of this tension lies in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi employs autocratic language and tactics to maintain power. But a recent election may indicate that voters are losing interest in this style of rule. Guest host Zack Beauchamp talks with scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta about the past of the Indian liberal tradition and what the current politics of the world’s largest democracy say about the state of global politics.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Pratap Bhanu Mehta
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- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
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