India’s Constitution and Constitutional values are under attack and our institutions are being captured to further an ideology antithetical to the idea of India. How did such a situation come to pass and what lies ahead?
All Indians Matter speaks to Pushparaj Deshpande, managing trustee and director of Samruddha Bharat, who has co-edited ‘The Great Indian Manthan’, a collection of essays on the state, statecraft and the republic.
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter, I am Ashraf Enjanya.
[00:00:04] There has perhaps never been a time when India's constitution and constitutional values have
[00:00:08] been under greater attack.
[00:00:10] This has been compounded by institutions from universities to central agencies and others
[00:00:14] being captured so to speak to entrench an ideology wholly different from what they are
[00:00:19] supposed to follow.
[00:00:20] How did such a situation come to pass and what lies ahead for India?
[00:00:25] As I talked about this I was informed of a book, The Great Indian Manthan, a collection St. Stephen's College and the Doon School. He tweets that Pushparaj VD. Welcome Pushparaj. Hi, thanks Ashraf for having me on this show and hi to all the viewers or people who are listening and tuning into this show. Pushparaj with all its challenges, India was a vibrant democracy with thriving institutions before 2014. How do institutions that have been around for decades
[00:01:41] and been built with such care go into decline so quickly? That's an interesting question Ashraf.
[00:02:48] That is one of the reasons why we have seen such a rapid democratic regression over the last nine years.
[00:02:55] Yeah, Pushvrajan, political ideologies may vary but commitment to institutions is make or break for democracy.
[00:02:59] Did political intent change in 2014?
[00:04:21] Yeah, again, the political intent at the executive level capture that they have been able to affect first, electoral and then institutional. Do you think issues like education like to add here. These are no longer make or break factors in elections. They are just an eligibility criteria. It's like an eligibility ticket for you to be relevant to the electorate. So the electorate looks at these as your entry barrier.
[00:05:44] Once you've cleared that, then they're making up their minds on completely different factors from the Hindu right and extreme communism from the Muslim right is feeding into each other. Same thing with what we just argued about populism. The problem is that neither side is willing to come to the center ground and forge a bipartisan consensus in the national
[00:07:01] interest or the people's interest. That is and hence the state. But because that function is no longer being performed by the state, what has happened is the state is just one among the many constituent forces that are competing, clashing with each other. So there is no central fulcrum to bring everyone together in the national interest.
[00:08:23] That is the problem. and liberty. And faced with extreme discrimination, poverty, we gave universal franchise. Faced with multiple other examples that other countries had followed, we decided that no matter who you are or where you come from, you have equitable, not equal, equitable right on the constitutional
[00:09:42] promise of India. That is why we don't it was hugely revolutionary. And we have managed to adhere to that. See, we might not have always lived up to that value, but in Nehru's tryst with Destiny's speech, he says that we will achieve this very substantially. So that's what I'm saying. It was a very radical conception.
[00:11:04] And we, by and large, every government has aspired to this value. including the BJP, maybe not this version of the BJP, maybe a future version of the BJP that is slightly more interested in working in the national interest and doesn't frame everything about us versus them. But using a bipartisan consensus, we will have a plethora of options and it's very clear if you see the viewership of both the right-wing, left-wing and the centrist channels that are there on social media, increasingly people are converging to centrist channels. They are not, they're shying away from the extremes. So in a sense, made it very difficult for the election commission to do his job, which has been exacerbated tenfold by how the current dispensation has gerrymandered and manipulated the terms of service of the election commissioners, in terms of how they're able to respond,
[00:15:00] in terms of how EVM and the voting process is conducted.
[00:15:05] So there are a lot of perception issues If you don't have faith in that, you suddenly don't have faith in the democratic process. And you can't talk about saying that, oh, some free and fair here, you won one election. It can't be that. That easy has to be above reproach. And they have to take special steps to overcome this perception problem that is there. Yeah. I mean, I would argue that it's more than perception. I mean, look at the amount of clear poll violations that are done, especially, you know, in terms
[00:16:23] of inflammatory speeches and communalism, things in that state. Not just that, there are ads that have been taken out in Karnataka, I remember, after the polling had ended, the BJP took out full-page ads in newspapers and the digital media thing, vote for the BJP with their manifesto. Now, how can the election commission be the parliament, the government, the bureaucracy, civil society to a limited extent. Each of these has been misused and weaponized to undermine the people's rights, your rights,
[00:19:01] your civic entitlements, as well as the rights of opposition parties and others who raise
[00:19:08] your voices. not want to publicly articulate them or position yourself in a partisan manner. But you are doing your job by doing this podcast. Similarly, we need everyone to do their best. Even if it's something as small as picking up a book like this Manthan or any other book or newspaper or an article and give it to your uncle or auntie in the WhatsApp group saying that uncle, auntie, I disagree with you.
[00:20:21] What about this?
[00:20:23] It could be something more as bringing together young people to talk to them, which is what
[00:20:27] the RSS does.
[00:20:28] That's what they do in shakhas. society. That 25% of India genuinely believes that India has to go back to the graded inequalities of the past, that we need to be feudal, that we need to be caste, that Varnashram dharma communalism is the way to be, that Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, other linguistic or ideological
[00:21:41] minorities don't deserve equal rights, which is whatali Mein, I am a taxi driver, I am a jhagarachal Bali Mein, I am a jhagarachal, I am a jhagarachal at least I will be safe
[00:23:00] life, liberty and pursuit of happiness
[00:23:02] I can't do it here, let's do it outside
[00:23:04] so that nirasha, that disappointment
[00:23:07] is something that we know your India and my India We shared a same dream for India if you're able to make them believe that Then we'll be able to start working with them to first start creating software
[00:24:23] To reform in software for that all of us have to work together
[00:25:26] election commission. Those systems we need to completely reform from within and we need to create new systems so that collectively we are continuously working both the software
[00:25:32] of India and the hardware of India is continuously working towards a desired goal which is the
[00:25:36] constitutional promise of India. Right and there is a suggestion in the book to repurpose the state.
[00:25:42] Could you expand on that? Look the state for many purposes is not being able to effectively The top 20 companies of India captured about 46% of the total profits in India, 46%. Today, the top 20 companies capture over 75%. And in fact, if you even go further, out of that 75%, almost 70% is captured by the top
[00:27:06] 3 companies.
[00:27:07] Is this fair? and it will equitably distribute resources to everyone, the famous trickle-down effect. But state after state, nation after nation has proved that trickle-down doesn't work. You need even Singapore, it needed heavy interventions by the state to make sure that the level playing field increase and the poor capital incomes increase, both bottom-up and top-down.
[00:28:22] That is what I mean by repurposing the state. platform that is working in the national interest, transcending partisan lines so that you are able to keep doing the kind of things that we have been talking about through this podcast. If India has to work towards a certain goal, by the time it turns hundred and twenty forty seven, and when it's two hundred and twenty one forty seven, we need to start working on the ground with movements and NGOs. In fact, one of the bodies that we have created, Jan Saruka, works to coalesce civil society towards a certain to work on these goals. So our model is very simple. We are a small core nerve center.
[00:31:01] We like, again, to go back, let 100 flowers bloom.
[00:31:05] So we try to bring together key stakeholders in every state and the nation as a large. Now they have agreed to come together and start working even more tangibly. I think the next step would be organization building for us. Right. And how did the idea of the book come about and how did you go about it? Oh wow. So as I said, this book, The Great Indian Mantan is part, is the 10th book of
[00:33:24] But we realize that all of this cannot work without fixing the state.
[00:33:27] Governance and statecraft.
[00:33:32] These are the two key things that are actually essential to fix and redress, to do everything that we've been talking about, everything that we
[00:33:36] believe in. And there is complete silence on this in the entire literature.
[00:33:40] I mean, if you see most of the books on governance and public administration
[00:33:43] that exist in India or outside India are written by people who are outside us,
[00:34:45] National Advisory Council, Justice Madan Lokur, who was the Supreme Court Judge, Ashok Lavasa, who was again the Election Commissioner, N.C. Saxena, who was the head of the bureaucracies,
[00:34:51] Lalwadu Shastri Academy for training and churning out bureaucrats.
[00:34:58] And there are of course others also.
[00:34:59] Each one of them has seen the system from within.
[00:35:03] And they are not, they are not, if you see the book, if you read it, I assure you it
[00:35:07] is not partisan at all. I don't know, it just profoundly changed me and since then I've been very very deeply engaged with Rajaji and Mohlana Azad and Rajendra Prasad and Ambedkar and so on and so forth. And then when you read these people, these intellectual giants who have walked before us, you realize that these people actually believed in something more than their individual selves.
[00:36:22] You know, they gave their, for our people. I just need to find the right way to channelize them constructively. That's it. And why wouldn't you do it? Everything, there is so much positivity. It's like everyone just overflowing with just so much positivity and idealism. I couldn't have it any other way. I'm sorry, I went off on a slight rant.
[00:37:44] That's absolutely fine. Pushvraj, the freedom struggle, you are never going to be able to get a chance to do something so meaningful, where the life your lives, your society, your economy, doing something about it is in your
[00:39:01] hands. So please, if you can, just think about the fact that just think about what you can do to