For the last episode of season 4, Milan sits down with Vinay Sitapati about his blockbuster new book, Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi.
This week on the show, Milan sits down with Vinay Sitapati, political scientist and author of the blockbuster new book, Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi. Vinay’s new book gives readers the crucial backstory to understanding India’s current political moment and it is full of historical insights, colorful anecdotes, and a decent dash of insider gossip.
Vinay and Milan discuss the unusual duo of Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, Hindu nationalism’s obsession with elections, the BJP’s “schizophrenic” approach to economics, and how the Hindu nationalist movement manages to balance the twin impulses of inclusion and exclusion. Plus, Vinay explains how a better understanding of the BJP of yesteryear can inform our thinking about Narendra Modi and Amit Shah today.
Episode notes:
This is the last episode of Grand Tamasha season 4! We'll be back in January with new episodes. If you have feedback or episode ideas, please contact us at podcasts@ceip.org. Happy holidays!
Milan 00:11
Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. This is the very last episode of season four of Grand Tamasha. In my opinion, we are ending with a very big bang. We are going to be coming back with new episodes for our fifth season starting in late January. My guest on the show today is Vinay Sitapati, a political scientist and author of the blockbuster new book Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi. Many of you will already know Vinay from his previous book, Half-Lion, which was an award-winning account of the life of former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. Vinay's new book gives us the crucial backstory to understanding India's current political moment, and it is full of historical insights, colorful anecdotes, and a decent dash of insider gossip. I'm pleased to welcome Vinay to the podcast for the very first time. Vinay, congrats on the book.
Vinay 00:59
Thanks, Milan. It really is a pleasure to be here.
Milan 01:02
You know, I want to start first by asking you about your previous book. Your first book, Half Lion, as I mentioned, was a political biography of former Congress prime minister Narasimha Rao. It was a big hit across India and across the world, really. We had the chance to talk about this book, I think at Carnegie, shortly after it came out. At what point did you decide, “I need to take up the question of the BJP's rise as the subject of my next book?”
Vinay 01:32
Well, Milan, I am 37, so I grew up in the '90s in Bombay, in India, and I remember liberalization - I remember the opening of the Indian markets in the early 1990s. I remember standing in a very long line for the first McDonald's to have, like, a Maharaja Mac. And, in some sense, my first book was to ask the question, how did that happen? So, that was my childhood memory. It pushed me to think about liberalization. And then I said, look, the politician at that time was Narasimha Rao, and I had studied enough to realize that that was a political story, that the Maharaja Mac that I ate around 1995 was driven by politics, so I picked up this biography of Narasimha Rao, and that was the story.
So, once I finished that, now, I was thinking about the other big political change that happened in the '90s in India, which is the rise of the BJP - the slow decline of the Congress and the emergence of the BJP as a stable competitor. So, I spent some time thinking about whether I should do a biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP's first prime minister - he was prime minister in '96, briefly in '98 for about a year, and then four or five years between '99 and 2004. So, that was what I went in going to do, but you're a scholar yourself, Milan, and you know that you go in on a research subject with a hypothesis, and then you realize that you didn't really know what you were talking about. Now, I realized very quickly that Vajpayee was only one half of the story, the other being the organizational man, Lal Krishna Advani, who was eventually India's deputy prime minister during those five years in power.
And once I began looking at these two and their story and the story of their teamwork - and that really is why my Indian version of the book is titled Jugalbandi, which is an Indian word, which is a musical concert played with different musical instruments. So, it's not a duet, it's not the same musical instrument, and Vajpayee and Advani were quite different from each other, but it's also an equal [style of] music - it's not that one of them accompanies and the other is the main performer. So, a musical concert with two people, both of them the main performers who typically play different instruments, that's a jugalbandi, and that was really the relationship I was interested in between Vajpayee and Advani. And as I got into that, Milan, I realized that really this story and this relationship between these two guys was a mirror to the larger rise of Hindu nationalism and the larger story of Hindu nationalism, which is why in some sense this book is about the BJP before Modi, all the way from 1924 to 2004. So, it was an organic evolution rather than a well-thought-out plan when I began writing the book.
Milan 04:18
As you say, you decided to tell the story specifically through the kind of intertwined lives of Vajpayee on the one hand and Advani on the other. Now, I remember meeting you in the course of writing this book. We're having coffee in Washington, D.C., and you brought out the most impressive binder I think I've ever seen, which was color coded, had dividers into different chapters - it was the most methodical process I think I've seen of someone in our field. And what's remarkable about this book in many ways is you are a political scientist, but you're also a lawyer, you're a scholar, and so there's a lot of meat for people to grab on to, but you tell the story in a very readable way. So, I think it's a really nice nexus - kind of a trade publication, but one that has a lot of research oomph. And I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the broader themes, but before I get there, I'm thinking - as a commercial proposition, when you go to talk to your publisher, there must have been a lot of pressure to say, “You know what, we still haven't had the great book on Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.” Was there pressure on you to kind of focus more on the contemporary period rather than looking in the rear-view mirror?
Vinay 05:33
So, Milan, since you know me, you know well that I don't scoff at commercial considerations at all. Like, I'm obsessed with readers - I look at my Amazon sales numbers all the time, and I'm not ashamed about it. Like, why the hell did I spend three years doing this if people don't read the book? Some people think it's a shallow way to go about things, but you know what? I just don't care. At the same time, I have to ask myself, what do I bring to the table? I used to be a journalist in India - there are plenty of journalists who have written about Amit Shah and Modi and others who want to write and are going to write about it. What do I add? I add academic rigor. I did my PhD at Princeton. So, I can look at data, I can look at archives, I can - just the scale of interviews, right? I did about 200 interviews for this book, I must have read about 100 articles as well as a few books, and none of this is helpful in understanding Amit Shah and Modi at least for the next 15, 20 years. So, I realized that I should do something [where] I add value as a scholar while at the same time making it racy, masala, and intelligible.
To give you just one example - a lot of people were happy to talk to me because Indian politicians only care about the next election, and Vajpayee and Advani are not electable anymore. Had I focused on Modi and Amit Shah, nobody would have spoken to me. No party documents would have been available. Nobody would have had the guts to give me their private archives. For example, I have the private archives of Vajpayee and Advani's lawyer, which is fantastic because lawyers write everything down. I'm not going to get Amit Shah and Modi's lawyer to give me anything for the next 10, 15 years.
More importantly, at a philosophical or a scholarly level, Milan, Amit Shah and Modi's stories are still being told. We don't know where that will end. Is it permanent? Is it just a temporary? I mean, I don't think it's temporary, but maybe it is, right? So, I have the benefit of some hindsight, which is where I think scholars kind of step in. Maybe what I'm doing is a little too early, which is why I rely a little more on newspapers and interviews, especially in the 2000s - from the 1920s, '30s, '40s, I can get archives. But I do think that - and I realized this with the Narasimha Rao book - you need 20, 30 years' distance between the subjects that you're writing about for people to speak, for archives to be made available, and quite simply to be able to see the woods for the trees. So, while I love commercial and sales considerations, I also know that what I should do is different from so many journalists trying to write about today.
Milan 08:05
Before we get into the real heart of the book, it occurs to me that many of our listeners started following Indian politics in 2014, or maybe with the UPA government - that they're young enough or new enough to the subject that the '70s, '80s, and '90s are kind of like ancient history to them. I was wondering if we could start out by just having you kind of briefly sketch out the books' two main protagonists, and let's start with Vajpayee. You note early in the book that “Vajpayee's childhood was not swept up in the anti-British struggle. Instead, what kept him and Advani busy was involvement in a cultural organization, the RSS, which was expanding fast enough for the British to at that point in time contemplate a ban.” Tell us a little bit about how Vajpayee enters the Hindu nationalist movement and how that shaped his life in his formative years.
Vinay 08:58
Well, so, just to give a brief sense to some of your listeners about why you should care about these two old guys - you know, how does it matter for the for the current moment? - in some sense, my book is an answer to the puzzle that unlike, say, Donald Trump or the Philippine president or the Brazilian president, Narendra Modi is not a whimsical man who wakes up and is driven by his own ego. He's an enormously disciplined man who is driven by a politics that is 100 years in the making. So, the Citizenship Amendment Act now, what he did when it comes to the special status to Kashmir, to just give you an example, [these policies have been] in the party manifesto for the last 70 years. So, that's why you should look at this 100-year history. And the people who dominated much of these 100 years were Vajpayee and Advani, and they literally ran the party between them from basically 1968 all the way to 2004. So, that's why you should study the two of them. And I do have a bit about the young Amit Shah and Modi and what are their defining influences and why are their politics different from the jugalbandi, or the duo of Vajpayee and Advani.
But let me begin the story at the birth of Vajpayee and Advani, which is the 1920s. So, to really understand them, you have to first understand the context in which they were born, and that context, Milan, is the introduction in a real sense of elections into India by the British. So, the British were introducing elections in India in response to nationalistic pressure. There were limited elections - they had begun in the late 19th century - but the 1920s is really the decade where Indians realized for the first time that the principle of one person, one vote is definitely going to decide power in the future. And, as you know, Milan, I have written about extensively [how] India is a group-based society - caste, religion, and region play a very big role. I also know, for example, race plays a role in the West, but Indian lives were and are entirely structured on the basis of groups. What lends fluidity and flexibility to Indian politics is that the definition of the group changes. Sometimes you vote because you're a Hindu, sometimes you vote because of your region, sometimes you vote because of your caste. But it's still groups we're talking about, not individuals.
So, just imagine for a second that you are 100 years prior to today in India and the British have introduced one person, one vote in a group-based society, and all of a sudden, Indians don't start voting according to their interest as individuals. Instead, groups begin to panic. If your group size is small, like in the case of Muslims, you begin to argue against one person, one vote, whereas if you're a Hindu nationalist, you say, “We love elections, and why do we love elections? Because Hindus are at the time 75% of British India and now about 80%. What's the problem? We love elections. But the puzzle for us is making sure that India's 80% Hindus who are divided into 1000s of castes, sub-castes, languages, vote as one.” Right? In India, we have a word for it - it's called a vote bank. So, to consolidate a Hindu social identity so that they vote [as] one - and, as you know, Milan, you're an expert at this, to win an election in India, you don't need 50% of the vote, you need 30% of the vote, you need 25% of the vote - that's the 100-year project of the RSS, of the BJP. They're not fascists. They're majoritarians who are defined by elections. That's the context to see Vajpayee and Advani.
Now, Vajpayee, as I mention in the book, is a Gangetic Brahman. He wears a sacred thread, he speaks Hindi, he knows a smattering of Marathi, and he enters into nationalism for reasons of caste and for reasons of location, [namely that] the princely state he grew up in was also Marathi-speaking, and Marathi is the lingua franca of the elite of the RSS, or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the voluntary group that forms the underpinning of today's BJP. So, that's Vajpayee for you. He eventually adopts the persona of a moderate or a liberal. I argue that there were two reasons for this. Reason one was that he becomes a parliamentarian at the age of 34 in 1957 and basically doesn't leave Parliament for the next 50 years. More than what the party or the kaadar thinks, he cares what Parliament thinks, and Parliament at that time is fashioned by the Nehruvian consensus, the original idea of India, and Vajpayee realizes that to mainstream Hindu nationalism - which had been rendered untouchable after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a man who subscribed to Hindu nationalist beliefs, even though he didn't belong to the organization and the organization played no role - that was his job.
On the other hand, Advani comes from an English-speaking background, like me, and he's a very rich man. He grows up in Karachi, which is a syncretic port city of the British Empire, exactly like Bombay. His strand of Hinduism is quite ecumenical. There are Sikh rituals practiced in his house, and his mother goes to a Sufi Muslim shrine to pray. So, he comes from a rich English-speaking class background and a strand of Hinduism which is very different from Hindu nationalism. Why does a man like him join the RSS and Hindu nationalism? The answer is the division of India on the basis of religion in 1947. Overnight, his family is dispossessed. Karachi is now part of Pakistan, and the Hindu minority there are forced to leave. And it's not just the fact that Advani's very rich family is converted to poverty and he's forced to flee as a refugee: his own religious idea of Karachi and Sindh, his state, as central to the Indian imagination has been destroyed. So, that's why these two unalike characters end up into Hindu nationalism and dominating it for the next 50 years.
Milan 14:58
But it's not just about ideas, of course, although that's a major part of it. One of the most remarkable aspects of the book is the way in which you're able to bring out the relationship and the partnership between these two men, right? Sometimes one takes the lead, the other takes the backseat, sometimes it's flipped, where the other one holds the reins and the other takes the backseat. You recount in colorful detail the first time Advani meets Vajpayee, and he remarks that he saw something smoldering within Vajpayee - that he “had a fire in his belly that produced an unmistakable glow,” I think is the quote that you have. Vajpayee, on the other hand, doesn't recall that first meeting, it seems, which must be something of a disappointment to Advani.
Vinay 15:41
But it's revealing nonetheless, right?
Milan 15:44
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the kind of yin and yang of this relationship, this kind of jugalbandi, as you call it. How did these two men sort of complement one another in the actual practice of running a political party?
Vinay 15:59
So, Hindu nationalism requires this yin and yang because it's both a movement seeking to change society as well as a party-seeking government. So, it always needs a moderate organizer-orator who appeals to Parliament as well as an organizer who can enthuse the kaadar. And Vajpayee and Advani weren't the first in this. Before that was Syama Prasad Mukherjee, the youngest vice chancellor of Calcutta University, basically an English-speaking man who becomes the face of Hindu nationalism in Parliament, while the dhoti-wearing, Hindi-speaking Deendayal Upadhyaya is kind of the Watson to his Sherlock Holmes, if it were. And in that sense, Hindu nationalism knew it needed a Vajpayee and Advani. They knew that.
But what is remarkable, Milan, about this relationship is how seamlessly they're able to switch roles. Between 1968 and 1986, it's Vajpayee who heads the party and heads the movement, but in 1986, as Hindu nationalism moves in a more radical direction, the RSS orders Vajpayee to step down as party president, and Advani becomes the head and the face of the party from 1986 to 1995 as the party moves in a more extreme or radical direction. Once more, in 1995, when the party looks within striking distance of power but needs to attract coalition allies and therefore moderate its image, Advani steps down and wordlessly serves under Vajpayee. Now, Milan, anyone who's been to India, anyone who's worked with Indians, really, know one thing: that Indians tend to be prima donnas, right? They find it very hard to work together in a team. You put three Indians in a room, and they end up with four factions, right? That's the joke. Many group-based societies have it. Indians are famously like that. And in that sense, in India - I mean, this is true everywhere in the world, but Indians are very status- and hierarchy-conscious. So, if you were once my junior and I was your senior, we don't like reporting to somebody who once reported to us. I mean, nobody likes it, but I think in America, it's a little more common. In India, on the other hand, government servants will resign, right, if they have, “been superseded” by someone from a junior batch. You know this, Milan, and this is the nature of India. In that scenario, a relationship that was able to move up and down and switch partnerships for the sake of this larger ideology - I found it just remarkable.
And it also gave me the clue to the larger point of why the BJP wins. Now, look, there are many reasons why the BJP wins, and I provide a causal explanation for the 1980s. But this book provides, I think, for the first time a new explanation, namely, that they are obsessed with unity under any condition. So, in that sense, jugalbandi or teamwork is the ideology of the movement. And that's what I find remarkable about the BJP, exemplified by this particular partnership.
Milan 19:01
So, this oscillation between extremism and moderation, this yin and this yang, you said, is kind of built into the BJP. If you read the work of, say, Christophe Jaffrelot, the French political scientist, he talks about this as well when he's accounting for the rise of the BJP. But we like to put people in bins, right? So, the bin that we put Vajpayee in is that he was the more palatable, moderate “mask” - [that’s] the term that's used for the BJP. But you also note in the book that Advani often wore a mask of his own. How so?
Vinay 19:35
You needed a good cop, and you needed a bad cop, and both of them knew that. And, ironically, the beginnings of both of them were the opposite of the role they eventually played. You know, if you think about it, that's what's fascinating about that story. Now, there is some truth to the story. You wear the mask long enough, the mask becomes your face - Vajpayee had liberal instincts and Advani genuinely cared what the party kaadar thought, what the RSS thought, more than what Parliament thought, right? But in that sense, they were wearers of mask, both of them.
Milan 20:08
Getting back to the point you made a second ago about party unity - this is one of the big explanations in your book for why the BJP wins, and I think [is] why political scientists will be mining your book for information about future work. If you just fast forward a second to the present moment, there are a lot of people actually saying that the BJP is in danger of losing this party unity on two counts. One is that they have put all their eggs in the Modi basket, and if Modi, for whatever reason, becomes unpopular, you could see a fragmentation. But there's a second reason, which is that in its successful attempt to expand its political footprint, it has started to incorporate castaways, poach people from other political parties who are not true believers in the RSS, Sangh Parivar kind of Hindutva ideology. Do you think, if you just kind of hit pause on the history for a second and think about the contemporary moment, that party unity looks or could look very different in a future BJP than how it looked in the past?
Vinay 21:17
I don't think so. Milan, let's take your second argument of castaways. The Jana Sangh and the BJP have been doing this for a really long time. Jaswant Singh, former foreign and finance minister of India, was a castaway from the Swatantra party. He joined. Sikander Bakht, the first Muslim face of the BJP, joined around 1980 - he was a castaway, too. Many other allies, like George Fernandes, a trade union leader who came from the political left, or Yashwant Sinha - he was a finance minister during the Vajpayee era, and he had literally been a finance minister in the previous Janata government. So, the BJP needs castaways because it's pragmatic that you need them to win elections, but the core of the BJP, the core of the Jana Sangh, will always be people with an RSS connection, and they will never forget that. So, they are very instrumental and cynical in taking some of these castaways, and they know that these people are not loyal to the ideology - you know, “We need them, it's a pact with the devil.”
But they've been making this electoral pact with the devil for a very long time, and to the extent that you have disunity, it's all these castaways who are disunited. Look today at all the former BJP leaders who are criticizing Narendra Modi. None of them come from an RSS background. Arun Shourie, the former disinvestment minister, he's not from an RSS background. Yashwant Sinha: not from an RSS background. On the other hand, the two men who Modi has humiliated the most, Murli Manohar Joshi and Lal Krishna Advani, have not muttered really a word against Modi, and that tells you something.
Now, in regard to your first question about [whether] Modi threatens disunity, the argument I'm making is not that there's something magical about the RSS, that they don't attract on egotists. I mean, Narendra Modi is Indian - he drinks the same water as other Indians who believe themselves prima donnas. But the question is, despite the fact that Modi is a bit solitary and a lone wolf, despite the fact that he's built a personality cult around him, and despite the fact that he's more popular than the party, the party organization has not been destroyed, the RSS has not been swallowed. And you have leaders in today's BJP, like Vasundhara Raje Scindia and the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, neither of whom Modi particularly likes and [who were both] once competitors to Modi, who have a say in the organization. In contrast, if you look at the Congress Party, you don't have anyone who doesn't swear absolute loyalty to Nehru Gandhi. So, despite Modi's solitary personality, the BJP today continues to have more inner-party democracy than most other political parties in India. And that's a triumph of the ideology of teamwork.
Milan 24:11
I mean, just to echo that point, this group of 23 Congress party elites have come out, they issued a letter a few months ago, worrying about the future of the Congress, and we've seen how they've been both publicly and privately kind of slapped down and marginalized in various ways. I want to come back to the period of the 1980s. So, the BJP is born as a party in 1980, and this is taking place in the aftermath of the ill-fated Janata government post-Emergency. You credit Advani for steering the BJP in a new direction, a direction that is more aligned with the backward caste movement, more in favor of the Ram temple in a Yoda more in Ayodhya, even of liberalization, but you remind us that these weren't preordained changes in any way. How did Advani come to shape the party in that direction? And, I'm wondering, to what extent was this a kind of top-down effort at change versus being able to perceptively kind of read the ways in which politics was shifting around him and quickly get in front of that tidal wave, as it were?
Vinay 25:39
So, the book argues that it's the latter, that Advani was late to the party. There's a saying in India - I'll say it in Indian, then I'll say it in English - which is, “नया-नया मुसलमान पांचों वक्त नमाज़ करेगा,” or “a new convert to Islam always prays five times.” Advani was a new convert to Hindutva in the late 1980s. So, my story, where it departs from scholarship on Hindu nationalism begins in the early 1980s, Milan, where I argue that the rise of the BJP or the rise of a Hindu vote bank was demand-driven. There was Hindu anxiety in the air, and that Hindu anxiety was driven by three or four factors. One is the Khalistan, or Sikh separatist movement, which was targeting Hindus of all castes. Second was the rise of OBC reservations on numerically mandated quotas in North India around that time - it had already happened in South India - which was creating panic among upper-caste, poor Hindu voters. Third is a fear that Saudi petro dollars were fueling conversions to Islam. And I would say, fourth, the general deterioration in the economy, which was fueling not class fears, but ethnic fears.
So, you have this cauldron in the 1980s where you have Hindu anxiety. Vajpayee is still stuck in the belief that, like in the 1970s, in the 1980s itself, the way to mainstream the BJP is to work within the Nehruvian consensus and to stay away from the RSS, and he's wrong. Again, I don't mean wrong for India, I mean wrong for Hindu nationalism and the BJP right. To be clear, my job is not to take sides in this debate. Advani realizes it much later, and as I argue in the book, the first group to see this was the RSS and the VHP. They begin to stroke Hindu anxiety. And the first political party to pander to this is the Congress Party, not the BJP, and in some sense the BJP adopts, for example, the Ayodhya movement - the desire to destroy the Babri Mosque and build a Hindu temple above it four years - after the Congress adopts it. Nobody talks about that. The first communal party in India was the Congress, right? For crying out loud.
Milan 27:50
But there's also the issue of - sorry, just to interject - this comes up in discussions about things like the cow slaughter bans, for instance. If you look at where those were first enacted, they're by and large in Congress ruled states.
Vinay 28:04
Yeah, absolutely. Right. And, in some sense, the BJP in the '80s is terrified that it's fashioning itself in this moderate image, but all Hindu voters are going in the opposite direction, because Vajpayee has descriptively completely misread the mood in the 1980s, which is a demand for radical Hindu politics. And by the time you entered 1990 - 1990 and 1991, to me, are the two years that define India today because they have the three big currents (and I have a chapter on that), which is the backward cast reservation quotas, the Ayodhya movement or radical Hindu politics, and economic liberalization or open markets, all of them taking place within basically a year of each other.
Milan 28:47
The three M's: Mandir, Mandal, and Markets.
Vinay 28:50
Yes, exactly. Right. Then it begins in August 1990, when the minority V.P. Singh government, with the outside support of the BJP, announces quotas in central jobs for middle castes or backward castes, and it creates fury among the poor upper caste voters who were the core vote base of the BJP. But Advani, who is at the time the President of the BJP, is smart enough to realize that if he opposes this, he risks alienating 40% or 45% of India who are OBCs, who are middle class, and the BJP will then be condemned to be just a 20%-of-India party, and you can never win with that. He knows that. So, he immediately supports the Mandal commission. His core base of the BJP is furious, but that's what has held the BJP in good stead today, Milan. All the data - which you're familiar with, many of which you create - shows you that the BJP is not an upper caste party anymore. It gets a lot of middle class votes, which is important to rule India.
At the same time, a month after the announcement of the Mandal commission report, he gets on top of this Toyota convertible, which looks like an ancient Hindu chariot, and he rides from Somnath in Gujarat all the way to Ayodhya. He stopped in the middle in order to create this mass movement to build the temple, thereby diverting Hindu anxiety from cannibalizing each other to standing united against Muslims as the other. And he's successful. He's absolutely successful. So, the two things that you see in the BJP of today, which is that it's a progressive Hindu party when it comes to caste but an exclusionary party when it comes to religion, happens in those two months.
And the third feature of the BJP happens soon after, when the Narasimha Rao government decides to open up India's markets. The trader base of the BJP supports the removal of domestic restrictions on domestic entrepreneurs, but they don't want foreign competition. But Advani sees the tide of history and pushes back against his own base to allow for multinational corporations to come to India, and I actually have private archives - I'm quite proud of that - of the meetings that happened immediately after. It's quite gossipy. So, that's the part of my research that I love, which is you get this gold mine where people are also abusing each other. It's amazing, right?
But that tells you that Advani could have gone differently. The BJP in that year - basically between August 1990 to August 1991 - could have become a party of only upper caste, in which case it could have never won anywhere in India. It could have become a party that rejected the Ayodhya movement, in which case it wouldn't have been able to radicalize its own base, and it could have gone against economic liberalization, and that would have been a very different party from today. So, while the book looks at these long duration forces, like Hindu anxiety, changes in demographics, I think the journalist in me is alive to the fact that pivotal events and personalities at critical junctures do change the course of history.
Milan 31:57
Just to kind of finish the point - you quote Arun Shourie, who is now not in the BJP's good books, but of course was very much part of the Vajpayee government, as saying that Advani was “the second most powerful man in India - the most powerful man was the one who met him last,” suggesting that he didn't clearly know which side of the fence he was to come down on.
Vinay 32:19
Yes, yes. Milan, I think you know, because I spent a lot of time on these two personalities, Vajpayee and Advani, I asked myself, can I describe each of them in one word? And with Vajpayee, I'd say charisma, right? Just raw, Elvis Presley-style charisma. Those of you who know Hindi, just go on YouTube and listen to his speeches. No Indian politician spoke with his mesmerizing quality.
The defining feature of Advani was under confidence, and I think it has to do with the trauma of partition. And the Arun Shourie quote that you mentioned fits that that that bill very well. He was an underconfident man, not sure of his own ability. He is a Hamlet-like figure - “to be or not to be,” as it were - which is why it's even more surprising that he saw the arc of history in that one-year period between August 1990 and '91. Sometimes, Milan, the subjects you think you know very well surprise you. Sometimes your friends, your parents, your significant other who you think you've figured out - sometimes they surprise you. That's the beauty of human beings: they can't be reduced to arithmetic.
Milan 33:23
So, we talked a little bit about this issue of the three M's, and I want to ask you a bit about the market, the third. Throughout the book, there is insight into the BJP's evolution on economics. At one point, you note the following, and I just want to read out a quote: “The ease with which Hindu nationalists can spout opposing economics suggests they don't have a principled view on the subject. The deciding factor in choosing to not confront Indira Gandhi was an analysis of what it took to win elections. It was votes, not ideology or money, that shaped the Jana Sangh's economics.” Of course, talking about an earlier era, it seems to me then if we again bring your insights to the current day that we should not at all be surprised by what some would argue resembles a kind of cognitive dissonance in the halls of power today, right? On the one hand, there are some factions who would like greater liberalization, more FDI, who would like to sign up to these mega-regional trading agreements, and others within the party and in the RSS who feel quite torn, who would like to see a doubling down on import substitution, who would like to see greater tariff barriers, who would like to see reform of public sector units rather than privatizing them. So, it seems like we've made, as an analyst class, a huge mistake in 2013-2014 assuming things about what a Modi-led BJP would do that we shouldn't have known based on past history. Is that accurate?
Vinay 34:58
I think you're absolutely right. Here's the inconsistency: on some things the Modi government does, they are remarkably consistent, right? So, for example, they've been saying for the last 70 years that they will get rid of special status when it comes to Kashmir. What do they do when they come in with a majority? They get rid of special status to Kashmir. From the '70s, in the '80s itself, they've been talking about counting Indian citizens, giving special citizenship to, basically, Hindus and non-Muslims from countries that are close to India. What do they do when they come to power? You have the Citizenship Amendment Act and the NRC. These are ideological.
I think the mistake analysts make is to look at everything that Modi does through the prism of ideology. And that's a mistake for the following reason, which is that unlike other sorts of ethnic or religious movements, Hindu nationalism is based on Hinduism, and Hinduism has never had a theocratic bent of mind. It's never had a theory of the state. So, if you ask the question, what is Hindu economics, or what is Hindu foreign policy, the answer is there is none. Because what makes Hinduism unique is that it doesn't have a central and authoritative institution, unlike the Vatican for the sake of Catholics, and it doesn't have a central authoritative book, like the Quran is for Muslims. That, for Hindu nationalism, is the problem - that's why Hindus don't vote as one, and they want to create a consolidated Hindu identity. On the other hand, the fact that there is no Hindu theocratic state has one very big implication for my book, which is that they are very comfortable with the democratic state. They don't want, you know, some kind of Hindu Medina or some kind of Hindu Caliphate or Hindu “paper state” because they don't have that resource and history to look at. Unlike many other religions, which have thought deeply about the relationship of the state and politics, Hindus and Hinduism have not.
As a consequence, one, they're comfortable with elections, especially because there are a social majority, and second, on issues that you and I, Milan, call governance, Hindu nationalism does not have an authoritative view. So, just take economics: in the 1970s, in the quote that you gave, the Hindu nationalists are very happy supporting socialism, right? But when Vajpayee comes to power between 1998 and 2004, the government he runs is widely seen as the most “reformist” in that it tried to diminish the state from many areas of the economy. And now you have Modi, who is much more of a command-and-control economy guy, for good or for worse. That just shows that the answer to Hindu nationalist economics does not lie in ideology.
And people do this - I mean, many people I respect are obsessed with finding some random text and saying that, “Look, there's an inkling of a foreign policy here.” What that simply means is that you have Hindu nationalists over the last 100 years who've written books on Israel, on the United States, on how to deal with the Muslim world. But that's just a big-time debate, right? That's not ideological. And my clue about this was in a conversation I had with Arun Shourie, who was a very reformist disinvestment minister in the Vajpayee government, the 1998 to 2004 one. The RSS hated him, and the head of the RSS, K.S. Sudarshan, who was a socialist when it came to economics, constantly and publicly - and, if I may say, in a very Hindu nationalist-like manner - criticized Shourie and Vajpayee, but he told me that when he met K.S. Sudarshan to argue back, K.S. Sudarshan never said, you know, “Look at this particular text in Hinduism.” He didn't say any of that. He just said, “I, Sudarshan, I'm a socialist and think what you're doing is against India.”
It really strikes me that analysts must look at some things which are ideological about this government because Modi and Amit Shah are ideologues and are serious about it, but on 90% of things you and I call governance, the RSS gives them a free pass - that when it comes to dealing with China, when it comes to demonetization, it's not that the head of the RSS is giving detailed instructions to Modi on what to do.
Milan 39:16
I mean, just to amplify the point, I remember - this was now almost two years ago - listening to a senior member of the government talk about the economic reform program post-2019 election, and what this official remarked was, “I'm not sure what's holding them back from doing more reform.” Right? You've won an unprecedented re-election, you now are approaching a majority in the Rajya Sabha, you've expanded your foothold across states, Narendra Modi is head and shoulders above any other politician in the country in terms of his popularity and charisma. And that prompted, after this statement, a bunch of side discussions, and the thing that emerged for me after talking to a bunch of people, including people within the BJP, is that exactly as you point out, there is no social consensus within the party on economics as there is on other matters of culture and society and so on and so forth.
And I think that shines through on the democracy point, Vinay, if I could just go back to that for a second - this is something you argue very powerfully in the book, but you've also highlighted at a preview you did in the pages of the Indian Express - I think you wrote an op-ed about this after the 2019 verdict in which you take issue with scholars who portray the BJP and RSS as anti-democratic or “fascists” because, as you argue, they have fully bought into the logic of elections. That squares with the social majority as well as the fact that there is no Hindu theocratic state. However, some might push back and say, “You know, Vinay, that's a pretty low bar. Okay, they buy into elections, but do they buy into the logic of liberal democracy, which is really what's at stake in India?” How would you react to that?
Vinay 41:11
Oh, I agree with them. They do not buy into the idea of liberal democracy. But there is a distinction between liberal democracy and democracy, and that kind of matters. The heart of democracy is free and fair elections, and if you take a Joseph Schumpeterian view, you just need the minimal additions to make sure elections are truly free and fair. The opposition should have a level playing field, etc., etc., but other than that, let's use the word democracy in a way in which you and I both agree, and then let's add constitutional democracy, liberal democracy. They're not liberals, right? And liberals defined narrowly to mean, is the unit for them the individual and individual freedom? Of course not. It's a group-based ideology.
But, once again, anyone who studies Indian politics realizes that liberalism in India is even rarer than the Bengal tiger - it's very, very hard to find it. In a few patches of urban India and on the op-ed pages of major newspapers, you will find somebody talking about individual freedom, but for 99.99% of Indians, that doesn't constitute what they consider the good life. I hope that changes. I recognize that I'm a minority in this sense. The BJP is not unusual, because every other party - and that's the point the book makes, that once the British introduce elections in India, everybody gets that the game is to expand your group size to get a majority. That's the game, right? And many parties tried - the communists, for example, said that, “Look, yes, India is an 80% Hindu majority country, but India is an 80% peasant and worker society.” Kanshi Ram, a genius of the same level of the RSS in their ability to understand Indian society in order to change it, says, “You know what, India is an 80% non-upper caste society. It's a Bahujan society.” These are all majoritarian ideas, right? And they're not liberal ideas. They aren't premised on individual freedom. In the case of subaltern politics, individual freedom can sometimes be a byproduct, but that's not the core argument.
So, the BJP is not very different. Where the BJP is different, as I point out in the book, is that it has the organization to see it through. It realizes that to conjure up a majority you need to also stick together as an organization. Otherwise, the constituent parts of your coalition will break up. I call it in the book Hindu Fevicol - [or, as] Americans say, super glue. Fevicol is a very popular super glue in India, so I say it because everyone intuitively understands what it is. I think for the US and UK edition of the book, I might just change it to super glue. But that's the key to their success. Of course, they're not liberals, but they're not fascists. They are majoritarian. And they're not conservative, either. I spend a lot of time in the book showing you that Hindu nationalism is self-consciously against traditional Hinduism - it thinks of traditional Hinduism as weak, and this weakness as giving rise to invasions. It doesn't want to go back to some glorious brahmanic past at all - you know, this Hindu rashtra, what opponents of Modi are terrified about, and they imagine that it's some kind of fascist state that lies in the in the future. It doesn't. We're living in the Hindu rashtra right now, which is a Hindu majority that is able to use the majority votes to create a state that represents the interests of one community, and it's perfectly compatible with constitutional democracy. So, by saying that they are constitutional democrats, I'm not giving them a free pass at all. I'm just saying, know your enemy if you don't like the BJP. And if those who hate Modi want to defeat him, the only way to do that is on election day. Like, it's not about writing outrage op-eds or ganging up in universities and canceling people. This is a movement that is obsessed with winning the next election. And, Milan, you're a close observer of India, you know that in a Hyderabad municipal election that happened a few weeks ago - a municipal election is, like, the lowest form of poll, I just mean in a geographic sense - you had all the top brass of the BJP going. What sense would that make if they have fascist intentions?
Milan 45:24
Well, not only that - I mean, the BJP party president, J.P. Nadda, just started sort of a tour to kick off preparations for the 2024 elections, whereas, as I pointed out on Twitter and other places, the Congress is still not sure what hit them in 2014. So, it just shows you the divergence between the two.
Vinay 45:44
And just to end that, Milan, what you just said - does it sound like this is somebody who wants to end elections?
Milan 45:51
No, I think that's right, but I think there is a question for many Indians out there about what the future holds. So, I think one of the provocative arguments you're making right now, and you make it in the book, is that in some sense, what the BJP represents is essentially a closer alignment, perhaps, with the leadership of the country and the median voter, right? An alignment in terms of language, in terms of caste, in terms of ideas about what's acceptable in a democracy and so on and so forth. I guess the question is, if we're in that broad alignment now or realignment, what about the future? Because we've seen a progression, right? You note in your book that Vajpayee and Advani use dog whistles on religion when it suited them - Modi and Shah have made elections explicitly about Muslims and Pakistan. Vajpayee and Advani in the past ignored caste - Modi has catered to that at the most micro level. Where Vajpayee and Advani emphasize teamwork, the collective, Modi's more of an egotist, and he's focused more about himself ever since the 2002 Gujarati elections. So, are we moving to a more extremist manifestation of the Hindu nationalist movement? I mean, many people say the next iteration will be led by Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, which looks very different from Vajpayee and Advani.
Vinay 47:25
Well, I would agree with that analysis in that it's much more unconstrained by the need to get coalition allies because they can come to power on their own. The biggest constraint during the Vajpayee-Advani era was - and I write this in the book - that in the 1970s, Vajpayee actually does a deal with the RSS, [saying,] “Look, though we need to focus on ideology to get the core voter, the Hindus are generally moderates, and they won't accept a radical party.” And that has changed. There's no question. But, just to complicate matters, as the BJP has been correctly criticized for not even dog whistling against Muslims, but being direct about it - and there's no question - I spend a lot of time in the book showing you that this is embedded in the DNA of Hindu nationalism. So, for example, at the creation of the RSS itself, the founder of the RSS notices that there's a local Muslim shrine where Hindus also go to worship, and he doesn't like that. He wants the boundary between Hinduism and Islam to be clearly drawn, even though that's not the reality - tons of Muslim communities live a syncretic form of Hinduism and Islam, and the RSS doesn't like it, and that is exclusionary about them.
But, Milan, at the same time, the BJP and the RSS are the most progressive institution within Hinduism. Traditional Hinduism had contempt for someone like Narendra Modi, the poor son of a tea seller who belongs to a middle caste, an OBC caste, called Modh Ghanchi, which is an oil presser caste. He may not have been allowed into temples, right? He's the opposite of the structures of brahminical Hinduism, but today, he is the face of Hindu nationalism, and Hindu nationalism is one of the few institutions within Hinduism which allowed for social mobility for lower castes like Narendra Modi. And today, Milan, we live in an India which has a Dalit, or a formerly untouchable, president of the republic and a middle caste or OBC prime minister at the same time. Historic. At the same time, we have observed laws against something called love jihad, and for those of your listeners who don't know what it is, it's basically [where] the state interferes and questions when a Muslim man marries a Hindu woman because there's an assumption of lack of consent. It is about the most illiberal thing you can get, right? But this is the same party that gives financial incentives when Brahmins marry Dalits. So, you have to see that to understand the BJP, to understand why the BJP wins, you have to see that it's this unusual mix of a deeply inclusionary and deeply progressive force, which is how nearly 80% of Indians see it, and a straight-up exclusionary force when it comes to religious minorities. And that's just the reality of the BJP. And if you don't see it, you'll never be able to defeat them.
Milan 50:22
Let me just end with a with a final question touching back on this issue of ideology. As you mentioned, Hindu nationalism doesn't have a clear view on the state. There's no doctrinal underpinnings about what the state should be. So, whether it's governance, whether it's foreign policy, whether it's social welfare, the ideology of the religion doesn't really come into play. Do you think, though, that could change? That we're seeing the outlines of what a Hindu nationalist governance structure could look like, which is premised on a charismatic leader, centralized leadership, an erasure of federal differences, a creation of a kind of second-class citizenship for religious minorities? Or do you think that it's not quite as organized as I'm making it out to be?
Vinay 51:08
Yeah, I would push back against that. I think what you're describing is Modi's Hindu nationalism. Who knows what 20 years [later will] look like? And, you know, I've studied 100 years of this movement, [and I've seen] that it's very subtle in responding to the Hindu voter, and as the Hindu voter changes, Hindu nationalism also changes. On the other hand, on some things, you're going to see even more of the same, which is, for example, things like the Citizenship Amendment Act - you're going to see more of that because they are obsessed with demographics. In Hindi, it's called ganit ka shaastr, or arithmetic, and I think the most honest way of describing the BJP's relaxed relationship with democracy and elections is to see it as arithmetic. That's what they see it as, and that's going to continue for a very, very long time.
And I just want to end with a joke, which is that, in this book, I have this story about the Jana Sangh's march to Parliament in the 1960s against cow slaughter, and I spoke to one of the organizers of this protest, and I said, “Look, you had this march to Parliament, what was the purpose of the march to Parliament?” And this RSS man kind of looked at me shocked and said, “The purpose was to get to Parliament.” It really struck me that, you know, if you ask the BJP, what's the purpose of winning elections? They're going to look at you and say, “Well, it's to win the next election.” Then you will tell them, “What's the purpose of winning the Bengal elections?” They'll say, “Well, we still have Tamil Nadu.” Right? And that's a long and deep project.
Milan 52:38
My guest on the show today is Vinay Sitapati, a professor of political science at Ashoka University and author of the brand-new book Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi. It is a page turner, full of historical insights about politics today. Vinay, congratulations on all the success you're having with this book, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Vinay 52:59
Thank you, Milan.