Vivek Kaul
Vijay Mallya, the liquor king, who wanted to run an airline, recently told the staff at Kingfisher Airlines that he had no money to clear their salary dues. Mallya, like many businessmen before him, also became a victim of the line extension trap. “The line-extension trap is using the same brand name on two different categories of products. Kingfisher beer and Kingfisher Airlines. We have studied hundreds of categories and thousands of companies and we find that line extension generally doesn’t work, although there are some exceptions,” says marketing guru Laura Ries, who has most recently authored Visual Hammer.
Along with her father, the legendary marketing guru Al Ries, she has also authored, several other bestsellers like The Origin of Brands, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR and the War in the Boardroom.
But does such a rigid line against line extensions make sense in this day and age, when it is very expensive to build a brand. “We have never said that a company should not line extend a brand. What we have said is that line extension “weakens” a brand,” says Ries. And there are always exceptions to the rule she concedes. “Sometimes, a brand is so strong it can easily withstand some weakening. Early on, for example, the Microsoft brand was exceptionally strong so the company could use it on other software products and services.”
There is also the recent case of Tide, the leading detergent in America, opening a line of dry-cleaning establishments using the Tide brand name. And it might just work, feels Ries. As she explains “Because there are no strong brands or national chains in the category, this can possibly work, although we believe Procter & Gamble, the owners of Tide, would be better off with a new brand name.”
These exceptions notwithstanding there are way too many examples of companies which haven’t fallen for the line extension mistake and are doing very well in the process. Toyota is one such example. And one of the reasons for its success is the launch of three new brands in addition to Toyota. Scion, a brand for younger drivers. Prius, a hybrid brand. And Lexus, a luxury brand.
“Initially, Prius was a sub-brand of Toyota, but the company recently decided to create a totally separate brand. Prius has some 50 percent of the hybrid market in America and is a phenomenal success. The separate brand name will assure its success for decades to come,” says Ries.
What about Apple we ask her? How does she view the brand, everyone loves to love? Hasn’t it also made the line extension mistake by launching the Apple iPod, the Apple iPhone and the Apple iPad? “Apple is not a product brand. Apple is a company brand. Nobody says, I bought an Apple unless they have just visited a grocery store. They say I bought an iPod or an iPhone or an iPad, three brands that made Apple one of the most-profitable companies in the world,” explains Ries.
So in that sense Apple did not really make a line extension mistake. For every new product it created a new brand. And the success of this strategy reflects in the numbers. Apple’s competitors, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, line extended their brands into many of the same products. Both are in trouble. Last year, Apple made $41.7 billion in net profits. Dell made $2.4 billion. And Hewlett-Packard lost $12.7 billion.
But what about Samsung, which has been giving Apple a really tough time in almost all product categories that they compete in. “Currently, Samsung is an exception to the principle that line extension can weaken a brand. But that’s only in the short term. We predict that sometime in the future Samsung will suffer for its marketing mistake,” states Ries. “What keeps Samsung profitable is the principle that in every category there’s always room for a No.2 brand. Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, for example,” she adds.
And Samsung is clearly not as profitable as Apple. Last year, Apple made almost twice as much in net profits as Samsung even though Apple’s revenues were smaller. Apple’s net profit margin was 26.7 percent compared to Samsung’s 11.5 percent.
The other two big companies in the mobile phone market have been Nokia and Blackberry. Nokia recently launched a smartphone under the new ‘Lumia’ brand name. On the face of it this is exactly what Ries would have recommended. The company launched a Lumia smartphone, and did not fall for the line extension trap. Given this, why is Nokia losing out in the smartphone business, we ask Ries.
“What’s a brand name? What’s a model name? What’s a sub-brand name?” she asks. “Many companies like Nokia think they can decide what is a brand name and what is a model or a sub-brand name. So Nokia considers “Lumia” to be its smartphone brand name. Not so. It’s consumers that make that decision. Consumers use iPhone as a brand name and not Apple. Consumers also use Nokia as the brand name and not Lumia. To consumers, Lumia is a model or sub-brand name.”
And there several reasons behind consumers not considering Lumia to be a brandname. “Look at a Lumia smartphone and you’ll see the word “Nokia” in big type. Look at an iPhone and you won’t see the word “Apple.” You’ll see the word “iPhone” in big type and just an Apple trademark,” says Ries.
And on top of that Lumia doesn’t even have a website of its own (www.lumia.com is a website of a British IT company). “Lumia” doesn’t sound like a brand name and it doesn’t even have a website. That makes it very difficult to create the impression that Lumia is a brand. This isn’t the first line-extension mistake Nokia has made. Nokia was its brand name for a line of inexpensive cellphones. And today, Nokia is also using the Nokia name for its expensive smartphone products,” says Ries.
The Blackberry story goes along similar line. On the face of it, the company doesn’t seem to have made a line extension mistake. But Ries clearly does not buy that. “What’s a BlackBerry? Is it a smartphone with a physical keyboard? Or a smartphone with a touchscreen? It’s both, of course, and that’s exactly why BlackBerry has fallen into the line extension trap. To compete with the touchscreen iPhone, the BlackBerry company (formerly called Research In Motion) needed to introduce a new brand of touchscreen smartphone. It’s very difficult to build a brand that it has lost its identity.”
And given the lost focus its very difficult for these companies to go back to the days when they were immensely successful. As Ries puts it “It depends upon whether either company (i.e. Nokia and Blackberry) can do two things: (1) Develop an innovative new idea for smartphones, and (2) Introduce that innovative new idea with a new brand name. It’s hard for us to tell whether it’s possible to come up with a new idea for a smartphone. It could be too late.”
And this could work in favour of Samsung, feels Ries. “Every category ultimately has a leader brand and a strong No.2 brand. Since all three smartphone brands (Samsung, Nokia and BlackBerry) are line extensions, one line extension has to win the battle to become the No.2 brand to the iPhone. Samsung made massive investments in product design and development plus massive marketing investments,” says Ries.
So it’s logical that Samsung would become a strong No.2 brand. Furthermore, they priced their smartphones as less expensive than iPhones, another strategy that increased its market share although not its profitability. This has worked particularly well in Asia, feels Ries.
This success of Apple over Samsung comes with a caveat. As Ries explains it “Long-term, every category has two major brands. But they are normally quite different. Long-term, we see Apple as the leader in the high-end smartphone category and Samsung the leader in the “basic” smartphone category. Apple would make a mistake in introducing less-expensive smartphones. That would undermine its position at the high end.” And that is mistake that Apple needs to avoid.
Another massively successful company that has fallen prey to the line extension trap has been Google. The company has introduced a number of products under the Google brand name, but none of them have been massive money spinners like the Google search engine.
As Ries puts it “Currently, I can’t think of any Google product that is very successful. Google +, the company’s social media competitor, is nowhere near as big or as profitable as Facebook. Google’s most successful introduction has been Android, which now is being use by 75 percent of all smartphones.” Google bought the Android company, one of the reasons it probably didn’t use the Google name on the software.
What all the examples given above tell us is that line extensions have had a sketchy track record. So why do companies fall for it, over and over again? Ries has an answer for it. “As one CEO told us, We have a great company and great products. Why can’t we use our great company name on our great products?,” she points out. “Most chief executives believe that the only thing that really matters is the quality of their products and services their prices. Deep down inside, they don’t believe that the name or the marketing makes much of a difference.”
Then there is the pressure to keep increasing earnings. Chief executives are under pressure to increase sales and profits and they see product expansion (including line extensions) as the best way to achieve these goals. “The more important strategic decision is the question of “focus.” It’s our opinion that the best way into the mind is with a narrow focus. That’s not, however, the majority opinion, at least among top management people. Most companies are moving in exactly the opposite direction. They are line extending their brands,” says Ries.
Given this, CEOs don’t believe a new brand is worth the cost and effort required. It’s true, too, that many management people equate new brands with expensive advertising programs, feels Ries.
But that again is a perception that they have. Most big brands in the last ten years were not built because they advertised left, right and centre. Ries questions the assertion that it’s expensive to create a new brand. “It’s only expensive if a company uses advertising to launch the new brand. In our book, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR, we recommend launching new brands with no advertising at all. Just PR or public relations. Advertising doesn’t have the credibility you need to launch a new brand.”
This is because when a consumer sees an advertisement for a new brand, his or her first reaction is, this can’t be very important because I’ve never heard of the brand. And that’s why some of the biggest brands in recent years like Amazon, Twitter and Google, used almost no advertising. They did, however, benefit from extensive media coverage, feels Ries.
In order to succeed in the years to come, companies will have to create multiple brands. “The future belongs to multiple-brand companies. But with one reservation. A company needs to be successful with its first brand before launching a second brand. You can’t build a successful company with two losing brands,” concludes Ries.
The article originally appeared in Forbes India edition dated July 12, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Interview
Gold will rise against USD; it may hit a ‘new high by 2013-end’
Nick Barisheff is the founder, President and CEO of Bullion Management Group Inc. (BMG) and the author of$10,000 Gold: Why Golds Inevitable Rise Is the Investor’s Safe Haven (www.10000goldthebook.com). Widely recognised as an international bullion expert, Barisheff speaks to Vivek Kaul in a free wheeling interview on the future of gold and why the current fall in its price is going to go away soon. As he puts it “I would not be surprised to see gold hit new highs before year end.”
Excerpts:
Has your book $10,000 Gold released at an inappropriate time, given that gold price has taken a big beating in the recent past?
I began collecting notes and research for the book soon after I decided to go into the precious metals business in 1998. Although the material was updated many times over the years, the core long-term trends, that I feel are responsible for gold’s rising price, are still in place today as they were in the late 1990s when gold was trading below $300 an ounce (1 troy ounce equals 31.1 grams). The book will be just as relevant in two years as it is today for this reason. It is about long-term, irreversible trends. Those simply won’t change until there is a complete purging of debt as the trends I follow are all trends that result in greater debt as debt is directly related to the price of gold.
What do you think are the reasons behind the recent fall in the price of gold? How soon do you expect it to start going up again?
Estimates put the sales on the COMEX on Friday April 12th, and Monday April 15th between 125 and 400 tonnes. The most telling evidence that this was a deliberate paper gold attack at the highest levels was the size and speed of the sales that then triggered sell stops and margin calls. (This article provides additional details: http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1368648060.php)
In contrast to the lows in paper gold, unprecedented buying of physical gold was triggered. If this were truly a natural correction or the indication that gold bull had turned into a bear, then the physical market would be panic selling not panic buying. Over the long term, these artificial declines in the price of paper gold are good for gold as it lets a lot of big players enter the markets. I do not expect this “correction” to extend over a long period of time as it is artificial. However, it is possible this was coordinated to correspond with gold’s slow summer season. I would not be surprised to see gold hit new highs before year end.
One of the major myths about gold is that it is not a good inflation hedge. You suggest that its a great inflation hedge. Can you explain that through some numbers?
The best way to see how gold works to maintain purchasing power and is therefore a good hedge against inflation is to think in terms of ounces rather than the more relative dollars or euros. As I mention in the book, it took 66 ounces of gold to buy a compact car in 1971. Today it would take about 10 ounces. We can see the same ratio with houses and even the DOW. (the Dow Jones Industrial Average, one of America’s premier stock market indices) Today you can buy 3 average size houses for the same amount of gold you would have needed to buy 1 house in 1971 even though the prices of houses have risen significantly in dollar terms since then. That’s how gold serves as a hedge against inflation and maintains its purchasing power. One of the best books on how gold maintains its purchasing power over long periods is the Golden Constant.
Gold bugs have been suggesting people to hold gold because they expect very high inflation to come in given all the money that is being printed by central banks all over the world. But inflation hasn’t set in as yet. What is your view on that?
To begin with, real inflation is running at a much higher level than official figures indicate. I’ve explained this in detail in the book. If we use the original basket of goods used to measure inflation before the Clinton government began understating inflation through substitution and other deceptive metrics, it is running at about 10 percent. (For a more detailed description please see: http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-438-public-comment-on-inflation-measurement)
Can you elaborate on that?
As I mentioned above, real inflation has set in, but it’s hidden through doctored government inflation reports. Anyone who eats, heats their home, drives a car or sends their children to college knows this, but governments need to hide this fact because, for each official point in inflation they would have to pay out hundreds of billions in indexed pensions. As well, the method they are currently using to keep the bond market strong is through low or negative real interest rates. I have discussed in several recent articles, the methods governments use to secretly rob pensioners and savers through these low interest rates using a program called “financial repression”. Richard Russell, the famous newsletter writer, once stated that gold will preserve wealth equally well in an inflationary or deflationary environment as it is the ultimate store of wealth. This is also confirmed by the data in the Golden Constant.
So where will all this money printing that is happening ultimately lead us to?
All world fiat currencies eventually end in hyperinflation followed by complete collapse. Throughout all of history there has not been a single example that did not follow this pattern. The U.S. dollar will fail for the same reasons the others failed, because politicians cannot resist the urge to print unlimited amounts of unbacked currency. This eventually appears as inflation brought about through currency debasement. The main reason this positively affects the gold price is because gold is not rising in value, currencies are losing purchasing power against gold. Therefore, gold can rise in price as high as currencies can fall. As Voltaire said, “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value—zero.”
What is the link that the oil, ageing population and population growth have with the price of gold?
As I write on Page 71 of my book “Ultimately, we are most concerned with one measure when it comes to the price of gold: government debt. How will decreasing oil supplies impact gold? They will impact gold in the same way as the other irreversible trends: the rising population, the aging population and outsourcing. All create the need for more debt to compensate for slowing growth, and increased government debt equals more currency, lower purchasing power and a higher gold price.”
Can you elaborate on that?
The debt based model depends on perpetual growth as it, like a spinning top will collapse if it stops moving. When natural economic growth does not come through productivity, manufacturing of the production of natural resources, then the government must fuel growth through debt creation. Dr. Chris Martenson does an excellent job of demonstrating how much of the growth of the past century, growth that led to a population explosion, was due to cheap land-based oil. The trends described in your question along with the huge interest payments necessary to finance the debt are costing the government many more dollars to grow the GDP. In 2012, it cost the U.S. government $2.47 to grow the GDP by $1.
And that is a problem?
Stimulus works while the major portion of the population is working. Right now baby boomers in the US are retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day. Despite the claims of energy independence because of shale oil in the United States, the world’s growth has been fueled by cheap land-based oil, located mainly in the Middle East. Oil sands and shale oil are extremely expensive to produce by comparison and are therefore inflationary. Apart from money printing creating inflation, the rising price of oil will also be inflationary as it is used for virtually everything. The trends described in the book all impact growth negatively, they reduce taxation revenues, cause inflation and require ever greater government expenditure leading to ever increasing government debt. Therefore, this creates a need of more currency debasement, which naturally causes the value of gold to appear stronger against currencies.
Anything else that you would like to tell our readers regarding this?
We can also add that over the past three thousand years the most effective solution to runaway inflation brought about through currency creation is the re-establishment of some type of relationship between currencies and gold. It doesn’t need to be a 1:1 relationship, but whatever percentage it is, it will cause gold to trade much higher. We are in uncharted territory here. Several reputable analysts are calling for $10,000 gold for this reason, such as Société Générale’s Edward Alberts and the man Barrons labeled “Mr. Gold” because of his proven understanding of the gold market—Jim Sinclair, who stated he expected gold to eventually trade at $50,000 an ounce. Again, this is easier to understand why currency debasement will result in rising gold prices when we realise gold is not rising in value, currencies are losing value against gold.
You suggest in your book that the Chinese government is buying gold big time, though there is very little evidence available for the same. Can you get into that in some detail?
China leads the world in gold production. All of that domestic production remains in China. We know that China and India purchased 2000 tonnes of the 2,700 tonnes of global production in 2012. This includes the public as well as official purchases and unofficial purchases by sovereign wealth funds. In the past, we know the Chinese government purchased its gold in a circumspect, but secretive manner. They accumulated through sovereign wealth funds that can bypass the red tape and the transparency required of official central banks. It is safe to assume they are still doing this. In 2009, China announced its official gold purchases after the fact. In 2009 the world thought China had 454 tonnes, the same as it held at the time of the country’s last official announcement in 2003. In 2009, they announced they had 1,054 tonnes.
Why are they being so secretive?
Of course, China is not interested in having the world know how much gold they have at this point because it is trying to accumulate as much as it can. I believe China hopes their yuan will replace the U.S. dollar as the next world reserve currency. If the Chinese follow the pattern of announcing every 6 years, we may be in for a major surprise in 2015, especially since Ji Xiaonan, who chairs the supervisory board for the Chinese State Council’s biggest state-owned companies stated in 2009 that China planned to add 10,000 tonnes to their gold reserves before 2019.
Gold has always been seen as an anti-dollar. People who have no confidence in the paper dollars being printed by the Federal Reserve buy gold. To what extent do you think the US will go to protect the dollar and discredit gold?
The U.S. government is highly motivated to maintain its reserve currency status and to maintain pricing of oil in US dollars. The US is the world’s largest debtor nation and the only reason the United States has been able to run up such a large debt is because it had the world’s reserve currency thanks at first to the Bretton Wood’s agreement in 1944. When they broke the peg with gold in 1971, the dollar’s status came under scrutiny, but there were no other currencies challenging it at the time. In 1973 the Americans secured their position as world’s reserve currency when OPEC agreed to denominate oil in U.S. dollars alone. This is now being challenged as China has entered into trade agreements with Japan, Australia, Brazil, Korea, and numerous others to bypass the US dollar and settle trade with each other’s currencies. This is a direct threat to the US dollars reserve status.
The interview originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 24, 2013.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
If Godhra had not happened…Modi would have been part of history by now
When it comes to writing biographies the life of Narendra Modi has been one of the most interesting subjects going around over the last decade. But no book which makes an objective assetsment of the life and times of Modi has been written till date. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay‘s Narendra Modi – The Man. The Times (Tranquebar, Rs 495), seeks to fill this gap. Mukhopadhyay has worked for several newspapers and magazines like The Economic Times, Hindustan Times, Outlook and The Statesman, in the past. He is also the author of The Demolition: India at the Crossroads. In this free-wheeling interview he speaks to Vivek Kaul, on how Modi’s life has impacted his politics and how his politics is impacting all of us.
Can you tell us a little bit about Narendra Modi’s childhood?
Decoding Modi’s childhood was very important to me from the outset because the die was cast then in his case also. I used this tool of the simultaneity of time. I portrayed events in Gujarat and India in 1950 when he was born, the political developments taking place in the 1950s when the Modi was becoming aware of the world outside his cocoon. Vadnagar(where Modi was brought up) in the mid 1950s was such a small place, that every one would have also known even the stones on the walls, forget each other. There was single train that went on the metre gauge track and it returned – on way to Mehsana in the evening. Not many people crossed the village for his father’s tea-shop to be doing roaring business. Life must have been tough though better than the working class who slugged it out in the fields of the rich farmers.
What is Modi’s own take on his childhood?
When I interacted with Modi early on, he did not romanticise about his difficult childhood. Many people in public life have used their deprived childhood as a reason for a slip here and there. In most early interactions, he was reticent to talk about his childhood. It became a media story after he became chief minister and image building became a necessity after the 2002 riots. The sob stories were fed to an eager media in those years. There were some problematic associations that I have probed and come up with some fresh information. They are indicative of his weaknesses, like his aggression and defiance of teachers.
You write that Modi’s mother was the only one who during those days felt that her son was destined for bigger things….
My claim that his mother being sure that he would break free from the lower middle class trappings is concerned, this is based on what his old friends said. Modi biography was first and foremost a simple narrative to me, with all its high and lows, the melodrama and the mania. I wrote the early chapters trying to find traces of his present. But instead of going from the present to the past, I let the past evolve into the present.
You talk about how very early in life Modi liked to present himself well. He also had a love for acting and theatre…
While talking of his early life, Modi mentioned that he joined the Maha Gujarat agitation at the age of six. He did not know much about it and was in it because it provided a platform to display enthusiasm. He got the spotlight and thereafter there was no looking back. From leading the ‘baccha brigade’ in the agitation, he was at the forefront in the volunteer camps during the 1962 war. Barely twelve, how could the family imagine Modi will return to the cocoon. He found expression to his desire for the outside world through theatre, Bal Shakhas and his swimming adventures. By the time he was in pre-teens, Modi had broken free of the herd of classmates.
How good was he at his studies?
He was a mediocre student but he nosed ahead through extra-curricular activities. Theatre, political activism and currying favours from elders by cosying up to them were on this path. It became important for Modi to look different. He folded his clothes neatly and after folding them put them below the mattress – this was the way most Indians families have traditionally ironed clothes. He participated in elocution contests in school and acted in plays – grabbing the lead roles.
And how did these traits evolve in his later life?
At some point the entire external space became a stage. This increased manifold after the victory in 2002. The term Modi Kurta was coined around that time though the idea of a half sleeves kurta was there from the 1960s thanks to a Jana Sangh leader but without such popularity. The success of the Modi Kurta shows that styles becomes fashionable only after celebrity endorsement. And, lets accept – Modi has acquired celebrity status. But political leaders always had distinctive dressing styles. From Mahatma Gandhi’s loincloth to Dr A P J Abdul Kalam’s hairstyle. Why, even Advani has been immaculately dressed always – and so are others. But yes, Modi’s emphasis on detail does demonstrate an obsession with his looks.
You write that Modi started attending the local Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh(RSS) shakha at the age of six. How did that influence his development as an individual?
The Bal Shakhas he attended were merely catchment areas for the RSS when it was recovering from the setback from the ban after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. The groups were collected every evening when they gathered for the Maha Gujarat programmes and the Shakhas were mainly play exercises. There was little politics but a sense of discipline was instilled in these shakhas. Modi’s elder brother told me that he was influenced with this and the concept of a hierarchical organisation. It stayed on and is the main reason for his emphatic and autocratic ways.
Does the way he operates now have a lot to do with all the years that he has spent in the RSS, first as a child and then as an adult?
When I asked him how he made a transition to becoming chief minister without ever having been a minister or an elected representative at any level, Modi told me that he learnt the basic skills of running an organisation in the RSS. While this is true, there are also several traits of Modi that have not come from the Sangh – his primness for instance. Within the RSS the biggest question that should have been raised was after his marriage and the episode stemming from it, became public knowledge. RSS Pracharaks were not allowed to marry but he became one despite being married. This means he hid the information. But no action was taken – the only one could have been his expulsion. The RSS leadership never addressed this question. Probably Modi became very powerful with patrons in right places and so he was protected. Modi easily picked up those qualities from the RSS which would assist him later in life. But whenever certain norms necessitated personal sacrifice and dumbing down of the self, Modi was a reluctant activist.
What made him leave home at the young age of 18?
He told me he did not wish to speak about those years of absence – that he will write someday about what he did. But we can draw inferences. He was married early to a girl he did not know but it was part of a 3-stage process with the ‘gauna’ being the last one. After the second stage was over and he realised what marriage was all about and how it would pin him down to his village, he chose to avoid ‘gauna’ and went away. I spent considerable time, energy and resources to see if his disappearance had any links to the communal riots of 1969 but found none. The closest he came to telling me was that at times, he would go to Rama Krishna Mission and to the Vivekananda Ashram in Almora. Throughout Swami Vivekananda’s 150th birth anniversary year, I followed his utterances and tweets on the seer. I found them steeped with romanticism – not scholarly or articulating a polemical viewpoint. The standard argument that Vivekananda was the torch-bearer of Hindu in the west and thus should be respected. On his recent visit to Kolkata, he visited Belur Match and also the room where the Swami spent time meditating.
He returned home at the age of 21 in 1971 and then never came back to Vadnagar except for just a few hours when his father was on his deathbed in 1989. He returned again only in 1999 for the golden jubilee celebrations of his school. What does it tell us about Modi as an individual?
Modi’s world comprises I, Me and Myself. He is the centre of the universe, always. When he came back at 21, he had already fixed up something in Ahmedabad. It was an escape from a small village and the possibility of having to cohabit with a girl he clearly did not like. It is very difficult to meet his siblings unless one lives for considerable lengths in Gujarat. Even regarding his mother, Modi allows photo shoots on his birthdays when he goes for blessings and during religious occasions like Dushhera. His brother, Pankaj who is employed with the state information department was to accompany me to Vadnagar, but called in sick at the last minute and that was the last I heard about him. In any case, I knew that the awe of Modi was so great, that no one especially his siblings – would say anything negative. Even political adversaries were guarded in their statement.
He was the second RSS pracharak to be deputed from the RSS to the BJP after KN Govindacharya. How did it shape him as an individual?
Modi said two very important things about his final deputation to the BJP. Firstly, in regard to when exactly it happened, he said there are no fixed dates as the RSS does not issue office orders – things happen, informally and then formally. The second revelation is that even before his formal move to the BJP, he had played a key role in the revival of the electoral fortunes of the BJP in Ahmedabad when he shepherded the campaign for the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation in 1986. Coming just a year after the rout following Indira Gandhi’s assassination it restored a semblance of confidence in the party and resulted in the party’s national leaders seeing the obvious talents of Modi. Advani played a key role in his elevation and he consulted with the top RSS brass before taking on Modi and before him K N Govindacharya as his political secretary.
How has the relationship between LK Advani and Narendra Modi evolve? What do you think is the status now? Does Advani still consider Modi to be his protege? Or is Advani still in the race for PM?
I went to gift Advani a copy of my book and it was evident he liked it as an idea. But he refused to be drawn into a comment on either Modi, current politics or even what he felt about the fact that I had written this book. He told me that all his utterances become controversial. He reiterated that the Parivar does not get offended if a junior member does very well. But then over the past few years, Advani had problems with even the RSS top brass over their suggestion that he call it a day and take on the role of a political mentor. Advani mentored Modi and the two remained close for a long period of time before Modi switched allegiance to the Murli Manohar Joshi camp. Modi made a return to the Advani camp when Vajpayee was PM. Advani lobbied for Modi getting the job (that of the Gujarat CM) and then saved him after the 2002 riots. But after the Jinnah comments, he became a liability for Modi and now with Modi’s rise, till the time Advani does not call it a day, his supporters will think of Modi as the usurper.
You write “If the Godhra incident had not ocuccured…in all probability there would have been no need to write this biography.” Why do you say that?
Modi is a ultimate manifestation of extreme communalisation of India. Modi won his assembly seat in a by-election after becoming CM but the BJP lost other seats in the same by-poll. This was just days before the Godhra carnage. Clearly the BJP was floundering and the government machinery was still moribund. Godhra and the riots changed it all. Modi realised that his time had come. Godhra did not happen because tourists were killed. This was a train load of VHP activists. The chain simple – No Godhra, no Modi. No Ayodhya – No Godhra. If Godhra had not happened, BJP would have lost the assembly polls due in February 2003. And Modi would have been part of history by now.
What do you make of the statement that Modi made after the incident: kriya pratikriya ki chain chal rahi hai? Why has he kept endorsing the post Godhra violence?
A political leader like Modi sees himself as a product to be merchandised by use of multiple tactics. In this process of selling, the USP has to be put upfront. Modi realised after the Godhra carnage that given the latent communalisation within Gujarat, there was bound to be a reaction. Instead of using force to quell violence and thereby allow detractors within the Sangh Parivar to weaken him, he chose to justify in the manner he did to the Zee reporter. It was not the reporter’s scoop. It was Modi’s scoop – he chose the vehicle that he felt would best deliver his message to his constituency. Modi knows how to toy with the media. Even now he does not express remorse in the Congress style ‘I am sorry’ or use Advani-type ‘saddest day’ words because if he does, he will upset his core constituency and this is something he cannot risk. How he balances this with the rest is the key question and I am eager to track this over the next few months.
There has been a lot of criticism of Modi over the years. But he still manages to win elections and people love him. How do you manage to explain that disconnect?
He wins because of his strategy of further communalising Gujarat and being able to coerce large sections of the Muslims to accept his hegemony has succeeded. Most Hindus who were surveyed by CSDS in 2003 said that the riots were necessary to teach a lesson to read Muslims. The more one criticises Modi, the more shrill noises are made by his adversaries, the more he benefits. In 2007, when he was shaky initially, Sonia Gandhi made the “Maut Ka Saudagar” comments and with that kissed the chances of the Congress goodbye. In 2012, the Congress never had a plan, they just hoped that Keshubhai would damage. He did and this was why Modi did not the 125-plus verdict he wanted.
When it comes to actual governance how good is Modi? The businessmen just seem to love him. Why is that?
There is no doubt that Modi is an efficient manager. He is quick on the uptake and has innate ability to make someone else’s knowledge his own. This includes his officers and people he interacts with – even those who come to seek something. He selects a good team of officers. He is a voracious reader and spends considerable time surfing the Internet looking for new ideas and then interact with subject experts. This has enabled him to initiate action in areas about which he knew little before – for instance rural electrification. Industrialists love him because Modi’s a single window operation. All ministers are either pygmies or rubber stamps. All decisions are taken by Modi. Even the basic decision on whether an appointment is to be given to someone who called, is taken by the man himself. Since industry leaders know that the decision is in the hands of just one man, they are happy dealing with Gujarat and it makes their task easier and the red tape easy to overcome.
One thing that comes out in the book is that Modi has fallen out (or even moved on from) with a lot of people who he was once close to. Sanjay Joshi, Haren Pandya, Gordhan Zadaphia, Keshubhai Patel, KN Govindracharya, S Gurumurthy and even LK Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi for that matter. What do you think would be reasons for the same?
Modi has not been a team man. If you look at this trajectory after the early years, he could never accept the presence of equals – he can only be captain. His unapologetic ambition has been the primary reason why he fell out with a large number of associates. He also changed sides effortlessly without any qualms whenever he felt the move would benefit him.
Is he sitting lonely at the top?
I asked him about him being lonely. He laughed saying that he liked loneliness. When I had probed further – if he had friends, he said his work left him with no time for friends. In a way it is true – he is a workaholic. But, the flip side is that he makes even close associates very insecure and so no one dares trying to befriend him. It is actually lonely at the top.
Do you think Modi will ever be able to get rid of the Godhra blot? How important is it for him to do that inorder to be a serious PM candidate in 2014? Or is Delhi still far away for him?
What is a blot to one section is also a certificate of commendation for the other group. I do not think Modi will ever say that what happened in the aftermath of the Godhra carnage was wrong and that his government should have been more vigilant. If he says anything like that I will be surprised. If he does, it will make him go the way Advani has gone – apologetic of his Ayodhya past, praising Jinnah and now saying that the BJP must provide a minimum guarantee to minorities. I used Nizamuddin Aulia’s words – Hunooz, Dehli Door Ast (Delhi is still far away) to argue that it was still a long way to go for the polls.
Will be get the necessary allies?
I had asked Modi about the number of dwindling allies. He argued that if the BJP’s winnability increased, allies would automatically come. He said they had more allies when they were on the winning curve but they started deserting when the ship began sinking. If it becomes afloat again, other would jump in. It is with grave risk that one should indulge in crystal ball gazing. But if the situation does not alter dramatically within BJP, and in other parties – including Congress – I see little chance of any party naming their prime ministerial candidates. The next election will in all likelihood see post-poll alliances determining who will head the next government. Modi’s chances will depend on the number of seats the BJP wins.
And finally do you think 2014 will be Rahul v/s Modi?
No I do not think it will be sort of presidential race. And as far as their support is concerned, if polls are held today, Modi will prove to be a better draw than Rahul.
The interview originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on April 15, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
It’s luck: Explaining Sonia’s rise, BJP’s 2004 loss and cricket debuts
Vivek Dehejia is an economics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is also a regular economic commentator on India for the New York Times India Ink. He has most recently co-authored Indianomix – Making Sense of Modern India (Random House India, Rs 399) along with Rupa Subramanya. The book is along the lines of international bestsellers like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist, and tries to answer a wide array of questions ranging from why did Jawaharlal Nehru did not see the 1962 war with China coming even though there was a lot of evidence to the contrary, to why seatbelts don’t save lives. Dehejia speaks to Vivek Kaul in an exclusive interview. Excerpts:
One of the controversial ideas in your book is that the BJP’s India Shiningcampaign of 2004 was not as much a disaster as is made out to be. Why?
I am glad you asked that. We think it is one of the interesting contributions of the book. I would agree with you that it is a controversial hypothesis because we have this received narrative of the 2004 election – which is that the poor voter had punished the BJP/NDA for the triumphalist India Shining campaign. Even the BJP bought into this interpretation. This has had far-reaching consequences. If you look at the political history of India since 2004, what was the lesson that was drawn? The lesson that everyone drew from the so-called disaster of the India Shining campaign was that you cannot win an election based on economic reform, economic policy and economic success.
And you don’t agree the India Campaign was a disaster…
Our argument here is that if you look at the numbers, if you look not just at the seats won but at the vote shares as well, you get a different story. Yes, there was a swing away from the NDA, but the actual vote share difference between the NDA and the UPA was just over 2 percent. The NDA won 33.3 percent of the vote and the UPA won 35.4 percent of the vote. For us that 2 percent difference in vote share can equally be attributed to a number of other explanations, such as bad luck, as it is to anything else.
Or let me put in another way; if you look at those results, basically it came down to a coin toss. A third of the voters voted for the NDA, another third voted for the UPA and a third voted for somebody else. As we see it, the role of luck and randomness in an outcome should not be underestimated.
That’s a very interesting point…
The NDA might well have won the election. And, in fact, they actually would have won if the DMK hadn’t pulled out their 16 seats at the last minute. And that really was what made the difference. Hence it is very difficult to conclude that it was the voters punishing India Shining. In all Indian elections, there are many regional and local issues at play and then there are issues about the complex way in which alliances work. Our point in the chapter really is that it is a very appealing narrative. We like to have these very convincing explanations because to say well, you know, it was bad luck doesn’t seem like a very satisfying explanation. But if we know that the BJP lost because they had this India Shiningcampaign and the poor voters punished them for it, that appeals to human psychology. We want to have a convincing story that explains everything.
A convincing and simple story that can be broadcast on TV..
That’s right. A story that can fit into a sound byte.
You also talk about the role of luck in Sonia Gandhi‘s life. If it was not at play she would not have ended up at where she is now…
We sort of tell the story as to how she met Rajiv Gandhi at a particular Greek restaurant in Cambridge, England, on a particular day in 1965. That itself was a chance event. Maybe if she did not like Greek food, or if she had gone on a different day! And the number of chance occurrences it took to go from being the shy Italian housewife that she was to being the most powerful person in the country. It took two assassinations and five unexpected deaths. The assassinations, of course, of her mother-in-law and her husband, and then the deaths of five senior Congress leaders (which included Rajesh Pilot, Sitaram Kesri and Madhavrao Scindia). The probability of that happening is so small that you have to call that an accident of fate. Or luck. Or randomness. Or whatever you want to call it.
Any other interesting examples on luck?
We have this study by Shekhar Aiyar and Rodney Ramcharan, two economists of the IMF, who look at the role of luck in test cricket. And they found, amazingly, that the advantage of debuting at home for test cricketers actually had a long lasting effect on their careers – which was really surprising. You would think that if you debut at home, sure it would effect your performance in the debut series, but in fact it has a long-lasting effect.So basically people who debut at home end up playing a lot more…
That’s right. Selectors unfairly punish those who debut abroad and don’t do well. Therefore, you are more likely to be dropped from the side once you debut abroad and don’t do well. But also there could be some learning by doing here. If you debut at home you are able to hone your skills and technique on your home turf and, therefore, you become a better player. Both things could be going on there. But the bottomline is that it is a result of luck because these Test schedules are set months and years in advance, and when someone is picked up for the national side is really the luck of the draw.
An extended portion of your book deals with Jawaharlal Nehru and the fact that for a very long period of time he did not see things heating up with China in 1962, despite there being evidence to the contrary. What is the broader point that you were trying to make?
That forms a central part of our chapter on cognitive failure when we draw on recent behavioural economics literature. The point and the purpose of looking at Nehru in the lead up to the 1962 war was how could something so obvious be missed. It had become clear at that point that China was flexing its muscles. It was a nationalistic state and the border issue was going to be a real problem. But the fact was it apparently caught Nehru by surprise. He himself admitted that he was more or less been living in a dream world before the war. He said: “We were living in an artificial atmosphere of our own creation”. So how could Nehru’s own assessment have been so far off the mark and have changed so radically over a short span of time?
And what did you figure out?
Certainly, one of the several possible interpretations is that Nehru and Krishna Menon (the Defence Minister when the Chinese attacked India) and people around them had succumbed, perhaps to a cognitive failure, where they couldn’t perceive the Chinese threat for what it was. They were looking at it through a different lens.Could you explain that in some detail?
Krishna Menon, for example, was ideologically towards the left and he found it very hard to accept that China, being a socialist state and being an Asian power, could have any threatening impulses towards India. This showed an ideological blind spot to Chinese nationalism that had been detected as long back as 1950 by the shrewd Vallabhbhai Patel. So the broader point we were trying to make is that a strongly-held ideological view can blinker you to some realities that don’t fit in with that view. There is this pattern that one sees where leaders can become overconfident in a lead-up to a crisis because what is happening doesn’t fit their world view of things.
From Nehru you jump to rail accidents in Mumbai…
Yes. A staggering 15,000 people die on railway tracks throughout India every year. Of this 40 percent, or about 6,000 deaths, take place in Mumbai alone on the suburban railway network.
And why is that?
If you look at it from a strictly conventional economic point of view, there is a cost-benefit calculation. So someone who is crossing the tracks at an unfenced point will reckon that he is saving the time it would take for him to get to the next safe crossing, i.e. the foot over-bridge. But that foot over-bridge could be several kilometres away from where he is. If, say, you are a daily wage labourer who has get to the construction site and give your name to the foreman, if you arrive half an hour or 45 minutes late you might miss out on a day of work and so the day’s wages. So the cost can be pretty high. That would be the end of the story from conventional economics and you would say let’s build more foot overbridges to reduce the time cost.
But that is not the whole story?
Let me tell you a little story. Biju Dominic, a former ad man and a co-founder of FinalMile, learned about the daily tragedies on the Mumbai rail system while teaching a class at the railway staff college. So he and his team started gathering some data. They realised that 85 percent of those trying to cross tracks were adult males. Of course, this may also reflect the fact that it is mostly men who are trying to cross the tracks. Also children were most adept at crossing tracks. An interesting finding was that people who are used to crossing tracks tend to underestimate the danger to their lives. This is a classic example of the overconfidence bias, along similar lines that had happened in Nehru’s case before the 1962 war with China. While crossing they don’t consciously realise the risks they are taking. They filter out the boiler plate warning signs and the text signs.
That’s very interesting…
So given the possibility of cognitive failure, it’s possible that some targeted interventions might change that tradeoff. FinalMile came up with three specific interventions. First, they painted alternate sets of railway ties (that’s the series of metal beams that connect the two ends of the track) a bright yellow. This was to help compensate for the psychological fact that people tend to underestimate the speed of large moving objects. With an alternate set of ties painted yellow, someone would be better able to gauge the speed of an oncoming train as it as it passed from the painted to the unpainted ties. Suppose you are in a high a speed train and you are looking out at the landscape, it is hard to tell how fast you are going, unless there is some reference point for the speed. That was one nudge.
What was the second one?The second one was to get the train drivers to switch from a single long warning whistle to two short staccato bursts. Again, this was based on neurological research that showed that the human brain was more receptive to sound that was separated by silence. And the third, the most striking nudge, was an image. People tend to filter out generic boiler-plate kind of warnings. So here they actually hired an actor to portray the wide-eyed horror of someone about to be crushed by an oncoming train and made a poster of it. The poster was vividly visceral enough to really get to someone’s gut, to effect someone psychologically. It is much harder to filter out something like that vis-a-vis a generic sign which says it’s dangerous, don’t cross here. And the poster was put up at points were people crossed tracks. Those were the three interventions.
And how are the results?
They started at Wadala. In the first half of 2010, the number of deaths dropped by 75 percent to nine from the previous year. When we spoke to them in February this year we were told that railways were rolling it out at the Mulund, Vikhroli and Ghatkopar stations. But the other point that we note there is that the success of that really won’t show up in any kind of statistic because if someone looks at the poster and decides not to cross or makes it across safely because of the yellow paint on the ties, it will be the absence of a statistic.
Another interesting piece of research you talk about are seat-belts…
Our inspiration is this classic 1975 article by Sam Peltzman, at the university of Chicago, who wanted to test whether seat-belts saved lives in the United States (US) where everyone had just assumed without argument that seat-belts must save lives. And what Peltzman found was that, in the US, that turned out not be the case. What was going on was that since the cars were now safer, the driving became more rash. The human reaction was, now that my car is a little safer, I can drive a little faster and I don’t need to worry as much about getting into an accident. The human behaviour offset the effects of a well-meaning government programme.
You can find examples of this everywhere. We give an example of sports equipment. There is some evidence now that in team sports where there is a lot of protective gear, you actually see more violence on the pitch. So American football and ice-hockey have a lot more protective gear and so you get a lot more violence. It’s the same thing because the players feel safer as drivers feel when they wear the seat-belt. But in soccer there is relatively very little protective gear and hence very little violence.
How does the seat-belt thing work in an Indian context?It’s not been very much studied but we found this one interesting study by Dinesh Mohan at IIT Delhi. The Delhi seat-belt law came into effect in 2002. What he found was that seat-belts saved very few lives. If you look at his paper, he concludes that the seat-belt law at most saved around 11-15 lives per year in Delhi out of nearly 2,000 fatalities.
Why was that the case?
There are two things going on here. The fatality rate for drivers and front seat passengers was already relatively low. And that dropped a bit after the seat-belt law came in. The deeper explanation is that most of the victims are not the front-seat passengers or the drivers. They are the other people. They are pedestrians. They are two-wheeler drivers. And others. With seat-belts in place drivers are essentially transferring the risk from themselves to the pedestrians.
An interesting part of your book is where you talk about how Indian states that were ruled by native princes are doing much better economically than the states that were ruled directly by the British. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
One of the questions that we like to ask in India is what if we hadn’t been ruled by the British, would we have done better? Or questions like: were the British good for India? And here there are all spectrum of opinions. There was a debate published an American magazineThe New Republic between Niall Ferguson and Amartya Sen which looked at this question. Sen wrote that had India not been colonised by the British then it might have evolved in a different (and) better way than with the colonisation. Then Ferguson replied to that. And Sen had a rejoinder. Ferguson is very much a believer in the British Empire. His argument is that the British Empire in its later phase did a lot of good for its colonies by integrating them into global trade and finance.
So what is the point you are trying to make?
It is very tempting to say that Indian economic performance or growth stagnated during 190 years or 200 years of British rule, and then growth began to take off after independence. The point we make is that by itself it tells you nothing and you have to have a counter-factual scenario. What are you comparing it with? And this is where we draw on the research of Lakshmi Iyer of the Harvard Business School.
What is this research about?
She very interestingly compares the economic performance post-independence of those regions which were directly ruled by the British as against those which were ruled by the princes of princely states. And she shows statistically that the native-ruled regions have done better on average even post-independence. And that is a very striking result. One sort of hypothesis is that the British, to the extent that they were more likely to rule states that generated taxation revenue for them (because tax on land and agriculture was a big source of revenue), may not have invested so much in physical capital and human capital as the Maharajas and Nawabs may have. At least, among the more progressive princely states, they probably realised the good value of education, health and so on and began to invest in that.
Can you give an example?
You can take the example of the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III. He ruled from 1875 to 1939. He had compulsory primary education, including that for girls. He put in place a number of socially progressive policies. That sort of legacy is still being reaped till today. That is one possible explanation and a suggestive idea.
The interview originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 19, 2012.
Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]
“Rahul Gandhi is completely mediocre…He should find another profession”
The New York Times has referred to him as ‘perhaps the best among India’s non fiction writers’; Time Magazine has called him ‘Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler’. Meet Ramachandra Guha, one of the few intellectuals in India, who is a liberal in the classic sense of the term.
He has pioneered three distinct fields of historical inquiry: environmental history (as in The Unquiet Woods, 1989), the social history of sport (A Corner of a Foreign Field, 2002), and contemporary history (India after Gandhi, 2007). He is currently working on a multi-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi.
His latest book Patriots and Partisans (Penguin/Allen Lane Rs 699) is a collection of 15 essays based mostly on all that has gone wrong in modern India.
“Rahul Gandhi is completely mediocre… He has no original ideas, no heart for sustained and hard work. He should find another profession,” he says in this interview to Vivek Kaul.
Excerpts:
You write that “Indian constitution had always been impalatable to the Marxist-Lenninists since it did not privilege a particular party(their own), and Hindu radicals since it did not privilege a particular faith (their own).” Can you discuss that in a little detail?
Marxist-Leninists the world over believe in a state run for and by a single party, their own. Hence the problems encountered by the Communist Party of China, which is paranoid that a call for freedom and democratic rights will lead to the dismantling of their monopoly. Indian Marxist-Leninists are no exception. The Naxalites fantasize about planting the Red Flag on the Red Fort. Even the CPI(M) still somewhere believes that one day it will be the sole party in control in India.
And what about Hindu radicals?
A core belief of the RSS(Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh) is in a Hindu Rashtra, a state run and for Hindus. Muslims and Christians in this scenario have always to prove their loyalty, in fact, they have to acknowledge their distant or proximate, real or fictitious, origins in a Hindu family and in Hindu culture. When the NDA came to power, under the influence of the RSS they constituted a Constitutional Review Commission. Knowing that the former Chief Justice, M. N. Venkatachaliah, was a practising Hindu with a profound knowledge of the scriptures, they asked him to head the Commission, hoping he would advocate amendments in the direction they desired. To their dismay, Justice Venkatachaliah said the secular Constitution of India was completely sound.
Which is a bigger threat to India, naxalism or Hindu bigotry?
In the 1990s, Hindu bigotry; now, Naxalism. Things may yet again change, or an altogether new threat may emerge. Historians cannot predict!
In one of your essays you talk about the senior Congress leader Gulzari Lal Nanda, who was twice the acting Prime Minister of India, dying in a small flat in Allahabad. You also talk about Lal Bahadur Shastri to highlight how upright Indian politicians used to be. What has made them so corrupt over the years?
Ironically, leaders of the CPI and CPI(M), despite their strange and archaic ideology, are perhaps the least corrupt of Indian politicians. They do not have Swiss bank accounts and do not sup with corporates. The compulsions of election funding, the state’s control over natural resources (including land), and sheer venality and greed have encouraged leaders of all other parties to become grossly wealthy by abusing their office.
There remain exceptions. Manmohan Singh is completely honest in a personal sense (though complicit in the corruption of his party and government). And there still remain some outstandingly upright judges, IAS officers, and Generals. The day his term ended, Justice Venkatachaliah moved out of his Lutyens bungalow in New Delhi and returned to his modest home in Bangalore. Others would have at least stayed on for the six months allowed for by the law, using that period to lobby for another sarkari post with perquisites.
You also suggest that if Lal Bahadur Shastri would have been around for sometime more India would have been different country than what it is today. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
Shastri has been greatly under-rated both as politician and Prime Minister. It was he who laid the foundations of the Green Revolution (although Indira Gandhi took the credit). He was a far more focused leader in defence and military matters than his mentor, Nehru. He had initiated moves to open out the economy and encourage entrepreneurship. And he was scrupulously honest and completely non-sectarian. Had he lived another five or ten years India may today be a less discontented democracy and a less corrupt society.
Normally when people want to refer to dynasty politics in India they talk about the Nehru Gandhi family. You say it should be just the Gandhi family. Why do you say that?
I show in my book, with concrete evidence, that the dynasty originated with Indira Gandhi, not Nehru. I think this dynasty is now on its last legs. Its charisma is fading with every generation. And Rahul Gandhi is completely mediocre. Rajiv at least had a vision–of making India a technologically sophisticated society. Sonia has enormous stamina and determination. Rahul has no original ideas, no heart for sustained and hard work. He should find another profession.
Has chamchagiri increased in the Congress party over the years? Are the chamchas of Sonia Gandhi bigger chamchas than the chamchas of Rajiv, Sanjay and Indira Gandhi?
Quite possibly. As there is less to go around, there is more active chamchagiri to get what remains. The cult around 10 Janpath in Congress circles is sickening.
Are the Internet Hindus the new kar sevaks?
Yes and no. They have the same bigoted worldview and fanatical fervour of the kar sevaks, but express this through the safe medium of the Web. The kar sevaks had more raw energy, travelling to Ayodhya, provoking riots on the way there and on the way back. The Internet Hindus are as narrow-minded and sectarian as the kar sevaks, but, since their abuse is verbal and not physical, far less dangerous.
Gurucharan Das talks about the need for a new party which understands the Indian middle class in his new book India Grows At Night. You also make a slight mention in one of the essays. Do you see that happening? Does the Aam Aadmi Party(AAP) look like filling in that gap?
The anti-corruption protests of 2011 were an important wake-up call to large sections of Indian society, not just the politicians. However, for the energy and passion to have a substantial and enduring impact, the movement must stay focused, and be patient. Too much media attention is inimical to solid grassroots work. The leaders of AAP should, for the moment, stay away from TV studios and build state-level units and forge alliances with civil society groups across India. To fight the next General Elections would be foolish and premature. They should aim rather to make an impact in the General Elections of 2019.
Over the years have we become less liberal as a society than we were before?
It may not be accurate to say that we have become less liberal as a society. On the whole, Indians are more aware of the rights of Dalits and women than they were 50 or 60 years ago. Sectarian religious sentiments on the ground are markedly less intense and polarizing than they were 10 or 15 years ago. At the same time, the media only gives space to extreme positions. And the state capitulates to bigots when it should stand up to them. This capitulation is sadly true of all parties.
Why did the UPA encourage India’s greatest artist to flee into exile? Could it not protect his life and dignity in his own homeland? Why did the Left Front not provide protection to Taslima Nasreen? The tragedy is that the so-called secular parties cave in most easily to the sectarians and the bigots—the Congress to the Hindu right, the Congress and the Left to the Muslim right, the NCP and the Congress in Maharashtra to the Shiv Sainiks.
Could you elaborate on that?
About four years ago, I wrote a piece in a Delhi newspaper known to be read by senior Congress leaders and Ministers. I said there than when the next Republic Day awards were announced, the Government should give MF Hussain the Bharat Ratna and Salman Rushdie the Padma Vibhushan. This would be just reward, no less than their artistic and literary genius deserved. It would strike a blow for artistic and literary freedom. And it would simultaneously insult Hindutvawadis and the mullahs. The rest of India (namely, the majority of Indians) would praise the Government, and the bigots would be speechless, the Hindutvawadis not knowing whether to praise the Government for honouring Rushdie or abuse it for honouring Hussain, and the mullahs confused in the other direction.
But that moment has now passed…
Sadly, Hussain is now dead, the moment has passed, and one does not see the Government—any government—stand up boldly for liberal and democratic values. This is the tragic paradox—that while society as a whole may be becoming slightly more liberal, the further progress of liberalism is halted by the encouragement to illiberal forces by the state and political parties.
The interview originally appeared in www.firstpost.com on December 17,2012
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])