On January 14, The Wire published an interview of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen by Karan Thapar.
The interview covered professor Sen’s opinion on the communitarian majoritarian policies of the Narendra Modi government, including its mistreatment of the minority community, especially Muslims, in the social and political sphere. He reiterated his stance on the Modi government, saying “it’s the most appalling in the world.”
Below is the full transcript of the interview. Watch it here. The transcript has been edited lightly for style and clarity.
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Is the Narendra Modi government the most appalling government in the world? That is the view of one of the world’s best-recognised Nobel laureate and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, Amartya Sen.
Today, professor Sen joins me to discuss his opinion of the Narendra Modi government.
Professor Sen, in an interview to the French newspaper Le Monde published on December 19, you said, and I’m quoting you, “The Indian government is one of the most appalling in the world.”
Can you start by explaining what brings you to that conclusion?
A country is governed by the government in question, and what it can do and what it can help and so on. Now, the Indian government’s work has so far been really rather terrible, and that goes back to not just today but also to the time of high COVID-19 when suddenly the government decided to introduce various methods including making travel difficult, making job-seeking difficult, betraying lots of people who depend on that for their livelihood by being able to earn a little income, to be able to get home and have shelter there, if needed. [Those people] suddenly lost that.
Then we got apologies from the government saying, ‘Oh, we are terribly sorry that we are insisting that you all stay at home because of the COVID danger.’
The real problem wasn’t so much that people were being restricted at home; they had no home to go to, and the result was that we had a dramatic decline in the living standard of people, and many of them had to walk hundreds of miles to get back home. Some kind of shelter in their little village and so on. Many of them had no job at all to earn a little income. So I think we could see the type of neglect that we found [during the COVID-19 crisis] to be a real agony.
Migrants in Jalandhar, May 8, 2020. Photo: PTI
Let me quote from that Le Monde interview. There you said, and I’m quoting you, “The Indian government is communitarian in the narrowest sense of the term, attacking Muslims and propagating the idea that Hindus form a nation.” How concerned are you about this majoritarian communitarian attitude of the Modi government?
I am very much concerned about that. India has always been a multinational, multi-ethnic country. Christians have come to India for shelter since the third century. Jews have come from the first century. Muslim traders got into the western part of India well before the conquest of the northwest began.
The patterns of exchange, being able to help each other, has been a major feature of the Indian State, and even though there have been fights and conquests and so on, this cannot take us away from the fact that the country has been, basically, a multinational, multi-ethnic existence.
Surely, this is not only normal living, which is there, it includes economics, social relations, political concerns but also arts and humanities and creations. The Taj Mahal, for example, is not just a Hindu creation, it is a mixture of the different cultures that make up this country.
To deny that, and to go for a kind of unilateral, unique focal country, is a reduction of India, from a big grand country of many to the one which is very narrowly concentrated on a particular focus – the Hindu India, in fact.
I’ll point out to the audience that you use a very evocative phrase that the majoritarian communitarian policies of this government is a reduction of India. Let me explore that reduction as you call it by discussing with you certain specific aspects of it.
To begin with, this government has passed acts like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which specifically excludes Muslims who are refugees in India from getting citizenship. Secondly, ministers and chief ministers refer to Muslims as “termites”, as “Babar ki aulaad“ and they taunt them with references to “abba jaan“ and they repeatedly tell them to go to Pakistan.
How do you view this language and this act?
That language is a reflection of an understanding of the Indian nation that is very distorted, indeed. India has had different cultural rules, as I said, different social, political, economic concerns, and suddenly to remove all that and count only Hindus as Indians and not the others, it’s a terrible error.
When Mahatma Gandhi was fighting for the independence of India, and independence of a nation that had Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and others, suddenly to change all that and make one part of it, the Muslims, go away as if they didn’t belong to India and belonged to only a neighbouring country, I think that would be dreadful confusion of the nature of the country.
In a situation of catastrophic warfare or crisis, one may be able to put up with that kind of non-stop routine, but not in a normal situation, when the country should have its usual material – Hindu, Muslim, Sikhs, and others. It’s a terrible folly on the part of the government to ignore the multiple pluralist nature of the country and we have every reason to be upset by the reduction of India.
You know you say it’s a terrible folly to ignore the multiple pluralist nature of the country but the Bharatiya Janata Party actually seems to have a policy of deliberately excluding Muslims. Neither in 2014 nor in 2019 did the party have a Muslim Lok Sabha MP. In fact, at the moment, the BJP doesn’t have a Muslim MP in either House of parliament, and in Gujarat, it hasn’t fielded a Muslim candidate in any election, be it a Lok Sabha election or a Vidhan Sabha election since 1998.
That’s almost a quarter of a century of deliberately excluding Muslim candidates in Gujarat– a state with a 9% Muslim population.
How worrying is it that the ruling party of India should adopt this attitude to a community that represents up to 15% of the population and maybe as many as 200 million people?
What we see, it’s really absolutely unacceptably barbaric. The word ‘barbaric’ comes to the tongue because there’s something not just unjust, not just wrong, but there’s something that makes people’s lives totally precarious and it also makes the culture of India so limited. If we look at Indian music and paintings, these are creations of Hindus and Muslims together.
If we look at the Taj Mahal, we can think of it in two different ways. It’s a great creation of Muslim architects as well as Hindu collaborators. It [was built in] the memory of the queen, Mohammed Khurram’s wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and it is also relevant that Mumtaz Mahal is the mother of Dara Shikoh, who was the first translator of Hinduism scripture, Upanishads in particular, from Sanskrit to Persian, which then got translated further into English, German, French, and so on.
So on the one side is a woman who is the mother of a great Hindu-Muslim combined culture and on the other side is the queen of a Mughal king with a great standing and stature. Now that is India.
We have had a long history of being together, and instead of that, to separate out Muslims, not giving them their status, roles, and sometimes security that could make them feel belonging to the country, these are absolutely abominable declines from which the Muslims have suffered.
Also read: What History Really Tells Us About Hindu-Muslim Relations
You know professor Sen you quote and cite Mumtaz Mahal as an example, an illustration of true India, of pluralist India. The truth is that what the BJP has taken as its attitude to Muslims and the way it’s excluding them from its own party has now begun to reflect on the country as a whole.
For instance, Muslims are today commonly accused of “love jihad”. They are victims of cow lynching. Dharma sansads, of all things, have publicly called for their genocide, and authorities across the country seem to demolish Muslim homes when they are just accused and are not even guilty of whatever they are accused of. These demolitions are happening without due process.
Are you worried that the country is increasingly becoming anti-Muslim, and that we are reducing Muslims to second-class citizens?
I’m not only worried, I’m terrified. I am terrified by the fact that a nation which has different components could suddenly find itself to be in a state of catastrophic isolation as groups, in particular Muslims, have ended up being. We live in a country where suddenly a whole group of people are seen as if they were not part of the country at all, and I think the disaster that this indicates is a national disaster.
The sense that Muslims could be excluded, that they should not be part of the political understanding of the nature of the country, that they should not be part of the culture and politics of the society that make India what it is – these exclusions are not just a matter of why, of concern, these are matters of horrendous potential of nastiness that could make one day the country completely alien to itself.
This alienation to oneself is a terrible folly that the Hindu administration, particularly the BJP, and certainly the leadership that we have now in India, generates a situation that is a kind of a departure from itself. Suddenly, as if a father of India has decided to go away. They didn’t want to go away instead the leadership decided that they should be driven away.
We have ended up being in a state of harassment and turmoil which no people of a good nation deserve but on top of that we have produced a situation of terrorising uncertainty.
Representational image. Demolition drive of illegal structures at the site, where communal clash had broken out on Ram Navami procession, in Himmatnagar, April 26, 2022. Photo: PTI
Professor Sen, let me once again highlight something that you said. You said you’re not only worried by the situation, you are terrified by it, and you said we’ve created a situation which you described as a matter of ‘horrendous potential for nastiness’.
I want to use that as the background to slightly widen our discussion. As I said India has nearly 200 million Muslims amounting to almost 15% of the population. That’s a population size that’s more than most countries have; 200 million is a huge minority. However, Aakar Patel, in his book Our Hindu Rashtra, points out that although Muslims are nearly 15% of the population, they are only 4.9% of state and central government employees. Only 4.6% of the paramilitary services. Only 3.2% of the IAS, IFS, and IPS, and perhaps as low as 1% of the army.
Doesn’t that suggest two things: first, that Muslims have not got their fair share of representation in democratic India, and second, this is a historical problem, not a new one. It may have burgeoned and become much worse under this government but it’s been there for decades.
The Hindu-Muslim relationship is a very major part of Indian history, as far through almost every part of the country – its politics, culture, society, literature, music, and so on. Somehow that 15% has been seen as if they didn’t matter, as if they’re there by the tolerance of the majority and not by their own life, as human beings, who are part of the nation.
So, I think what you’re pointing out, namely, that the minority, which in the case of Muslims is very large in India, as if they are a minuscule faction of the country. That’s not the case. The nation has relied on combined forces from different parts of the society.
What we see is a reduction, in fact, an effective demolition, of a part of the country in a way that makes the nation smaller, poorer and, in many ways, nastier because they’re forced into being in a ridiculously survival position.
The ill-treatment of the minorities is one of the major follies of a nation, which could have been much bigger, much greater, and much more a part of the tradition that made India such a major country over the years.
You talk about, and I’m quoting you, the “ill-treatment of minorities is one of the major follies of the nation.” Even in politics, where once upon a time we had Muslim presidents, home ministers, chief ministers, Muslims seem to be increasingly excluded. In proportionate terms, they should have 74 seats in the Lok Sabha; they have only 27.
India does not have a Muslim chief minister in any of its 28 states. In 15 states there are no Muslim ministers at all. In 10 there’s just one and usually restricted to minority affairs. Do you feel this is deliberate planning that’s excluding Muslims or is it something that’s just happened?
I think it is a pre-planned disaster. I don’t know where to begin here and even if I tried to find out the disparity between the proportion of Muslims in the country and their traditional role, which have been thin and respectable, but instead of that, you find them in a very minor tradition, often having no power at all or having no standing.
Now that indicates confusion of what the nation stands for. I think it’s important to see it as confusion. It’s not just that the majoritarian ruler doesn’t want to take much note of the minorities, but also they do not understand what a nation means. How a nation that consists of different parts of people can work together and be a major contributor to what we can call the Indian civilisation.
It’s a fantastic denigration, fantastic demolition of the country’s history, its past and present, and we have every reason to stand up against it.
Also read: How India Came to Be at the Top of ‘Global Minority Report’
Absolutely. I’m going to once again repeat what you said because I think it’s so important people should fully hear what you said. You said this is a fantastic denigration and demolition of the country’s history but also of the country’s present, and therefore, I can understand why you said to Le Monde that the Indian government is one of the most appalling in the world.
But I should point out to you that the BJP, its supporters, its allies, will be furious with you. So let me ask you before I end, do you stand by that? That the Indian government, the Modi government, is one of the most appalling in the world? You’ll be criticised for saying it. Do you stand by it?
Well, yeah I do. I do think the new Modi government is one of the most appalling. He treats his own people in such a nasty way which neglects the justice and fairness that should come to people of different ancestry today in all over India. So I think the neglect of Indians in India is a major catastrophe that has ridden the country. India wasn’t like that before the present, and the next season began. People like Gandhi and Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose and many others have worked very hard to make the country a combined united nation, and suddenly, we find that there is one thought of the nation, the majoritarian part, [that] is going ahead and trying to make a mess of the life of the minorities.
Professor Sen, my last question. I note that you stand by your description to Le Monde that the Indian government, that is to say, the Modi government of today, is one of the most appalling in the world and you’ve just explained that. You say this because it treats its own people in such a nasty way but let me ask you before I end for a little bit of perspective – how does the Indian government compare with the governments in countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Russia? Those are also governments that treat their people in terrible ways. How does the Modi government compare to the governments of Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia?
Sometimes when we look at the worse actions, even the worse record, we may feel that ‘oh, maybe we’re not so bad’ but that’s a terrible way of thinking about our nations. There are two reasons. Quite often the nastiness that we see in other countries, even though they may look worse than what we see in India, in many respects, they have relief of a kind that India doesn’t often have, but there is also the fact that people in different countries in the world are doing something to fight in favour of a kind of justice that every country and the nation in every part of the world.
Absolutely, sir. I take your point entirely. There may be countries like Iran, Afghanistan, possibly Russia, that treat their people even worse than the Indian government treats its people, but that doesn’t mean that the Indian government is not one of the most appalling in the world. I take that point, I’m only repeating it because I think it’s very important for the audience. I end there but I’ll point out that we’ve limited our discussion to what you call the communitarian majoritarian policies of this government.
We haven’t talked about other things that I’m sure would corroborate and underline your belief that the Indian government is supporting such as its intolerance of dissent, such as the way it treats the media, the way institutions like the Election Commission and even parliament are now limited in their functioning or even the attack presently on the Supreme Court.
We haven’t discussed all of that, but I’ll point out that I imagine that would corroborate what you’ve said. I thank you for explaining what you said and I’ll repeat it again you stand by your view expressed to Le Monde that the Indian government is one of the most appalling in the world.
Professor Sen thank you very much for this interview.
