In this interview with Tarunabh Khaitan, we discuss the ongoing crisis of democracy and constitutionalism in India. At the time of conducting the interview, elections are underway in India, with approximately a month left for results to be declared. In this context, we discuss the differences between the first and the second term of the Modi government, India’s place in the ongoing wave of global populism, suggestions for recovering constitutional democracy, and the dangers of “Scholactivism”.
Tarunabh Khaitan is Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School.
Rohit Sarma is an Assistant Editor at RevDem and a PhD student at the Central European University.
Rohit Sarma: My first question, Tarunabh, takes us back a back a few years, to 2020, when you published an article which was titled “Killing a constitution with thousand cuts”, which we had in fact discussed on this podcast when you were here the last time. It’s been some time since the article, so we were thinking that maybe we could have a recap on what you argued there, and also look at how things have progressed since then in the last four years. Correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but the argument that you had made back then was that, in the first term of the BJP, the attack on the Constitution had been subtle and incremental. This contrasts the treatment met out to the Constitution by illiberal leaders from the past, in particular Indira Gandhi, who, in your words, lodged a “direct and full frontal” attack on the Constitution. With this in mind, in these last four years, how do you think things have played out? Would you say that it’s remained within this camp of incremental attacks, or perhaps have they moved towards this more direct full-frontal attack as you had predicted towards the end of that article?
Tarunabh Khaitan: You’re quite right that I think the first term was characterized by subtle and incremental assaults on the Constitution, but I also argued that, although subtle and incremental, these attacks were widespread and systematic and hence the metaphor of the thousand cuts. The overall impact on the Constitution was not subtle or incremental since the Constitution was already under significant stress after the first term.
Why would a regime engage in subtle incrementalism? I mean, it’s a difficult question to answer and I’m obviously not a regime insider, so I cannot answer why they engaged with it. But that strategy clearly changed in the second term of Prime Minister Modi. So what changed in the second term: First, unlike the first term, the ideological agenda of cultural nationalism of the Hindu Rashtra took enormous salience for the second term of Prime Minister Modi. We saw this with the Citizenship Amendment Act, the change in status of Kashmir, the use of Hindu symbolism in the inauguration of the new Parliament building, the attempts to even consider dropping name India and replacing it with Bharat, the massive increase in persecution of Muslims etc. A lot also happened in the first term, but that was still undertaken with plausible deniability. Back then, it was mostly vigilante mob attacks on Muslims, or persecution of Muslims by the police and by non-state actors. But all of this again with some plausible deniability.
The entire point of cultural nationalism is that you can’t do it half-heartedly. The whole point of the Hindu Rashtra agenda is that it is expressive and to get that expressive message across, you have to shout from the rooftop. With such an agenda, if nobody’s noticing it, it’s not that it’s being done on the quiet, but that it’s not being done at all. The whole point is to change the country culturally and that part of the agenda could not be achieved in a subtle and incremental manner. It had to be loud and expressive. The other thing is that there has been a shift in the regime’s self-confidence after the great victory of 2019 and the lesser reliance on coalition partners. With this came a rhetorical change from the language of welfarism and development to this astonishing embrace, not only of Hindu nationalism, but a Hindu nationalist notion of decolonization. Using the narrative of decolonization—completely appropriating the postcolonial vocabulary of progressive scholars, largely based in the West—in the second term, the BJP pushed forth an extremely authoritarian agenda that some would say is even more authoritarian than the colonial state. Take for example the reform of the criminal laws which was wholly non-consultative and a sham of a reform of the criminal laws. Within the same framework, we saw that infamous op-ed by Bibek Debroy which released the thought balloon about whether it’s time to not only amend the Constitution, but replace the Constitution altogether because it’s colonial. In this same spirit, we also saw Arghya Sengupta’s book titled “The Colonial Constitution”. These are things that are being done with some degree of plausible deniability, but there is an ecosystem being created for constitutional replacement.
The third thing that was particularly distinctive about the second term of the Modi government was its relationship with crony capitalism which became extremely obvious in this term. In the first term, there was an understanding or assumption that Modi is close to certain business houses, especially from Gujarat. But just how close that link is and who was the master and who was the servant itself was unclear. In the second term, the question of whether it’s the politicians controlling the corporate houses or the other way around became a huge issue, especially with the farm bills and the massive farmers protest, which, by the way, led to the only significant U-turn on a policy matter by the Modi government. Add to all this, the incredible weaponization of laws against any critic of Adani in particular, but also other plutocrats. The targets here include the media, activists, among others. Take Alpa Shah’s new book on the Bhima Koregaon arrests which demonstrates a key link between these Human Rights activists and helps answer the question of why were these human rights activists arrested. I’ve read the book and it seems that all of them have a back story where they have been irritants to the regime’s favourite plutocrat at some point in their not to distant history.
Then finally, of course, you have the system of quid pro quo that was revealed by the data that came out of the Electoral Bonds, which demonstrates a system of extortion and also bribery by corporates. I think these changes were particularly remarkable and I would not call any of them either subtle or incremental.
Rohit: You mentioned four points and we’ll get back to some of them later, but for now I wanted to pick on one which has really puzzled me lately from this perspective of the direct or incremental attack question – this concerns the question of amendment.
As you mentioned, there have been these thought balloons floating that the Constitution needs to be amended. People have said that the word secularism for example. In that context I’m wondering what you make of the opposition’s claim, which it made quite recently, that if the BJP government wins this next round of the elections and comes to power once again for a third term, they will amend the Constitution and that there will be a major constitutional overhaul.
What I’ve been surprised by is that many in the BJP have responded by saying that there’s nothing like this on the cards. I think for example Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, said that it’s Modi’s guaranteed that the Constitution won’t be amended. This is making me wonder if incrementalism still has some purchase because a direct constitutional overhaul is something that even the BJP is not willing to do at this stage?
Tarunabh: I have no doubt that incremental and subtle assaults on the Constitution are far worse and far more dangerous to democracy than clear and full-frontal attacks. It’s not a surprise that saving the Constitution was not an electoral issue in 2019 elections, despite the best efforts of the opposition. But now it has become a major issue in the 2024 elections, and I think that is because the assaults on the Constitution in this second term are for all to see.
Incrementalism is hugely valuable. In fact, it used to be a progressive tool. It was articulated by progressives who wanted to do radical reform, but introduce it slowly or gradually, and without drawing too much of a backlash. So, incrementalism works. I think the regime in India overplayed its hand. It became overconfident and in so doing, gave up on incrementalism. I think it may well pay an electoral price for that change in approach. It’s easier to get away with incrementalism, but incrementalism has its limits. You can’t do everything you want to do, especially when your goals are expressive in the cultural domain. Incrementalism is great for material change or social change. But it’s very difficult to deploy it for cultural change and this this government wants to change Indian culture. That is why it recognises the limits of incrementalism on the Constitutional transformation.
I think the recent statements about guaranteeing no amendments to the constitution are just damage control. I don’t think they expected that the agenda of saving the Constitution would strike a chord with the voters in the way that it has. It was very clear that their allies and their in-house intellectuals were pushing this replacement agenda. So I think they were surprised by the backlash against it. Add to that, the fear of losing the Dalit vote, which has a particular affective attachment to the Constitution because of Dr. Ambedkar’s role in framing it. So all in all, I think this is all damage control and I wouldn’t call that incrementalism. Incrementalism is a thought-through strategy where, from the very beginning, a decision is made to approach things slowly. Here, by contrast, you could say that they put out thought balloons with plausible deniability, or perhaps with implausible deniability, but the idea really was to test the waters. And we can see that they were burned, very badly.
Rohit: In terms of incrementalism, even in your article, you had mentioned that this was part of a trend that we see around the world with the emergence of “creeping authoritarianism”. A question that I am often asked is whether India fits into this global trend of illiberal democracy, populism, rule of law backsliding, call it what you may. There are many things that do point in the direction of India being a part of this camp, but there are things that pull it away – I am thinking here about the cultural project you mention. Do you think that understanding India through these global trends is helpful or would you rather suggest that India is better placed in a camp like say global south constitutionalism or South Asian constitutionalism, which are more context-specific?
Tarunabh: Look, no country is an island today, and I think there is a pattern to these developments and India is definitely part of a global trend. There’s good reason to believe that there are some notes being exchanged. There’s some learning, whether direct or indirect, from other autocracies, and some teaching to other autocracies. And of course there are personal friendships that you can see between, say Modi and Netanyahu, etc. So, I think there is a sense of solidarity or camaraderie between these emerging, elected authoritarian leaders. And there is a similarity in their approaches and in their toolkit.
But there are vast differences as well. I think India remains unique in the extensive use of violence, both legal and illegal in undermining democracy. In India, personal security, life, and liberty are under threat in a way that is to my mind unparalleled in the democratic world. Also, the kind of fascistic narrative in India which may only be a degree removed from other, but the extreme sort of the villainization of a prominent minority—i.e. Muslims in India is—is just off the scales, in my view. There are differences regarding institutions as well—I think the role of courts and independent institutions in standing up to the regime has been particularly pitiful and appalling in India. I mean, at least until these institutions were captured in other contexts they did try to stand up and sometimes quite effectively against authoritarian forces. In South Africa, for example, it was the courts and the prosecutors that got rid of President Zuma. In India, by contrast, we have not seen any institutional spine on the parts of the court. Also, there are fundamental differences—India size, its federal structure, and I suspect, one key difference lies in India’s geopolitical location, which is coupled with the fantasy in the West that India can be a democratic bulwark against China in this time of rising tensions between the US and China. This has served as a get-out-of-jail card for the Modi regime, where many of its sins of omissions and commissions, including targeted assassinations on the foreign soil of allies, have been forgiven. Similarly, India ignoring the sanctions on Russia for the Ukraine war have been forgiven, or forgotten, or even ignored. So, I think India is also unique in many respects.
Rohit: We’ll get to the cultural project of Hindutva. In India, according to surveys done by organizations like Pew, support for autocracy is skyrocketing and this is certainly worth spending time on. But before we get to it, I want to first look at some constitutional design questions which you’ve sort of commented on, especially in an article for The Wire from 2023 where you mentioned something called an “11-point Common Minimum Programme” for the Opposition. Could you take us through some of these points, and perhaps tell us which ones are the most pressing in opinion?
Tarunabh: I was told this an exercise in fantastical thinking, because it was an article setting an agenda of constitutional reform for a scenario where the opposition won, which I was told was not going to happen. But maybe, you know, sometimes there’s some value to being a fool.
Before I come to the design recommendations, I want to say two things: First, it is very clear that many of the excesses of the Modi regime have been made possible because of existing design flaws in India’s laws, or structural inconsistencies and institutional weaknesses. A system can function with these design weaknesses under relatively benign conditions, and I do mean relatively here because even the previous governments have played fast and loose with institutional propriety, civil liberties, with the lives of individuals, with media freedom, etc. The difference however is one of scale, degree, etc., and also where these improprieties take place—whether they happen in Delhi or in Kashmir etc. With that in mind, part of the motivation for writing that paper was that an opposition, even under rigged conditions where elections are fought unfairly, can sometimes win. In these situations, it surprises even itself by winning. This happened in Malaysia. This happened in Sri Lanka. But, of course, for the opposition to win, it needs to win big. Because the system is rigged. I mean, if the system is completely rigged, of course, there’s no chance of winning. But India is not there. In the present conditions, the opposition needs to outperform by a certain margin in order to actually win. Oppositions that win against authoritarian incumbents do so by forming single-point, broad coalitions, where the only point is to get rid of the incumbent. Often these ideological coalitions are fragile because everybody is forced to come together. Because of this, the window of opportunity to enact change for these kinds of opposition governments tends to be small. Often, they fall apart because of their own internal contradictions, as we know famously from our own experience in India with the Janta Party government in the 1970s. So, the window of opportunity is small and unless they use the political legitimacy and political capital that they have earned in the election quickly, they could very well be out of the picture. They have to spend their political capital very quickly within the honeymoon period. They don’t have the luxury to wait for a full five years because they may not last the full five-year term. Within that context, I wanted to start at least a debate, because the entire debate was only about how the opposition could win and not what it should do when and if it wins. So that was the point of that piece.
Substantively, the main thing in that piece is basically to address certain institutional fragilities in India. The main one that I start with, which incidentally is the one that the opposition has not picked up in its manifesto—mainly because the idea is particularly foreign to India and there are worries about feasibility, etc., which I think are overplayed—but the idea is as essentially to change the electoral system from first-past-the-post to a ranked-choice voting system. The Constitution requires constituency-based elections for the lower houses i.e., lower chambers of legislatures. So we can’t have a list-based proportional representation system without a constitutional amendment. But the Constitution does not describe what the mode of election should be. Now what happens if we move from a first-past-the-post system? In first-past-the-post, we have scenarios such as the BJP winning 35% of the vote share and still managing to win a plurality. By contrast, in ranked-choice voting, the voter can be required to, or rather permitted to—and I think under Indian conditions it will have to be permitted to—vote for her top two, top three candidates. What this means is that, even without ideological alliances, aligned parties, instead of undercutting each other’s votes, end up transferring their votes to the most ideologically aligned party if they’re out of the contest. Such an arrangement is extremely important because otherwise what ends up happening is that even if the centre-left ideological voter core is 60%, it can be divided between 32% and 28% of candidates. Under a rank-choice voting, however, voters will mark their choices as one or two and then end up transferring votes between their two options in the eventuality that their candidate loses. This is, by the way, equally true of centre-right parties, so there’s no ideological bias. What there is a bias against is polarising parties—polarising parties, which hold extremist ideologies, tend to be either the first choice or the last choice of voters. That is where the ranked-choice system hurts these parties, because in order to win a ranked-choice vote, you need to get enough second-choice votes to add to your first-choice votes. It is only then that you cross the 50% threshold. Now, since for toxic parties, you either love them or you hate them, you know they aren’t going to be anybody’s second choice, and that is where the system is extremely important if politics in India has to be de-radicalized from the effects of the BJP. So that was the main suggestion.
There were a host of other suggestions as well: I’ve written about a bill on independent institutions; I’ve commented on judicial independence; on opposition rights, which I was very pleased to see has been picked up in the opposition’s manifesto; I’ve also written about an anti-discrimination law, which again has found mention in the Congress and in the Communist Party Manifesto; I’ve written on federalism; the need to investigate the electoral bond scheme, which, actually, I would call state capture, and would advocate for something like the State Capture Commission which was established in South Africa to look into state capture by corporates under Zuma. Other than that, anti-defection law is a huge problem in India because the financially strong party, the BJP, has used its money-power to not just buy legislators from the other parties to form government, but also now we see that it’s buying candidates themselves. All of that has to be fixed. There is some very silly progressive/liberal view in India that legislators need to be free and an anti-defection law curtails their freedom of choice. That argument, in my opinion, is completely acontextual and fails to see the damage that Operation Lotus, which is what the phenomenon of the BJP buying opposition members of parliament is called, has done to the political fabric. And also there is something to be said about going to the voters on a party symbol. If you give up that party symbol after the election, you must go back to the people on a different party symbol, i.e., of your new party. So, my proposition is not that defectors should be barred from politics. All I am saying is that, if you change your party, the seat you are contesting from should go back to the polls and we should let the people decide. In this regard, I’ve actually recommended Pakistan’s model, because in Pakistan the process is restricted to issuing confidence votes and not to all votes, but the loss of the seat of the defecting parliamentarian is automatic.
Aside from this, there is of course the need for securing civil liberties. The weaponization of criminal law has to be fixed. There has to be a huge priority given to securing the freedom of media and freedom of academia. I have seen that the opposition is talking about media pluralism laws in its manifesto, which is great.
Those are some of the suggestions that I’ve put together to think about how constitutionalism and democracy can not just be restored, but also how we can ensure that we don’t repeat this episode of authoritarianism ever again.
Rohit: I was wondering, from a historical perspective, why weren’t these suggestions introduced in the past? Or perhaps whether they weren’t even considered in the Constitutional Assembly? At the end of the day, it’s always said that the Indian Constitution is a document that’s been very well thought out. So were these issues that you have highted something that was just not considered at the time, or perhaps was it that circumstances meant that these types of issues could not be considered? Or, as you said with ranked-choice voting, was it that these reforms were very foreign to India’s polity at the time?
Tarunabh: Some of the suggestions are new and some have been around. The recommendations on civil liberties and the overreach of draconian criminal laws have had a longstanding resonance in India, which predates independence and goes back to colonial times. The independent state does in fact continue with the colonial regimes of policing and prosecution. Lots of people have written about this, including Kannabiran’s excellent book titled Wages of Impunity. So, you can say that it has always been on the agenda, but very little has been done to tackle it.
Independence of the judiciary has been on the agenda for a very long time because, again, we have a history with attempts at judicial capture. We have, for example, Indira Gandhi’s attempts to get a committed judiciary. Similarly with federalism, we have some history which includes the Sarkaria Commission, the Bommai case, etc. Obviously these did a lot to strengthen federalism, but some of the mechanisms of undermining federalism have changed now. For example, we have subtle and incremental mechanisms like denying funding to states, etc. They’re different from past attacks on federalism and therefore require different solutions.
I think the thinking on the independence of institutions other than criminal justice institutions, like election commissioners, etc., is relatively new. But also the blatant partisanship of these institutions is also relatively new. The sense of shame that at least forced them to act without egregious partisanship in the past seems to have gone. When shame is no longer a check, you need to think about other types of checks, including legal ones. The fact is that we’re in a constitutionally shameless moment in India.
When it comes to opposition rights, again, it was not an issue previously because previous prime ministers, across the political spectrum, with the obvious exception of Indira Gandhi during the emergency, were very respectful of the opposition. Rajiv Gandhi during his premiership knew that Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then leader of opposition, needed a kidney surgery and that hospitals in India could not perform it or at least not performed equally well. Also, considering the state of politicians in India then, he knew Vajpayee could not afford a foreign medical trip on his own expenditure. So he (Rajiv Gandhi) made him an official part of an Indian delegation going to the US so that he could at least use state funds to get to the US, after which he could get his surgery done. Similarly, Narasimha Rao sent Vajpayee, again the leader of the opposition, as the head of an Indian delegation on a United Nations mission. When Vajpayee became Prime Minister, he returned the favor and made Sonia Gandhi, the then leader of opposition, a member of an Indian delegation to the United Nations. This was all based on the idea that the opposition is in opposition to the government, but not to the state itself. None of this was based on hard constitutional rules. There wasn’t the language of rights, but there was a convention from the Nehruvian era that the opposition has to be treated respectfully. That system has completely collapsed under Prime Minister Modi. And therefore, again, when the sense of shame goes, then you need resort to more drastic systems of accountability.
Then there’s the anti-discrimination law. I have been waging war as a one-man army for the past 15 years to get that enacted. I don’t know if I’ll see it in my lifetime. Then you have the issue of state capture, and I think that that’s a relatively new idea that comes from South Africa. When it comes to the proposed anti-defection law, we have been talking about it for a long time and it’s been very controversial for a long time. But what is clear is that it is ineffective. It’s just not working, and it needs to be given some teeth. Media freedom has seen a long debate, but the mode of media control has changed. Instead of censorship, now we get captured media, i.e., media captured by the ruling party through its favorite plutocrats who just buy out the media houses. Because of this, anti-censorship rules through constitutional protections are simply not working because this—in the present scenario, it is not that the media wants to say something and is being stopped. What is more, the curtailment of media freedom is taking place through the weaponization of laws other than media laws as well. There is the use of the tax law or the foreign donations law, etc.
All in all, the point is that some of the debates are familiar, and nothing has been done; some of the debates have happened, but the context has changed; and some of the debates are new.
Rohit: You’ve mentioned Hindutva and about the change in political culture in India. In that light, I want to ask you about the changes that you have suggested aside from the institutional design suggestions that we have discussed so far.
In a recent article, you called for an alternative vision of politics or an alternative vision of the nation to combat Hindutva. You call this alternative, “Hindustaniyat” (i.e., Indianness). Could you tell us what that vision includes, especially for perhaps an audience that does not speak Hindustani?
Tarunabh: First, I should clarify that it’s not a vision of the nation. I pointedly do not use the word nation or nationalism in the article. I think it’s a vision of patriotism but that’s probably putting too fine a point on it.
The argument that I make is that the cultural battle is being waged and progressives can choose to fight it or they can choose to continue to dodge it. If they continue to dodge it, they will lose. On the cultural front, for so long it’s only the right that has been fighting the battle with its notion of an exclusivist and majoritarian Hindu Rashtra.
What is the alternative vision? You can’t fight the cultural battle—the battle of affect—through policies alone. It’s clearly an issue of belonging. Belonging is clearly a need that matters to humans, and so you have to have a progressive answer to the question of belonging. I’ll come to question of labels in a moment, but before that what I proposed as an idea was that the Left could explore notions of virtue-based belonging instead of identity-based belonging, which is what the Right has proposed that it’s championing for the majority-identity. What does a virtuous citizen look like? Notions of virtue are very common in ancient thought everywhere, and in Indian thought in particular: ideas of righteousness, ideas of honesty, simplicity, dignity, non-ostentatiousness, a notion of comfort with complexity, etc. All of these are key, culturally salient markers of virtue that are ubiquitous across India. Every culture takes virtue seriously, but they’re not necessarily the same virtues. Take Mehmaan Nawazi (i.e., the virtue of being generous and welcoming to guests). It is hugely culturally salient across India, right from the poorest households to the richest. Cultures, perhaps for random reasons or perhaps for no reason at all, come to adopt certain virtues that they see as their own right. In India, there is a tongue-in-cheek song by Shahrukh Khan called Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (but the heart is still Indian). In my alternative vision, these ideas of Indianness are celebrated in popular culture as well. Importantly, they’re not identity-based. They transcend identities of caste or religion or language. That was my idea of proposing a progressive possibility of offering a thicker account of virtue-based citizenship which does not exclude swathes of India’s population.
Right now, of course, all the debate about that piece has become a debate about its label, which I called Hindustaniat. The reason for that choice was because, for me, as a North Indian, born in a Hindu context, who came of age politically when Gujarat happened in 2002, where thousands of Muslims were murdered by Hindu mobs as the police stood by, religion in many ways became the defining fault-line of my political identity. Hindustaniat, at least in North India, speaks to that fault line. This region has an extremely rich cultural history, a cultural history which was extremely salient and controversial even at the time of making the Constitution. The Constitution has a directive that tells the state to develop the Hindi language, and Gandhi crucially did not want the word Hindi in the Constitution. He wanted it to be Hindustani. So Hindustani in the sense of what is known as the Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb—i.e. the melting pot of the Hindu and Muslim cultures—is an attractive idea to me. But I understand that, as a label, it’s not inclusive of all of India. It has very little salience or currency in southern India. I don’t think any label will capture this idea of virtue-based belonging adequately. So I think what we need is a progressive politics that comes up with a family of overlapping notions of belonging that is based on virtue and is inclusive. I think there is there is beauty in the fact that there isn’t a single label that captures this notion of Indianness, except of course in the English language with ‘Indianness’, which is obviously what we are trying to give content to. So it will be tautological to use Indianness alone. Honestly, I’m not familiar with other contexts so I don’t know what other labels can be appropriated, but what I can say is that they have to have some historical resonance. Of course, we can use a neologism. Let’s not forget that Hindutva is a neologism. It is not a historical term. It’s coined. It should be remembered though that new terms require a lot of political, social, cultural effort to give them currency and maybe Indianness will become that. At this stage, I don’t know and to some extent I don’t care. I think it’s the idea of virtue-based citizenship that I’m more invested in rather than which particular labels we choose to capture it.
Rohit: I’m wondering what all of this means for you as a constitutional lawyer. Does the need for an alternative vision of politics suggest that constitutional design, even though it can do a lot, can never really stop authoritarianism in and of itself? Or, to put it differently, that if you don’t have this cultural element attached to constitutional politics, the constitution itself risks becoming a shell that can be shamelessly thrown out by illiberal forces?
Tarunabh: On design, my view is that the very best designs can fail and even terrible systems with a terrible design can still survive or even flourish. But that does not make design irrelevant. It’s naïve to think that it does. Design clearly matters because if it did not, these authoritarian leaders would not spend so much political capital trying to change it. Not all design is the same. Every elected authoritarian leader in a parliamentary system across the world wants to change it into a presidential system. There’s a reason behind that which proves that design clearly matters. Design matters a lot. If the Election Commission of India today was selected under the Supreme Court-mandated procedure from last year, it would most likely be a different Election Commission with a different attitude to the excesses of the ruling party. The current Election Commission was constituted under the law passed by the government and that has affected its functioning and attitudes. So design clearly matters. The mistake is to think that design can fix all problems. Design is one of the many elements that go into a causality to determine what actually happens in a political system. Sometimes things happen despite good design. I see design as a part of a function of things, and I think the metaphor I would use is this: Design is a catalyst. Good design can slow down bad political reactions, or it can accelerate good political reactions. Conversely, bad design can have the opposite effect. Sometimes all you need in politics is time. Timing is everything in politics—Donald Trump would not be American president under a slightly different design of America’s electoral system. The point being that minor differences in politics regarding time or numbers can be decisive. That’s my sort of main point on design. I don’t think of an identitarian cultural narrative as an alternative to design. I think it’s definitely complementary. Design cannot solve all our problems and some problems are political and therefore have to be solved politically. Design can help or hinder.
Rohit: My last question, Professor Khaitan, concerns the role of the academic. We had asked you a similar question when you were here last time around, but a lot of things have happened since then. Among other things, you wrote a piece that started a very vibrant debate around what you call “Scholactivism” (Tarunabh’s response is available here).
If I understood you correctly, what you mean by Scholactivism is the bending of the truth to meet activist ends. Your critique to this practice was that academics already do a lot by pursuing truth and they should follow their institutional calling, rather than being swayed by activist ends. How do you see your argument now in retrospect, especially in light of all of the things that are happening, say, in the US or in India, where attacks on universities are taking place with increasing frequency and ferocity?
Tarunabh: I remain absolutely committed to everything I said in that paper. I don’t feel the need to revisit anything from that piece, except perhaps the label. I’m not entirely happy with the label of “Scholactivism.” I think that it, much like Hindustaniat, became a distraction. But these things are hard to predict before you’ve written the piece. In terms of the idea that scholarly research should not be motivated by material outcome or the desire to make material change in the world, that is something that I completely stand by and I think the world will be a better place if academics did not do that. A bad reading of the piece, where the reader goes by the by the headline suggests that I’m against activism or that I’m against activism by academics. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I learned how to do activism with Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey as a law student interning in rural Rajasthan, and the main learning from that experience was about just how skillful good activism is, and how bad most academics are at it. Now, even if we want to do activism, let’s not do it as academics. I do a lot of activism, as you know. If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m very vocal about a whole range of issues as a citizen. But I would be ashamed of myself if I discovered that I had, in a scholarly research paper, played fast and loose with the truth, or with method, or with rigor because of the attraction of a short-term political goal. I think that the recent onslaught on academic freedom around the world only invites me to double down on my anxieties and not to withdraw them or amend them in any form.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. In collaboration with Cody James Inglis, Lilith Hakobyan, and Adam Hushegyi.
