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Bollywood Interview Lite Blogs

Kiran Rao Returns with ‘Laapataa Ladies’

The story of the movie revolves around two newly-wed brides who get separated from their families and how a slip-up sets many things right…reports Asian Lite News

After treating the audience with ‘Dhobi Ghat’, the ace director and producer Kiran Rao, is again back with another project titled ‘Laapataa Ladies’. As Rao is busy in promoting her film, she recently got candid about making a comeback as a director and what makes the story set in 2001 still relatable and relevant.

She told, “My struggle continued. I kept writing for 10-12 years. I was writing stories for films, I was writing stories for the OTT series as well. But for some reason, I wasn’t completely satisfied with them.”
“When ‘Dhobi Ghat’ was released, I became a mother. I was very busy and enjoying being a mother. I don’t know how the years went by. But I kept writing. I worked in the films of Aamir Khan Productions. I also contributed to the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. But the desire to make a film was left behind. Because I was not able to complete the script.”
She continued, “In 2018, Aamir got this script. He was a judge in a screenwriting competition. And he liked the story a lot. This story won the second prize. Writer Biplab Goswami wrote it. Then I thought, yes, this is my story. But it’s been six years since it was made.”

The story of the movie revolves around two newly-wed brides who get separated from their families and how a slip-up sets many things right. In a very subtle way, using the elements of humour and hope, Kiran has attempted to address a strong social issue and women’s empowerment
However, the original story was much realistic and dark though her film comes with the elements of comedy and hope.

As she explained, ” When we met Sneha Desai as a writer, I felt that this could be done because the story was very good, which was written by Bipalab, but it was very realistic and I felt that the fun should come because this is a kind of satirical situation that two girls get separated and then what happens next. How can this be changed? And then what happens? There is a twist in the story. Sneha Desai brought the fun in the twist very well. And I will give her full credit. Biplab had also written a very good story. Sneha did this and Divyanidhi Sharma created the character of Shyam Manohar(played by Ravi Kishan).

“So the challenge was that the topics on which we have to discuss to change people’s perspective, we should do it under the table. We should do it through comedy. So that you don’t feel that someone is giving you a lecture standing and someone is explaining something to you. It’s not something to explain. The audience understands. Whatever you want to say, you don’t have to explain it. If your story touches them, then they understand. So actually, while writing, a lot of us we were conscious that the less we kept preaching, the less we kept lecturing. But I felt that the comedy element was very important. Because people then understand what you want to convey very easily, ” she added.
‘Laapata Ladies’ is set in 2001 Madhya Pradesh, a time when mobile phones were precious and the internet and technology had not made everything easily accessible. But, she feels that the story is still relatable. made. “I think this story will touch people’s hearts as emotions and dreams have no age.”

On how she decided about the locations, the director shared, “So, we saw a lot of recce tapes from the villages, because, as I said, it was the time of Covid, so we couldn’t travel that much to find them. So, from everywhere, from Bihar, UP, Delhi, MP we saw a lot of recce tapes in Maharashtra as well. So, we thought that we were getting a lot of locations together in MP. They are not that far away from Bhopal. Their shooting infrastructure is very good. The government and tourism support the film industry a lot. And we got to see very beautiful villages that haven’t changed that much in the last 20-25 years. As you have seen, it’s the story of 2001.”

“So, we also had that requirement that we don’t get a very solid house in that village. So, where there is a beautiful mud house of India, they should be there. A simplicity, a beauty, where the fields are behind the house. It’s not that there are thousands of acres of fields, but someone is living in a bungalow. We needed that kind of atmosphere that we got in MP. And we did the train shoots in Maharashtra. Train stations, we shot them in Nashik district,” the director added.

The film stars Ravi Kishan, Pratibha Ranta, Sparsh Shrivastav, and Nitanshi Goel. Talking about the casting of the film, and working with new as well as established names, Kiran shared, “It always comes with a challenge to work with new stars but to hire new people, you have to balance the equation. You have to keep your project within a certain size, being realistic, and then you can be free in this project. And we both felt, Aamir and I, that if the actors are completely new to this, who fit this character perfectly, then you(the audience) will believe this world in some way, and you will understand this world. You won’t think, how is this possible? You know, you will start flowing with this story. So, because of Aamir’s faith and sharp planning and design casting happened.”

Presented by Jio Studios, ‘Laapataa Ladies’ is directed by Kiran Rao and produced by Aamir Khan and Jyoti Deshpande.
‘Laapataa Ladies’ is a story set in 2001 in rural India about two young brides who get separated during a train journey and what happens when Kishan, a police officer, takes it upon himself to probe the missing case.
The film received a standing ovation during its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.’Laapataa Ladies’ is produced by a team that has collaborated for such hits as ‘Delhi Belly’, ‘Dangal’, and ‘Peepli Live’.

The film has been produced under the banner of Aamir Khan Productions and Kindling Productions, with the scripting by Biplab Goswami. Sneha Desai wrote the screenplay and dialogue, while Divyanidhi Sharma jotted down the additional lines.
‘Laapataa Ladies’ will hit the theatres on March 1. (ANI)

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India News Interview Politics

‘Archaeological Survey Report on Gyanvapi Not Reliable’

Historian Prof. Audrey Truschke discusses the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report on the Gyanvapi Masjid that a ‘ large temple’ existed under the present Mosque before the construction of the Mosque. 

Audrey Truschke is Professor of South Asian history at the University of Rutgers, Newark.  She is the author of three acclaimed books, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, 2016,  Aurangazeb, 2016, and the Language of History : Sanskrit narratives of Indo Muslim rule, 2021. She is currently working on a single volume history of India, ‘ From Mohenjo Daro to today to be published by the Princeton University Press.  

In an Exclusive interview with Abhish K. Bose, Prof Truschke discusses the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report on the Gyanvapi Masjid that a ‘ large temple’ existed under the present Mosque before the construction of the Mosque. 

Excerpts from the interview 

Abhish K Bose:  As a historian who is working in the contemporary period and influenced by ideals such as communalism, democracy, ethics and other values emerged in the last two hundred years or less, how can you ascertain the objectivity of chronicling history of the medieval period when none of these belief systems existed, and what prevailed then was archaic thinking, which has no connection with the contemporary ideas or ideals? 

Audrey Truschke  : My goal in studying history is to understand the past, not to judge it. Modern ideals are just that, modern, and so often not especially relevant to excavating the ideas and casualties of prior periods. Except that, in the present day, many of us value an honest account of the past. In that sense, my core motivation as a modern historian is decidedly modern, even as it is not shared by many other modern people who, instead, embrace an approach of mythologizing the past.

(Photo: IANS)

Abhish K. Bose  : How do you respond to the  Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) finding made in its latest survey report on the Gyanvapi Masjid in Benares. The (ASI) report has claimed that a “large Hindu temple” existed there prior to the construction of the existing Mosque and that parts of the temple were used in the construction of the Mosque. The narrative is similar to the tone of the narrarive spread initially at the time of the controversy surrounding Babri Masjid. As a historian of the medieval period what are your inferences on the (ASI) findings on the said Mosque ?

Audrey Truschke  : I do not find the ASI to be a reliable source of information or analysis at present. In the case of Benares’s Gyanvapi Masjid, they are asking the wrong question. The critical question is not: Was there once, hundreds of years ago, a temple there that premodern people destroyed? Indeed, this is something few, if any, historians contest. Rather, the key question is: Should 21st-century Hindu supremacists destroy a mosque that has stood for centuries as part of their ongoing agenda to oppress Muslims and undermine Indian democracy?

Abhish K. Bose  : Based on your research on the Medieval period and rulers how do you recall the Muslim rulers relations with the hindu community? Has the hindu community benefited or became disadvantaged as a result of the Mughal rule?

Audrey Truschke  : It is difficult to characterize the relationship of all Indo-Muslim kings with all Hindu communities, both because it varied and because Indian kings did not tend to think about a Hindu community in the singular. One especially influential set of alliances featured the Mughals and Rajputs. The Mughals relied on many loyal Rajput lineages in military and cultural ways; those Rajputs benefited enormously, financially and otherwise, from their investment in the Mughal state. Collectively, the Mughals and Rajputs fashioned what we sometimes call “Mughal ruling culture.”

Abhish K. Bose  : Your works  ‘ Aurangazeb’ ‘ The Man and the Myth’ and ‘ culture of encounters ‘ refers to the cultural exchanges and bonhomie in between the Mughal rulers and hindu community in the medieval period such as learning of Sanskrit by the Mughal rulers for understanding Indian ethos, and the Mughal rulers like Aurangazeb protecting Hindus from Muslim aggression. While this is the scenario why the Indian historiography highlighted the Mughal rulers only as plunderers of Hindus and destroyer of temples? Is it the lapse of historians or the lapse of the readers in understanding the history? 

Audrey Truschke  : Professional Indian historians are on the same page as historians worldwide in understanding the nuances of Hindu-Muslim relations during Mughal rule. But India seems to have a growing number of people at present who are popular historians at best and, more honestly, Hindutva propagandists. They churn out books (and, maybe more often, blog posts and Twitter threads) with false information, plagiarism, and misleading claims that participate in the ongoing Hindu nationalist agenda to malign Indian Muslims, past and present.

A priest offers prayers at ‘Vyas Ji ka Tehkhana’ inside Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, after District court order, in Varanasi, on Feb 01, 2024.(IANS/X/@Vishnu_Jain1)

Abhish K. Bose  : As a historian specializing on the medieval period what are your views on the claims by the hindu right-wing over the disputed Mosques in different parts of India?       

Audrey Truschke :  Legally and ethically, Hindu supremacists should not destroy any premodern mosques moving forward. Realistically, they’re probably just getting started as they further transform India into an ethno-nationalist state where minorities face rising oppression and violence.

Abhish K. Bose  : The currently prevailing demarcation of historical periods was a colonial-era innovation designed to dignify colonial rule, among other things.  What are some of the gains and losses of this way of separating historical periods, for understanding our historical present?

Audrey Truschke : In my next book (which is currently under peer review), I do not demarcate South Asian history into standard periods. This will throw off some readers, and that’s part of the point. If we are ever to move beyond bad colonial-era ideas about South Asian historical periods, well, we must move on and challenge ourselves and others to see things in new ways.

Abhish K. Bose  : The focus on demolition of Hindu temples some times excludes all other aspects of the historical past. Can you provide some context for understanding such events? Temples were symbols of power and wealth and not exclusively of religion or spirituality; Hindu kings also demolished Hindu temples of rival kings etc. Why are demolished Hindu temples so important to a certain kind of nationalist history-writing?

Audrey Truschke : Hindu nationalists rely on a grievance machine to fuel their ever increasing hatred of Muslims. Indian history poses many problems for Hindu nationalists in this regard, including that it does not furnish many examples of persecuted Hindus that might produce such grievances. So, they invent persecution, mischaracterize and exaggerate the few crumbs they can find, and otherwise engage in bad faith arguments. In brief, Hindu nationalists are obsessed with temple demolitions because it fuels their modern prejudices; it has little to nothing to do with history. Also, there might be a bit of projection involved. After all, Hindu nationalists are some of the great iconoclasts of our times and have destroyed many places of worship in contemporary India.

Abhish K. Bose  :  You are currently working on a historical account from early Indus valley civilisation to the contemporary period. Could you share a little bit on the book you are working?    

Audrey Truschke  : My current book project is a single-volume overview of South Asian history. It is aimed at undergraduates and educated popular readers. Among other things, I strive to bring in a diversity of Indian voices, meaning more women, lower castes, and lower classes than have many prior historians.

ALSO READ: Puja performed inside Gyanvapi mosque complex

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Films Interview Lite Blogs

Sonalee Kulkarni’s Memorable Journey with Mohanlal

The actress also spoke about director Lijo Jose Pellissery and shared that the unexpected becomes the norm in the cinematic universe of Lijo…reports Asian Lite News

Actress Sonalee Kulkarni, who is receiving a lot of positive response to her work in the recently released Mohanlal-starrer film ‘Malaikottai Vaaliban’, shared her experience working with the Malayalam cinema legend, Mohanlal.

She narrated an incident from the shoot about the Malayalam megastar’s generosity.

Elaborating on the same, the actress said: “Collaborating with Mohanlal sir was an immersion into the realm of cinematic brilliance and unparalleled dedication. From the very first encounter on the sets in Jaisalmer, his warm welcome set the tone for an extraordinary journey. During his action sequence shoot, amidst the cold desert winds, his immediate concern for my comfort epitomised his generosity and camaraderie.”

She continued: “It was during this shoot that I witnessed firsthand his commitment to perfection, every action sequence, a testament to his enduring passion for his craft. He not only recognised my work but also expressed genuine curiosity about the nuances of my recent popular songs.”

She added: “His childlike enthusiasm in discussing his favourite action sequences from ‘Lucifer’ or demonstrating dance steps between takes was both delightful and enlightening. It’s not every day that a legendary actor, with a plethora of accolades and accomplishments, exhibits such humility and genuine interest in others’ work.”

The actress also spoke about director Lijo Jose Pellissery and shared that the unexpected becomes the norm in the cinematic universe of Lijo. She said that working with him is an exhilarating experience, filled with spontaneity and surprises.

She said: “My journey into Lijo’s world began unexpectedly, much like the twists in his narratives. I never imagined working in a Malayalam film under his direction, but here I am, living a dream I never saw coming. His visionary approach to filmmaking, demonstrated in masterpieces like ‘Jallikattu’ and ‘Angamaly Diaries,’ drew me into a world of storytelling that defies conventions.”

She further mentioned: “The turning point arrived when I was finally slated to shoot my first dialogue portion, a crucial scene with Mohan Lal Sir. However, just before the sequence, Lijo decided to rewrite the scene, leaving me in shock. A sudden change in script and a completely new scene thrown at me just an hour before shooting—panic set in. Miraculously, the scene unfolded seamlessly in a single take, becoming one of my favourite moments in the film.”

“This incident encapsulates the essence of working with Lijo Jose Pellissery—a director who thrives on unpredictability, pushing actors to embrace the unexpected. With him, every moment is a unique adventure, a testament to his genius and the electrifying magic he brings to the canvas of cinema,” she concluded.

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Arab News Interview World News

‘The devastation of Israel-Hamas war will haunt future generations’

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita English and Comparative Literature; Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender Columbia University.      

Hirsch writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective, a process she has termed “postmemory.” Her books include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997), The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012). She co-authored Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020) with Leo Spitzer. Her (co)-edited volumes include The Familial Gaze (1998), Women Mobilizing Memory (2019) and Imagining Everyday Life (2021). Hirsch is professor emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York. She is a former President of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a co-founder of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, where with a group of artists, scholars and activists, she co-created the Zip Code Memory Project, dedicated to finding community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods. Hirsch is currently working on a book about reparative memory.

In an interview with Abhish K. Bose she discusses how the disastrous impacts of tragic incidents affects the posterity.

1, You have studied the psychological and physiological impact of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants and proposed the term postmemory for inherited trauma. According to you, memories of tragedies will not end in one generation, rather they get transmitted to posterity. What is the scientific basis of this contention? Please explain?

Yes, I have argued that we can remember other people’s memories.  Descendants of individuals and communities that have survived powerful collective experiences – catastrophes such as war, genocide and extreme violence, but also transformative political movements such as coups, revolutions and uprisings – often feel as though they were shaped by events that preceded their birth.  But they experience these events not as memories, but as postmemories; they were not there, so their recollections are belated, temporally and qualitatively removed.

This argument is based on literary, artistic and autobiographical second-and third generation accounts and on research about trauma and its intergenerational transmission. In recent years, neuroscientists have substantiated these accounts by showing how trauma can be transmitted across generations epigenetically. Thus, parental trauma can be encoded in children’s epigenetic structures – not their DNA sequence but in the gene expression which encodes environmental factors that are heritable. This can make them more vulnerable to traumatic and post-traumatic stress symptoms.  Although this research is in its very beginnings and not yet conclusive, it does corroborate the more subjective accounts of members of what the writer Eva Hoffman has called the “postgenerations.”

2,   What do you think the impact of calamities such as the current wars will be for posterity? The Israel  – Hamas war is ongoing with indescribable destruction and butchering of humanity. Could you evaluate the repercussions of the loss of human life for the descendants of the victims and the survivors?

It is harrowing to think about the generations of trauma that are being produced by the brutal wars in Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Gaza. And by other less publicized wars and ethnic cleansings. The fear of deadly aerial bombardment; the intimate brutality and devastation children are suffering and witnessing;  the wounding, maiming, hunger, lack of medical care they are experiencing – all this will haunt traumatized survivors and their descendants for generations to come. And this violence is sure to breed further enmity and hatred against the perpetrators. In all these wars and on all sides, the current devastation is also reactivating older histories of violence that have not been worked through but that fuel current conflicts. It is both fascinating and extremely troubling that the Holocaust, for example,  is being used as an alibi for war, both by Russia and by Israel. It feels impossible to “solve” these wars and to envision peace—but, as intellectuals, we must try to shift the frames of war and to think beyond and against its inevitability.

3, The impact of communal riots resulting from partition also bears similar long standing consequences. India had a fair share of communal riots and the partition triggered mass displacement. Are there connections between them and the descendants of Holocaust survivors as far as the repercussions of these historical events are concerned? 

This is not my field, but I do believe that the violence of the partition and the mass displacement that resulted left lasting scars that were and are transmitted to subsequent generations. It took longer for this research to emerge but studies of the long-term effects of the partition are now central to the field of memory studies. Literary, artistic and historical works about the partition are offering a new focus in the field and the opportunity to study both the particularity of each of these catastrophic histories and points of connection between them.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at an official ceremony marking the Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. (Xinhua/Du Zhen/IANS)

4, What mitigation  measures do you offer the post generations suffering from the disastrous effects of these traumatic histories ? Can the individual and communal mental, psychological and emotional torment be repaired or healed ? 

Can individuals and communities repair long-standing legacies of structural inequality and violence and their traumatic after-effects?  For the last three decades,  I have worked on the memory of the Holocaust and other catastrophic histories, yet the reparative potentials of memory—the possibility of healing and repair – were not my primary concerns.  My goal was to trace and to understand the workings of trauma and its transmission across generations.   I worked under the assumption that some traumatic events would remain irreparable. In recent years, however, for me and many of my colleagues, doing work on memory within the unforgiving frame and teleology of trauma – the powerful idea that it will repeat,  and can never truly be healed – has come to feel constraining.  I’ve had the occasion to study the workings of social and cultural memory in the context of several transnational interdisciplinary working groups and to participate in memory networks and conferences in numerous locations across the globe. Inspired by feminist, queer, de-colonial and indigenous ideas about time and memory and by commitments to social justice, some of these groups have displaced the focus on trauma and its inexorable after-effects.  I have joined them in examining alternative, multiple, non-linear ideas about time and memory that help to reveal aspects of the past and its continuing presence that resist the inevitability of trauma and its unforgiving return. Without denying the magnitude of traumatic loss,  the focus on vulnerability, care, mutual aid and repair can help us reveal instances of resistance and refusal in the past, and also of hope and belief in a future. 

These questions of repair, reparation and justice became urgent for me as I lived through the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City and observed how legacies of racism and inequality created enormous differentials in how individuals and communities experienced the pandemic. I worked with a group of academics, artists and activists to seekreparative ways to acknowledge these devastating losses and to memorialize the people, institutions, moments, and places that our communities lost. In what we called the Zip Code Memory Project, we acted on the belief that when memory activates the past in a communal setting,  it can also reframe it and help us imagine a different potential ending – one that can serve as a provocation for collective political engagement. Thus, perhaps, memory could be reparative and oriented toward the future.  Through a series of art-based workshops and communal gatherings, we built a community that could envision trust, care, and the possibility of repair. It was a small, local experiment, but as you can see on the Zip Code Memory Project website, many of the practices are replicable in other settings.

5, Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories, multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. Do you have any evidence to prove that postmemory changes across geographical and historical differences? 

I think that the structure of postmemory exhibits a lot of parallels across different histories, but also that its particular manifestations take different shapes in different national, geographic and historical settings. So much depends on the infrastructures of memory and in the structure of power that shapes and controls it. If groups and nations are shaped by their memories, then memory is always contested. Whose memory, whose voice,  counts? Whose is silenced? Who decides? How do silenced voices nevertheless get heard? These questions are constant across various histories, but the instances are different.

And yet, memory is also a global phenomenon and we see remarkable similarities in its manifestations. Across the globe, contemporary writers, filmmakers, visual artists, memorial artists and museologists have forged an aesthetic of postmemory.  They have sought forms through which to express the gaps in knowledge, the fears and terrors, that ensue in the aftermath of trauma, the excitements and disappointments that follow revolutions.  Some of these tropes and artistic strategies have been remarkably consistent, constructing a global memory and postmemory aesthetic that both bridges and occludes political and cultural divides.  The wall of photos at the Museo de la Memoria in Santiago, Chile, recalls similar walls in memorial museums in Phnom Penh, Paris, Amsterdam, and New York. Lists of names recall victims of the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the September 11, 2001 bombings, and more. Memorial artists like Horst Hoheisel have worked in Germany, Argentina and Cambodia; Daniel Libeskind in Berlin, Stockholm and New York.  Their memorial sites are dominated by idioms of trauma, loss and mourning, invoking tropes of absence and silence, unknowability and emptiness.  They tend to rely on archival images and documents, highlighting ghosts and shadows, gaps in knowledge and transmission.  They use projection, reframings, recontextualization. They juxtapose or superimpose past and present, without allowing them to merge.  But some of these practices also do more in an activist frame: they demand accountability and justice. Thus, groups of mothers walk or sit in squares from Buenos Aires to Mexico City to Istanbul, memorializing their disappeared children by holding photographs of them from a time before their violent disappearances or deaths. Memory can serve progressive ends, but it can also be mobilized in opposite ways—to provoke enmity and conflict.

6, Your book Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-authored with your husband, the historian Leo Spitzer, is a family/communal memoir about the city in which your parents grew up and survived the Holocaust. What message do you have to convey to humanity based on your exploration of the period of Holocaust?   Has our species matured enough to deter the occurrence of similar incidents in the future?  

Our species has decidedly not matured in any way. Racialized hatred and persecution are everywhere visible and are being practiced with impunity by many nations. It’s only a few months ago that Armenians were brutally displaced from Azerbaijan with the world watching and not intervening.

As I mentioned, I have been alarmed at how the Holocaust has entered present political conversations and actions. Alarmed not only as a scholar of the Holocaust, but also as a daughter of parents who were persecuted, chased from their homes, and targeted for extermination as Jews. It is unbearable to me that my ancestors’ suffering is being misused by politicians and the media to justify the necessity of continuing cycles of violence and war by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine and by Israel in the aftermath of the horrific racialized violence of October 7 perpetrated by Hamas. Holocaust memory has become an alibi for repression, violence, and racialized hatred and for the contagious perpetuation and exploitation of transgenerational fear and trauma.

If you are asking about a message, I’d say: Don’t invoke the Holocaust in these ways. Don’t exploit its memory. Don’t take it out of history. Don’t divide the world into Nazis and Jews and then apply these terms to groups and nations  for your own political purposes.Learn from this history that genocides can happen and do your utmost to prevent them by building a world of care and repair.

ALSO READ: Global Threads: Unravelling the Link Between Iowa, Rwanda, Gaza, Ukraine, and Ayodhya

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India News Interview Politics

Babri Demolition Fuelled BJP To Power, Observes Arvind Rajagopal

Arvind Rajagopal is Professor of Media Studies at New York University (NYU) and is an affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU. In 2010-11, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His books include Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001), which won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the Daniel Griffiths Prize at NYU, both in 2003, and The Indian Public Sphere: Structure and Transformation (Oxford, 2009). He has won awards from the MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations and has been a Member in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. In addition to his scholarly writing, he has also published in forums such the SSRC’s Immanent Frame and opendemocracy.net, and in newspapers and periodicals.

In an interview with Abhish K. Bose he discusses the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in which the entire accused in the the Babri Masjid demolition case were absolved of the charges. The interview is with particular reference to his study of the serialization of Ramayana in Television.

Excerpts from the interview

None of the accused in the Ayodhya temple demolition got convicted in the case despite documentary evidences to prove their presence in the scene of crime. Why did the Indian judicial system failed to punish those culpable for the demolition of the Babri Masjid? Could you explain the process through which the evidences of the presence of the leaders of BJP and other affiliate organisations were obliterated thereby sabotaging the Indian judiciary’s commitment to justice? 

It is often said that the bigger the crime, the more likely that its perpetrator becomes a hero and not a villain. As Indians celebrate the inauguration of a grand temple to Lord Ram in Ayodhya, we are at a moment when our major national monuments are no longer dams and power plants, but temples and statues. We need the sense of psychological empowerment that we earlier lacked, because our core Hindu identity was not acknowledged, we are told. But proud Hindus should not shirk from the facts. And the facts are that the legal right to the 400-year-old Babri Masjid was with the Sunni Waqf Board. The Hindu claim was faith-based, and essentially, inadmissible on the terms of constitutional law. But the courts bowed to the fact that the ruling party is the BJP, which came to power promising the Ram temple. Popular justice has triumphed over the letter of the law, and the courts have been wise enough to accommodate that – it could be said. But the court is abrogating fundamental rights on a partisan basis.

The report of the 17-year-longLiberhan Inquiry Commission clearly identified the RSS as having planned the demolition. But the Supreme Court and the CBI Special Court chose to disregard crucial evidence, and in the end found insufficient evidence of a pre-planned demolition. This is when the BJP’s political ticket to power was the demolition itself. It was simply inadmissible to apply the law because it would destabilize the new political regime.

Who was the master brain behind the Ram Janmabhoomi movement ? Is there any precedent in history which the progenitors of the movement depended for deriving inspiration so as to orchestrate the movement, which traversed the length and breadth of the country paving the seeds of hindutva mass mobilisation and the subsequent  electoral victory of the BJP till 2019?  

“I gave them the national angle,” former BJP Gen Secy Govindacharya once told me. They (the rest of the BJP) were simply anti-Muslim, he said. As for drawing inspiration, Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan seems to have been important. At a BJP National Conclave in Ahmedabad in 1987, BJP leader Jay Dubashi, who was a columnist for the financial press, noticed that no one showed up – because, they later learned, that the Ramayan telecast was at the same time. When I asked him about it, Dubashi said, “We thought there was something there.” The VHP began to draw on the imagery of the TV serial in its propaganda. There are also clear signals of VHP propaganda in the Ramayan serial itself, as I have shown in my book, including text lifted verbatim from RSS leader Sudarshan.

Ram Mandir being decorated with flowers ahead of its consecration ceremony, in Ayodhya. (Photo: IANS/@ShriRamTeerth)

At one level the victory of an overtly Hindu party in a Hindu majority society is not surprising; that is only a difference of degree between the Congress and the BJP, which are historically parties dominated by upper-castes. The political difference is actually about methods – how to be Hindu, and how to practice Hindu politics, while making violence more visible alongside, which may also be a methodological preference.

You may be right that there is no precedent in a large electoral democracy such as India’s, for a minority party to have propelled itself to such a powerful status.A small spark that accidentally became an all-consuming conflagration. As late as 1984, the BJP election manifesto clearly positioned itself as a minority party to the Congress. They did not envision becoming a ruling party until the rath yatra, whose ground effect was actually limited. It was in the Hindi news media that the story caught fire, for example. The power of a political identity based on majority religious identity is that it is unopposed. There should be numerous parties reflecting Hindu diversity – instead we are told there can only be one.

Why was LK Advani, the leader and architect of the Ram Jannabhoomi movement relegated to second position in the BJP leadership, though he played a pivotal role in cementing the base for hindutva in Indian politics?  What was the role of RSS in that decision? 

It is ironic that the man who became the face of assertive Hindutva, LK Advani, was overtaken by the next generation. Maybe it is the dramaturgy of party politics at work here. Modi would like to claim that he has no predecessors; he does not want to recognize Advani. We should not forget a crucial mediator, namely the late Arun Jaitley, who advised Modi and helped broker his relationship with the national media.

Is Gujarat riots a sequel to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement as designed by the Sangh Parivar to saffronize India ? Both in the range of the mayhem and destruction wreaked by the riots likewise in the Ayodhya movement, apart from the saffronization of the state, as well as the elevation of the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate of BJP in 2014 general elections, all these scheme of things instils such a doubt?  Is their any veracity in that way of thinking?  

The RSS was not a political organization – it was a secret organization that was periodically banned, and thus, not quite respectable, for most of its 100-year life. But its program has become a political program because the RSS’s political wing has come to power. As we might expect, that program – of saffronization, as you say, is rigid. The unwillingness to negotiate is the side-effect of Modi’s aesthetics of power, of immaculate wisdom, that can only be admitted, and that no one can criticize. Now, Modi is both an RSS man and someone who is not likely to allow the RSS to question his own authority. In other words, Modi defines the RSS today. When he loses one battle, as with the kisan andolan, does that make him more open to accommodation in the next battle, more empathetic to popular voices? It seems as if his program is unchanged; defeat is only a setback, not an opportunity to rethink his program. After being told for years how tolerant and democratic Indians are, and this would be Modi’s claim even today, we now have an opportunity to see how much overt aggression Indians like to endure. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets senior BJP leader LK Advani on his birthday, in New Delhi. (IANS/Twitter:@narendramodi)

What was the role of TV serials including Ramayana serialized in Doordarshan in supporting the hindutva nationalism project of the Sangh Parivar?  Is their any evidence to conclude that the serialization of Ramayana close to the heels of the Ram Jannabhoomi mobilization in the 1980s was part of a grand scheme to support the hindutva nationalism? 

It was all an accident, although in retrospect everything looks inevitable. Our problem is – we are not able to imagine anything different. But things would have been different if a different set of accidents occurred.Hindutva was the program all along, so to that extent it is pre-programmed. But the RSS leader Golwalkar, who led the RSS but the BJP proceeded from one lucky break after another. First, the Congress MP DauDayal Khanna, who initiated the Ram Janmabhumi agitation, and then the Congress decision to open the Babri doors for exclusively Hindu worship under Rajiv Gandhi, and then the decision to depart from the secular ethos of state television and sponsor devotional Hindu programming. S.S. Gill, who was I&B Secretary under Rajiv Gandhi, said the Ramayan serial was his idea; he criticized Ramanand Sagar’s devotional treatment, and saw himself as a Congress leftist. The BJP had two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984; the Ramayan serial together with the Ramjanmabhumiandolan brought it to power in 1998.There are a number of points where different decisions could have been made. But the driving force of saffronization has linked all of these points.

You are right therefore, to insist on the political logic of winning power and ask about its meaning in ideological terms. This was the first party that squarely equated televisual popularity with electoral success, beginning with the Ramayan serial itself. The Ramayan serial in fact remade the BJP, as a party that began to compete for a national audience. Its tactics suited the new medium of television better, and they grew their audience more successfully than the Congress was able to do.

There is no RSS script however, for dealing with today’s context. Golwalkar had actually warned against the method of “advertisement” as opposed to the long-term work of cadre-building, and to support the Congress rather than seek an independent political identity. By 1993, LK Advani spoke of the need to project the illusion of victory(in an interview to the Economic Times). This suggests how experimental such thinking was in the BJP at the time, that it could be said openly before an educated audience. So the question of how Hindutva should translate to a non-cadre audience was a new one. The only way Advani was able to express it in the secular terms that his audience expected, was to call it an illusion rather than a program. 

Was it a given that the BJP would carry out a program of delegitimizing existing institutions and creating arbitrary and personalistic structures of power – was that implied in Hindutva? After all, the RSS trained individuals to depersonalize themselves in the cause of building the Hindu nation. But Modi broke the RSS mould, and created a cult of personality around himself. Instead of a cadre as large as the nation itself, as Golwalkar had envisioned, and where the psychological wage of sacrifice to the nation would be shared by all, we notice something different. A small cadre has developed a large and mobile vigilante force, in real and virtual domains. And there is a change in the terms of the sacrifice. Now it may easily be the other person’s sacrifice, whose spectacle I can enjoy.

Is there any precedent internationally for political leaders to attach national development to a religious symbol to the same extent as in Ayodhya? 

Maybe we can find a parallel in Saudi Arabia where the rulers made much of the renovation of the Kaaba in Mecca. Western countries may celebrate religion; for example the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Reformation was celebrated in Germany. But here religion was an ethos of social reform as well as a symbol of devotion. The Ram mandir can of course symbolize many things, but what this inauguration represents is also among other things, an attempt to nationalize Hindu symbolism and render it into a political vocabulary in which all the poetry and all the prose convey the message of Hindutva. We can foresee that this is doomed to failure, but we also have to acknowledge that there is a scope for turning Hinduism into a kind of political church that the BJP has discovered, that had not been possible before. The attempted unification of Hinduism is political and not spiritual. Somewhat like American Evangelical Christianity, there is a conscious decision to take advantage of the political opportunity, in their case, presented by Trump; the spiritual element is token at best.

Why it was that the Congress allowed demolition of the Babri Masjid to take place  when the cause was BJP’s and not the Congress’s ? 

Narasimha Rao, who was the PM during the time, did not think he could stop the demolition. If he had tried to do so, the BJP would have used that opposition to escalate their agitation as they had done under Mulayam Singh, whom the BJP called Mulla Mulayam Singh. What he showed was that the demolition did not automatically translate into political victory – it was the Congress that ruled for most of the 1990s, although saffron began to colour more of civil society afterwards.

Why is the mainstream left parties which are ideologically opposed to the hindutva not shown sufficient resistance to the Babri Masjid demolition?

Communal mobilization proceeds through stoking fear and violence. Hinduism is in danger can be a powerful rallying cry – whereas proletariat in danger or socialism in danger don’t have the same appeal. The left parties focused on interest assuming that identities would reflect rational interest. As it turns out, these can be compartmentalized. Workers can support unions for their economic benefits and the BJP for their psychological benefit. There is the affirmation of Hindu pride, and a pride of belonging, but also an acceptance that the real unity is for the most part, abstract and virtual. In practice, there are a series of distinctions, exceptions, marginalizations that fracture the community, and render it more porous to political influence.

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Pankaj Tripathi Exposes Filmmaking Realities

For the film ‘Main Atal Hoon’ I had to do prosthetic make up on my face and nose speaks Pankaj Tripathi

Actor Pankaj Tripathi, famed for his refined acting abilities and diverse unconventional performances has opened up on what actually goes behind filmmaking and emphasises the challenges that actors face
In an interview with Tripathi points out that there is much confusion and misconception about the film industry and film fraternity, particularly fuelled by updates posted on social media.

“People think there is lot of fun happening in film industry. Just because actors make their PR machinery to their fun footages like spotted at an event, airport, etc. People think actors have dreamy life,” the actor said.
Tripathi goes on to detail the difficulties he faced while shooting the soon-to-be released biopic “Main Atal Hoon” in which he wears prosthetics to resemble late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The National Award-winning actor said, “Shooting is a very difficult task.

For the film ‘Main Atal Hoon’ I had to do prosthetic make up on my face and nose. There is a rule in prosthetic make up that you should stay in at least 22 degree or beyond temperature zone so, that you don’t sweat. Otherwise the prosthetic will start melting and due to which actors get distracted.”

“I shot with prosthetics in 46-degree temperature in Lucknow. I was shooting for 12 hours straight. And when there is so many problems happening in body then it gradually effects your mind. It also effects your performance. For me, I didn’t want this problem to show in my performance,” the actor said.

He added, “As it’s Atal ji’s film, you can’t make any improvisation in it. You can only play with posture and gesture not with his speech and dialogues. Filmmaking is all about hard work. Cinema demands hard work, not like what’s shown on insta… There is gruelling 12-hour shoots for which we have to arrive on sets one or hour an hour prior. It’s not an easy task as it seems to be.”

Directed by Ravi Jadhav, the film ‘Main Atal Hoon’ written by Rishi Virmani and Ravi Jadhav is all set to hit theatres on January 19.
It is backed by Bhanushali Studios Limited and Legend Studios, Vinod Bhanushali, Sandeep Singh, Sam Khan and Kamlesh Bhanushali.

ALSO READ-Indian cueist Pankaj wins IBSF Billiards Championships title

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India News Interview Politics

‘A people’s movement can only stem corruption in the Indian society’

Professor K.P. Kannan, a former Fellow and Director of the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum is currently a Honorary Fellow there. He is also the Academic Chairman of the Laurie Baker Centre for Habitat Studies in Trivandrum. He was a member of the International Panel on Social Progress, a collective initiative of social scientists from different parts of the world, which prepared a global report on Society in the 21st Century in June 2018 (published by Cambridge University Press).

Professor Kannan has had several UN assignments, the most important of which was as an Expert Member in the Technical Secretariat of the World Commission on Social Dimension of Globalisation constituted by the ILO in Geneva (2002-03).  During 2005-09, he was a Member of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that prepared a number of major reports on the informal economy and informal workers in India.  In 2008, he was conferred the first VV Giri Memorial Award for his contributions in the area of social security for workers in the informal sector. He was awarded a National Fellowship by the India, the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) during 2016-18.

Professor Kannan has authored, co-authored, or edited twelve books as well as several research papers. His books include Poverty, Women and Capability: A Study of Kerala’s Kudumbashree System, LBC, 2023; Interrogating Inclusive Growth: Poverty and Inequality in India, Routledge, 2014; and The Long Road to Social Security (edited jointly with Jan Breman),OUP, 2013.  In an interview with Abhish K. Bose he discusses the economic inequalities prevailing in India reminiscent of the post partition period and a number of issues which deals with the political economy of the country.  

Excerpts from the interview 

1.   In India, economic inequalities have aggravated between the ultra-rich and the poorest, reminiscent of the 1940s -the partition and its miserable aftermaths. Given that equality is basic to the health and vitality of democracy, what dangers do you perceive the present trend as harbouring for the survival of democracy in India? Please examine this issue also because economic inequality, or developmental differential, plays a part in Hindu-Muslim alienation, which has intensified of late in India.

KPK: Increasing economic inequality is one of the sharp outcomes of the neoliberal economic policies followed by most countries in the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. India is no exception.  By mid-1970s India managed to bring down its pre-independence economic inequality to some extent by its mixed-economy policies and state interventions. But this trend got reversed since the initiation of neoliberal economic reforms since 1991.  Economic inequality is certain to affect the democratic process as we are witnessing today in the form of the role of money in elections. When it is also accompanied by the rise and strengthening of crony capitalism it exerts an undue influence in economic and social policies. At the same time, one should also remember that India is a land of manifold inequalities as in hierarchical social structure, gender inequality, as well as spatial inequality manifested as rural-urban inequality in economic and social development. My own work in documenting the intersectional nature of economic inequality from the point of the ordinary people is contained in Interrogating Inclusive Growth: Poverty and Inequality in India (published by Routledge in 2014). The social dimension of increasing economic inequality is not limited to the Hindu-Muslim divide but an increasing gap between each of the disadvantaged groups compared to what I called the ‘Socially Advantaged Group consisting of upper caste Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, and Christians. The increase in social inequality as between the bottom groups of SC and ST and the socially advantaged is the highest. The only field where social inequality has reduced somewhat is in education taken as average years of education. For my research in this area of social inequality see, K.P. Kannan (2019), India’s Social Inequality as Durable Inequality: Dalits and Adivasis at the bottom of an Increasingly Unequal Hierarchical Society, Working Paper No. 488, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (Also published as a chapter in Reclaiming Development Studies: Essays for Ashwani Saith,edited by Murat Arsel, Anirban Dasgupta, and Servaas Storm (published by Anthem Press, 2021).

2. In his latest book ‘ India is broken’ economist Ashoka Mody argues that the socialist policies of Nehru and Indira Gandhi governments paralyzed economic growth which hinges on the presumption that socialism continues to hamper India’s economic prospects. Has commitment to socialism weakened the foundation of democracy in India by clogging development with excessive concern for the poor? To what extent can the ills of the present state of India be blamed on Nehru?

KPK: I do not agree at all with the view taken by Ashoka Mody. He is a distinguished member of the alumni of the Centre for Development Studies as well as a colleague for some time. Jawaharlal Nehru was not just the first Prime Minister of India but a towering architect of modern India even before independence. Not only he represented a secular and modern vision for independent India but also built it on the foundations of the best principles and practices of Indian civilization such as the plural nature of its religious heritage, an innate ability to fuse foreign civilizational cultures into its own, free thinking as represented in its multiple philosophies. At the same time, India was a vanquished economy at the time of independence having been drained of its resources for more than one-and-a-half century by British colonialism. The Great Bengal Famine and several famines and droughts during the colonial period is but one manifestation of this draining. Added to this was the economic, social, and psychological disruptions of Partition as well as the limited foreign exchange that was not readily available to the country. It was also a time when a huge majority of people looked up to the Soviet Union as a model for economic and social emancipation.  But Nehru and his team were strongly committed to a democratic polity and enshrined it in the Indian Constitution the value of which is now being increasingly realised even by the critics of his times. He knew the multi-structural nature of the Indian society and economy and wanted to develop it through the instrumentality of national planning. But he and his team also realised the practical limitations and adopted a mixed economy approach in which certain basic sectors of the economy called the ‘commanding heights’ were to be led by the state through the establishment of a public sector. It was neither explicitly socialist or capitalist but social democratic or what was then called ‘a socialistic pattern of society.’ This approach pulled the country out of its deep economic backwardness manifested by a growth rate of well over three percent per annum compared to less than half-a-percent during the five decades before independence.

Beginning with 1962, the Indian economy went through a difficult period burdened by the war with China and then Pakistan, death of Nehru and the break-up of the Congress, war with Pakistan in 1971, droughts, and a higher rate of population growth than expected in the planning framework. The relative decline is clearly post-Nehru. Added to this is the semi-authoritarian style of Mrs Indira Gandhi and the emergence of political cronyism. Chief Ministers were picked from cronies within the Congress Party and it also finally resulted in weakening the Centre-State relations. By early 1980s western capitalism was clearly winning with its agenda of neoliberal economic reforms that suited the interests of the increasingly powerful finance capital. The final nails in the coffin of national economic development of many developing countries were thrust with the implosion of the Soviet Union and the formal establishment of the World Trade Organization declaring an all-encompassing process of globalization. China had already changed its tack with sweeping economic reforms embracing the market principles as directed by its state. India too had to follow with the collapse of the sources of cheap oil from Iraq as well as the market for trade in the former socialist bloc.

Jawaharlal Nehru signing the constitution

Given this understanding, I do not see any reason to put the blame on Nehru and the Nehruvian vision that encompassed not just the economic realm but also social, political, and international relations. It was a Middle Path, let us say Budha’s Middle Path. The relevance of this middle path is now increasingly becoming a necessity as the world is moving away from the neoliberal globalisation because it has not helped the rich western capitalist countries to continue their economic and, by extension, political hegemony over non-western countries. I think we will be compelled to rediscover the Nehruvian vision and its path as time goes by and the challenges before India becomes tougher and tougher both internally and externally.

3. Is Indira Gandhi responsible for the increasing political and economic corruption in post-Nehru India? What about the Total Revolution movement led by Jaiprakash Narain? What about the active agents in the public sphere such as the media, religious institutions, and judiciary in countering the increasingly corrupt practices?

KPK: As an academic, I do not subscribe to the view that the increasing corruption of politics and economics in India is solely to the due to personality of an individual. At the same time, if the individual is a powerful leader, he or she has the capacity to change the situation for the better. On the other hand, if it suits the logic of clinging on to power the leader will not hesitate to indulge in corrupt practices. That is the lesson of history. The struggle for power within the Congress led to the emergence of Indira Gandhi as an undisputed leader within her party and that led to a series of negative consequences to the polity and economy in the short as well as long run. The JP movement gave a lot of hope in the initial stages given the track record of Jaiprakash Narain but his followers were a motely crowd of clearly communal right-wing parties, parties oriented towards socialism with a core agenda for social justice (read caste based social justice) and others with an agenda for power-grabbing.  It was inherently unstable and it was no surprise that they disintegrated within a short span of time paving the way for the return of Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party. She provided stability and determination as well as a concern for the poor that was addressed through populist policies of welfare benefits but not long-term institutional changes and/or a concerted programme for education and employment creation.

During the Emergency (1975-77), most of the media as well as other formal institutions did not provide much of a fight. However, the judiciary always kept a window of hope by not wholly following the agenda of the leader. Resistance was there among several groups as well as some intellectuals and some media institutions. People at large perhaps realised the gravity of the situation in suspending all civil rights and decided to act when national election was announced. And they used this democratic weapon, given to them by the Indian Constitution, to great effect

I do not think religious institutions got very much worried by the Emergency or the semi-authoritarian style of government of Indira Gandhi.  In history religious institutions usually sided with state power unless they are attacked.

4. Before economic liberalisation, especially during the period of Nehru, the Indian economy is characterised as working under a dirigisme regime i.e. with positive intervention by the state in economic policy and planning having a lot of control. It also necessitated control of foreign exchange rate and its movement. Is this approach that led to what some call ‘Hindu Rate of Growth’?

KPK : As I said earlier a newly independent India did not want to take sides in a bipolar post-second World War era. It wanted to preserve its national sovereignty in both political and economic matters. At the same time, it did not believe in shifting itself off from either side of the Cold War leaders viz., United States and Soviet Union. As in the case of many other large developing countries it also adopted an import substitution strategy about industrialisation. That is how it laid the foundations for a heavy industry in many critical sectors that many now seem to forget. It required control and interventions in foreign exchange rate and its flow given the paucity of foreign exchange.  This was the case with most developing countries. Only some small developing countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan decided to align with the western block led by the United States that gave them access to foreign capital, external market for their products, development aid and so on. Some countries like South Korea and Taiwan had political compulsions to be a subordinate ally of the United States. But they used the opportunity to work hard, organise their economy for innovation, etc under military dictatorships and economically grew fast and became prosperous as appendage economies. Some countries like Pakistan and Philippines failed given their inefficiencies in internal economic system.

It was Professor Raj Krishna, an eminent economist, who called the below 4 percent economic growth as ‘Hindu Rate of Growth’ because it was not enough for India to solve its basic problems. This is because the capacity of the Indian economy to save and invest was so low (around 5 percent immediately after independence) and it grew slowly but steadily to around 20 percent by the mid-1970s. But this growth rate acquired the meaning of a ‘sloppy or slow performing economy’ by its use widely in the media.  In terms of the historical experience of economic development before 1945, three to four percent was a high-performing one. As I said earlier this so-called Hindu Rate of Growth was much higher than what it was before and it laid the foundations for a faster rate of growth subsequently.  We could have certainly done better but in a democracy every change must be a negotiated one, not one ‘ordered’ by the top as in the case of China. China decided to enforce a ‘one child per family’ policy and it enforced it ruthlessly.  When India tried a milder version during the Emergency it got backfired because people saw it, rightly so, as an intrusion into their personal freedom. China could mobilize the savings in the economy into the coffers of the state and increase its investment rate. This does not mean that democratic India’s record in economic development was better than China. Many other factors also played their role in China’s experience such as raising the educational, skill and health levels of the people, abolishing private ownership of land, and pursuing a policy of full employment till the end of the 1970s. It then used this ‘broad base’ to get special treatment from the United States to access their technology and market but adopting an anti-Soviet Union policy in the realm of international politics. This opportunistic set of policies by aligning with the capitalist west led by the United States has not yet been adequately acknowledged and analysed in the development literature.

Blaming the pre-neoliberal economic reform period as ‘Hindu Rate of Growth’ is like blaming the parents by their currently educated and rich children for not being fast enough in enriching the family.  What they forget is the sacrifices of the parents with limited means in educating the children and creating better opportunities for them to get educated in the newly expanded public provisioning of education and health that become the basis for the richer children to get access to both domestic and foreign opportunities for employment in the private sector.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks during the discussion on the Motion of No-confidence in the Lok Sabha during the Monsoon Session of Parliament, in New Delhi, on August 10, 2023. (Photo: IANS/SANSAD TV)

There is also a danger in glorifying the higher rate of aggregate economic growth when it is accompanied by increasing inequality. That means the disparity between the poor and the rich are widening although the poor may be benefitting a small increase in income in absolute terms. This kind of growth – inequalizing growth – is a sure recipe for increasing social tensions and conflicts as we are now witnessing. Despite high aggregate growth, the backlog of poverty, low education and health status, inadequate employment let alone decent employment are the order of the day in our country. Even the rich countries are now witnessing the consequences of their increasing economic inequality. For them globalization has largely meant shifting of jobs by their capital to low-wage countries and an increase in private capitalist accumulation. This has given rise to the emergence of right-wing political movements who locate the problem in migration especially of those who do not look like them. It also becomes a fertile ground for authoritarian leadership. Democracy itself is being threatened as in many countries that we usually called ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ such as the United States and several countries in the European Union. The old communist left has lost its credibility because it never subscribed to the will of the people through a process of multiparty democracy. The left represented by social democracy in Europe did sustain longer the old left but now face an existential threat from right wing political parties.

A new democratic left is emerging in many large and middle Latin American countries. But that kind of hope is not currently evident in Asian countries. Africa is a mixed bag with more countries under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes. At the same time, I think there are enough reservoirs of political energy as well as economic capacity across countries for creating a more representative, secular, and equitable governance and development thinking and programme of action.

My hope is that strengthening such a new path will produce a new democratic movement with more participation, decentralisation, gender and social justice and environmental sustainability based on basic principles of fairness, public morality and ethics that could become a new Middle Path.

5. India followed an active non-alignment foreign policy as envisioned by its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru till the end of the twentieth century. But the shift towards a pro-western – largely a pro-US – shift is evident for sometime now. In economic realms it is much stronger than in foreign policy. Do you think such a shift will end in subservience to US interests?

KPK: There is no doubt that India’s embrace of neoliberal economic policies has landed it in the lap of the US-dominated economic world order.  But it is neither an inevitable or a desirable one.  That is why it is increasingly asserting its ‘independent’ positions and policies. In politics, especially those relating to national security and external economic opportunities, the Indian regime finds itself compelled to protect its national interests. Hence its neutral stand on the Russian-Ukraine conflict. Even when the head of the government sides with Israel, corrections and caveats are issued immediately not to give up its earlier position. There is also the question of accessing advanced technologies – both civil and military and sometimes dual – that the US and its allies have been averse to giving to India.  In defence, the Russian willingness to not only supply final products but also share technologies has been a time-tested experience.  The Indian regime is aware of that it has not been successful in attracting the expected level of foreign direct investment as opposed to foreign portfolio investment that seek immediate profits through the stock market. The Indian regime also knows that the dominance of the US dollar in international payments is more of a constraint than a facilitator of its national economic development. Its aspiration for a higher stake in multilateral financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank has not received a favourable response from the US-led western block.  Given these realities, my sense is that there are limits to any Indian regime’s proclivity to align strongly with the Western countries. This will result in a relatively independent foreign and economic policy in tune with national compulsions.

6. Do you expect India attaining any worthwhile alleviation, in the foreseeable future, of the mounting unemployment distress that is spreading unrest among our educated youth? How is the AI challenge, already looming large over the world, likely to affect us in this respect? 

KPK: The biggest challenge to raising the pitiable standard of living of close to two-thirds of Indians is the lack of decent employment that ensures them a living wage, employment security and access to social security. Despite the high aggregate growth performance of close to four decades, 90 (or a little more) percent of employment is informal in nature i.e. insecure employment. Half or a little more than half of the total employment in India is classified as ‘self-employment’ with earnings that are often below the average wage of casual workers. India’s poverty is largely of the working poor especially those who toil in villages as well as in urban informal sector. The exodus of such insecure workers during the nation-wide lockdown was just one manifestation of this employment insecurity.

Added to this is the declining participation of women in the workforce.  Despite increasing their average years of education, reducing the number of children per couple, willing to work in jobs that are traditionally appropriated by men, women in India are an excluded lot as far as access to employment is concerned let alone accessing decent jobs. Much of the ‘jobless growth is a product of the introduction of advanced technologies because of international competition and the compulsions to increase labour productivity.  But this should have compelled the national governments to rethink their ‘growth at any cost’ policy by focusing on employment creation as an objective.  This is feasible in a country of vast areas and people and the developmental deficit in education, health, housing, rural infrastructurenot to speak of the urgent need for ecological regeneration and environmental sustainability.  This question was addressed by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (known as NCEUS) that was appointed by the former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in 2004.  The final report of the NCEUS argued for an employment policy that, by default, will address several basic problems being faced by the un- and under-employed as well as those in informal employment. I would remind the readers to examine this report titles The Challenge of Employment: An Informal Economy Perspective published by the Academic Foundation, New Delhi in 2009.

Given the pace of technological change India would find itself difficult to opt out of working and adapting the new technologies including AI but employment and social consequences need to be studied, understood, and analysed for designing a larger economic vision and approach to pursue a strategy of ‘employment with growth.’  

7.  Why does corruption remain endemic and impossible to eradicate in our society? Without containing corruption, is it possible for India to do justice to her true potential or do justice to the common man? The AAP, which got started with much fanfare about eradicating corruption, is now perceived to be getting infected. What measures would you suggest to contain corruption in India?

KPK: Corruption is like cancer. It will slowly but steadily corrode the basic values in a society and affect the welfare of most of the people. The minority of beneficiaries will benefit in the short run but will produce outcomes that will be disastrous to the development and welfare of the country.  Corruption is a part of the concept of ‘rent-seeking’ to extract benefits in multiple ways by people who have the power and opportunitybut not entitled to such extraction. If the top layers of the regime indulge in rent-seeking in various ways, it will rapidly infiltrate into the lower levels.  Neoliberal economic reforms have given way to an increasing trend in rent-seeking than before.  And that is why the media is now talking of the increasing tendency towards crony capitalism.

Given our corrupt feudal past as well as a corrupt colonial bureaucracy, the bureaucratic system has institutionalised its own version of rent-seeking by small and big corruption in realms where there are opportunities for using their power.

Only a people’s movement will check the corruption and other forms of rent-seeking in the society. The parties that emerged out of such movements seems to have lost their credibility even before they got entrenched in the political system. But public action must continue through multiple ways and means. Public morality, personal integrity awnd honesty and ethical politics should not be consigned to academic studies and philosophical discourses. There is no short cut to public action.

ALSO READ: Anand Teltumbde: BJP’s Full-On Approach For 2024 Victory

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India News Interview Politics

Anand Teltumbde: BJP’s Full-On Approach For 2024 Victory

In an interview with Abhish K. Bose, Anand Teltumbde he discusses the BJP’s strategies for 2024 elections. 

Besides being a scholar and practitioner in his formal disciplines of Technology and Management, Anand Teltumbde has an illustrated corporate career spanning four decades at top management positions, and a decade as an academic. He maintained and excelled in his parallel career as a civil rights activist, writer, columnist and public intellectual right since his student days.

He immensely contributed to the civil rights movement in India as one of its founding pillars and contributed theoretical insights through his voluminous writings on contemporary issues. He participated and led many fact finding missions and peoples’ struggle. He is General Secretary, Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), and a Presidium Member, All India Forum for Right to Education. A prolific writer, he has already published more than 30 books on contemporary issues, numerous papers and articles and wrote a column Margin Speak for a decade in Economic & Political Weekly before being arrested in the infamous Bhima-Koregaon case. In an interview with Abhish K. Bose, he discusses the BJP’s strategies for 2024 elections. 

Excerpts from the interview 

Could you shed light into the strategic motive behind the ‘ One nation – One election’ move of the BJP government at the centre?  Is it yet another surreptitious move to sabotage the federal structure of the Indian constitution and eliminate Indian democracys possibility to reflect the country’s diversity? 

Ans: Yes, the strategic motive behind this move is surely to strike at the federal structure of the Indian Constitution. But beyond that, it should be seen as the move towards RSS’s Hindu Rashtra agenda to impose its ‘oneness’(one nation, one language, one religion, one religion, one leader..) on every aspect of the country, negating the diversity which arguably is the soul of India. RSS wants centralized authority for the entire country concentrated in one person as in its own structure. Although it is not expedient for it to speak against democracy and Constitution, it has no love lost for them. It is too well known to remind here that when the Constitution was adopted, it had bitterly critiqued that it did not have “ancient Bhartiya constitutional laws, institutions, nomenclatures and phraseology in it…as enunciated in the Manusmriti”

Though the Constitution provided federal structure, it has left an intrinsic bias in favour of the centre. It gave central executive overriding powers over the States. The resultant centralization is not just political; it has serious implications to the capacities of the States to perform the allocated roles in the Constitution.

These roles are adversely impacted by the intrinsic fiscal imbalance between centre and the States. Whereas resource mobilisation potential is concentrated with the centre, socio-economic responsibilities are given to the States. It entails States expanding in excess of their revenue generating capabilities, for which the Constitution mandates the appointment of Finance Commissions once every five years to decide on and devolve to States a share of the resources mobilised by the Centre. There have been serious lacunae in this mechanism.

Since the Finance Commissions is constituted by the centre which also decides its terms of reference, without any consultation with States, its recommendations are not expected to be independent.Besides, a large chunk of the resources transferred were kept out of the Finance Commission’s ambit, giving space for discrimination as well as central control over their use, especially after the Planning Commission and the National Development Council were abolished by the Modi government. The rhetoric of ‘double engine sarkar’actually insinuates this unashamed discrimination. Over the years, there has been a growing reliance on cesses and surcharges that do not fall within the remit of the revenue-sharing decisions of the Finance Commissions. They have gone as high as 15 percent of the total collection during Modi years.

With this kind of state of devolution of resources, the implementation of the GST regime by the Modi government has proved the last straw on the camel’s back. It has effectively denied State governments any ability to raise their own revenues other than through sales taxes on alcohol and excise duties on fuel, which are exempted from GST. States are now dependent on the Centre for nearly half of all of their resources, and have no control over more than two-thirds of their revenues.The way GST has been designed and implemented has seriously impaired the fiscal federalism in India.

Now this move of One Nation, One Election (ONOE) towards having synchronized elections every five years is mooted to dismantle political federalism.

Interestingly, Ram NathKovind, who is made the chair of the committee sans opposition to decide on this, had in his previous avatar of president of India, announced this reform in his address to Parliament in January 2018. The recommendation of this committee is anybody’s guess in the current regime, where all state institutions have been reduced to a meaningless formality.

Coming to this idea ONOE, elections for both LokSabha and State Assemblies were conducted by default till 1959, when it was disrupted for the first time because the Centre invoked Article 356 to dismiss the first elected communist government in Kerala.The cycle could not be restored thereafter within the framework of the Constitution.

The claimed benefits of ONOE are dubious. For instance, it is claimed that ONOE would enable increased focus of the government. The reason being, the on-going elections engage prime minister, especially the present one, and ministers all the time, not leaving much time for them to perform their own roles. This is a bit farcical, and can be easily curbed by bringing in a simple constitutional amendment by which the parliamentary executives are prevented from participating in electioneering. It will also minimize the huge advantage in elections to the party in power. Another benefit that is claimed is the reduced cost of elections on account of election rolls, engagement of government machinery, security forces and election commission. This point may be conceded because the Election Commission and NitiAayog, both not known for their sterling independence, have claimed that cost may be approximately halved.The other claimed benefits of ONOE, viz., reducing ‘horse trading’ or ‘freebies’ etc. are clearly baseless.

As against it, ONOE seriously compromised the democratic principles envisaged by Article 83(2), 172 and 356 of the Constitution.The Law Commission headed by Justice B. S. Chauhan has rightly concluded that ONOE is not feasible within the existing framework of the Constitution. Obviously, the government means mutilating the framework and as well as changing the Representation of the People Act 1951 and the Rules of Procedure of LokSabha and State Assemblies to implement it but that will be at the cost of democracy itself. ONOE will pose logistical challenges in terms of availability and security of electronic voting machines, personnel and other resources. EC may face difficulties in managing such a massive exercise. There is another angle to this move as one study conducted by the IDFC Institute in 2015 revealed that there will be a 77% chance that the winning political party or alliance will win both the LokSabha and Assembly elections in that state when held simultaneously, undermining the distinctive demand and needs of each state. Clearly, it would be decimation of the principle of federalism.

Police official stand guard as Voters Stand in queue to cast their vote during the Telangana Legislative Assembly election, at Khairtabad in Hyderabad district, Thursday, November 30, 2023. (Photo: IANS)

Ashoka University assistant professor Sabysachi Das, who resigned from the University following him publishing a research  paper, Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy‘ which galloped into a huge controversy refers to alleged electoral fraud by the ruling party.  In the paper, Prof Das argued that the BJP won a disproportionate share of fiercely contested parliamentary seats in the  2019LokSabha polls, especially in States where it was the ruling party at the time. The research was published on the Social Science Research Network on July 25th. While the upcoming Loksabha elections are on the anvil, how do you perceive BJP dispensation’s approach to the general elections in the light of these allegations? 

It’s a case of academic research published by a professor of a university of repute on a network that caters to his peer community. The controversy that you refer to is not generated within this community but outside, by a section of people affiliated to the ruling party. There is no harm insofar as it is a controversy over its academic value. Das could deal with it.

But when it takes the form of a troll, the academic is helpless. The Ashoka University in such circumstances is obliged to support its professor. Unfortunately, it chose to take shelter in technicality and left to Das to defend himself knowing well that he would not be able to do so. One does not know whether the University has gone beyond it and pressured Das to resign. But the resignation of a well-known professor, PulapreBalakrishnan, and the faculty asking for reinstatement of Das show that the Ashoka University administration did not live up to their academic reputation.

With regard to the subject matter of Das’s paper, in view of the irregular pattern he observed in the 2019 election, he formulated two hypotheses for its explanation. One was that it was caused due to electoral manipulation and two it was due to the incumbent party’s ability to precisely predict and affect win margins through campaigning. His analysis of the various data sets that he compiled tended to support electoral manipulation over the precise control hypothesis. He indicated that the manipulation appeared to take the form of targeted electoral discrimination against Muslims, which was facilitated by weak monitoring by the election observers. To my knowledge, there has not been any counter to the paper in SSRN.  I have gone through his paper and vouch for the soundness of his methodology. On the contrary, the political science, sociology and anthropology departments put out statements in solidarity with professor Sabyasachi Das. His conclusions therefore stand.

The instances of manipulations such as mass missing of the names of communities which were unlikely to vote to BJP from the electoral rolls, preventing them from going for voting, influencing others in the name of religions, etc. were being reported many times in elections, particularly since 2014. It is also true that BJP’s election machine would not leave any stone unturned to win the election. The machine intricately understands each constituency, strategizes what it takes to win and zealously implements it without any scruple. 2024 election is the most important for the BJP to consummate its goal of Hindu Rashtra. It is expected that the BJP would try all tricks in trade to win it. But as the result of the recent five state elections reveal, more than the BJP’s own resolve, the Congress party, appears to be bent upon facilitating BJP’s victory with its ‘business as usual’ attitude. Alas, it does not realise that there shall be no elections thereafter for her to try its luck.

The BJP has for some time particularly catered to the OBC and Dalit votes in a deviation from its conventional upper caste orientation. What is the specific methodology that they are adopting to attract the dominant OBC/ Dalit votes in the Hindi heartlands of the North Indian states?  How is the BJP planning to counter the opposition campaign to give a thrust to social justice for backward communities a key campaign issue? 

BJP inherited Brahmin-Baniaepitaph from its parent RSS, which was a Brahman-Bania, mainly Brahmin organization till Golwalkar’s death. BalasahebDeoras who became sarsanghchalak after Golwalkar realized it’s myopia and strategized to extend its appeal to the lower castes and classes. The RSS surreptitiously included many heroes who were almost anathema to it like Gandhi andAmbedkar into its pantheon and created special purpose campaigns like samarasatamanch (harmony platform) to appeal to the Dalits and lower castes. Of course, it had begun work among the tribals much earlier not from the perspective of social oppression (although they continued to call them junglee, vanavasi), but to thwart the efforts of Christian missionaries who have been working among them from colonial times. The outreach to OBCs, however, did not gain momentum until it launched the Ram Mandir movement in response to the Mandal move by the VP Singh government. It was a true offensive because if it had slacked, there was a risk of boomerang. The opposition failed to communicate as they do even today and BJP succeeded in Hinduizing (or Brahmanizing?) the OBCs.

OBCs are the most populous caste band with a fluid identity of Shudras in the classical varna system. They potentially constituted most important constituency provided they were given a viable identity, which is socially significant. OBC has a ‘backward’ in it that tended to lower its social worth, because of which they participated with the upper caste in the anti-Mandal rights and beat up the Dalit students who hailed their reservations. BJP’s Hindu identity, however, was immediately accepted in the company of Brahmin-Bania, as it made them psychologically feel socially worthy. That has been the key behind the longevity of the caste system that a large population of agricultural serfs was incorporated with the notion that they were still superior to the Dalits in their vicinity. The rise of the BJP since the Ram Mandir movement is the success of its OBC strategy.

The actual caste strategy of the BJP is seen in identifying the segments of generic caste/community cluster (such as Scheduled Caste, OBC, Muslims) which got ignored by other political parties and cultivate them. It was exactly opposite of other parties, which tried to woo the more populous sections in the hope of grabbing its fraction, which they imagined sizable enough to give then the winning edge.They would try wooing the most populous Dalit castes, who were Ambedkarites and the most politicized segment. But BJP strategically avoided the crowding space and focussed on the left over Dalit castes, which cumulatively came closer to the size of AmbedkariteDalits. That mass was more effectively co opted by it. Similar formation existed in every caste and community in India and BJP used this strategy for each. In the case of OBCs, whereas the Congress empowered the populous section of the OBCs, the farming castes, the BJP’s OBC outreach targeted the lower segments of the OBCs which were hitherto neglected. It paid a rich dividend: BJP’s vote share grew from 19% in 1996 to 44% in 2019. While the Brahmin-Bania remains solidly behind the BJP, its wining force comes from the OBCs. The BJP’s all-India vote share in the LokSabha election of 2019 (37.6%) was almost double that of 2009 (18.6%). This was largely due to the inroads the party made among the OBCs — along with Adivasis and Dalits — while retaining its core support base among the upper castes.

The result of 2024 will depend upon the extent to which the opposition parties can delink the OBCs as oppressed castes from their oppressor’s party, BJP. The caste census which would expose the asymmetry between the Brahman-Bania and OBCs in terms of power and wealth may be a tool to do it but it would not automatically happen. It will have to be accompanied by a well-designed communication strategy to make OBCs realise that they were trapped and need to free themselves from the BJP’s clutches. The Opposition however appears complacent, as though it has grabbed a brahmastra of caste census and reservation to decimate BJP. Rahul Gandhi stole a slogan from Kanshiram: jiskijitanisankhyabhari, usakiutanibhagidari (communities get representation, as per their population-proportion). BJP has already countered it by flaunting its numbers: that 85% of BJP’s 303 MPs and 365 of its 1358 MLAs were from OBCs, as are 27 Union ministers. The Opposition failed to even sense the potential force of the BJP’s promise to implement sub-categorization. After all, OBCs or Dalits are not a homogenous people; the inequality within them is rather grudged more by the deprived sections than others. There was news that in UP, which holds the key to the power, BJP is deploying a special team of as many as 20,000 OBC functionaries to work among the community to bring it closer to the saffron outfit.I do not see any signs of opposition waking up to these challenges.

While they have introduced laws such as CAA and engage in other similar anti Muslim tirades, through another way the BJP is trying to woo the Muslim community aiming at the hustles. This appears contradictory. What are their plans vis a vis the community for the next decade. Do you think the BJP genuinely expects Muslims to vote for them?

BJP’s hatred for Muslims is two pronged: strategic and cultural. In the latter, it hates Muslims (and also Christians) because a vast majority of them come from the stock of Dalits and artisan (shudra) castes. It cannot say it straight because it would puncture the balloon of hindutva. In strategic term their hatred is the hatred of the ‘other’ so as toconsolidate its Hindu constituency for winning political power. If it could be achieved by loving them, it would not mind doing that. Its goal is to make India Hindu Rashtra. And what does a Hindu Rashtra mean? Hindu Rashtradoes not mean that all Hindus would enjoy liberty, equality, fraternity and justice; they would not be exploited by the Hindu capitalists or Hindu landlords or repressed by Hindu bureaucrats, orhumiliated by a Hindu policeman. It only means that the society would be reordered with the tenets of Brahminism; it means that a select few from the superior breed will be at the societal helm, all others accepting their duties as assigned by the hegemons. Although the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, has thrilled the simpletons with his public apology for the inhuman oppression his ancestors subjected the Dalits to andhis statements against the evils of caste, he would not speak against the principles of Brahminsmthat people are created unequal and that the social order necessitates ‘inferior’ people obeying superior breed. The goal of the BJP is to recreate this paradigm that it believes existed before the advent of Muslim rulers in India.

BJP not only spoke against Muslims but tormented them whenever it had an opportunity. It enacted draconian cow-laws, unleashed its lynching gangs against them; it stamped them as terrorists and incarcerated them in jails.And in 1919, they brought this Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) which blatantly uses religion as a criterion for citizenship and tries to declare their religion as unwelcome. It attracted global criticism but gladdened BJP’s Hindu constituency.The Act amends the Citizenship Act, 1955 by providing an accelerated pathway to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, or Christians, and arrived in India before the end of December 2014.

The harassment of Muslims, instead of alienating, impelled them to seek truce with the BJP. The Gujarati Muslims who suffered horrific carnage in 2002,today massively vote for the BJP to save themselves. This has happened especially with the better off Muslims, the lower strata being nowhere to decide anything.  The BJP forged a dual strategy; on the one hand, it showed itself as determined to get rid of Muslims to the Hindus, and on the other, it applied the OBC strategy to woo the poorer strata of Muslims. BJP’s overtures to Muslim women and Pasmanda (backward class) Muslims are quite known. Pasmandasare the low caste Muslims in Hindi belt, whoconstitute 85 percent of the Muslim vote share. Their support enabled the BJP to win significant number of seats in the eastern part of the state — a region that is the home turf of the rabid Hindutvaproponent, YogiAdityanath. For the 2024 elections the BJP is not leaving any stone unturned. It has launched ModiMitr(Modi’s friend) outreach that focuses on spreading the BJP’s economic message especially to PasmandaMuslims. BJP enlisted 25,000 Muslim community leaders as ModiMitrs to promote a message on economy and canvass about various welfare programmes. It is especially focusing on 65 seats in the 543-member lower house of parliament that have a Muslim voter population of at least 30%, roughly double their share of the national population.

The BJP strategy in building an elaborate adivasi voter base that continues to support them despite its alliance with corporate groups and big industries, which uproots tribal communities and whose ideology that segregates tribals is shrouded in duplicity. Can BJP create inroads into the tribal vote base through these contradictory stands? 

The success of BJP lies in its managing contradictions. It can carry on the most virulent campaign against Muslims while wooing a section of them, the Pasmanda Muslims. It accuses other parties of practicing casteism to win elections but itself goes casteist to the extent of playing up subcaste game, by wooing the minor castes of OBCs as well as Dalits. Its Adivasi strategy is no exception. Adivasis were the neglected people and hence the RSS, BJP’s parent, reached them way back in 1940s and silently worked among them and thwarted the Christian missionary activities. Though Adivasis are the animist communities, the RSS almost succeeded in hinduizing them. This represents one strand of the strategy. The other strand comes from the fact that the Adivasi lands, the hills and jungles, contain in their bellies a vast wealth of minerals worth trillions of dollars, which is eyed by the global capital with salivating greed. BJP, as rather any other political party, can ignore it at their peril. They have to vacate these lands of the Adivasis. BJP does it in the name of curbing the naxal menace. For years, Adivasis have been butchered with this fake alibi. The Congress did it during its reign. The BJP dislodged Congress with the promise of serving the capital better and has since been doing it ruthlessly.    

As stated above, BJP is adept at managing the duality on many fronts. The narrative conflating tribal resistance against their displacement with naxalism was created and matured during the Congress regime but it is operated far more adroitly by the BJP. Though BJP has accelerated the tribal displacement, by doing away environmental hurdles and manipulating gram sabha resistance, the tribalsare happier with the BJP than ever before. BJP is master of managing politics of symbols. It had a masterstroke in installing the first ever tribal lady in RashtrapatiBhavan. It would never invoke the first Tribal leader Jaipal Singh Munda who had foregrounded the oppression of his people by the ancestors of the BJP in the constituent assembly.

The BJP government has amended laws such as Representation of the People Act, The Companies Act and the Income Tax Act so as to favour political donations by individuals, partnership firms, and even companies for enabling corporate funding for the elections.  What will be the source and nature of  funding for the coming general elections and how will the political parties bypass the restrictions put in place for election funding? 

Yes, the BJP government has amended all laws to facilitate donations by individuals, partnership firms, companies including overseas corporations to political parties through electoral bonds. Until 2021-22 seven national parties and 24 regional parties received a total donation of ₹9,188.35 crore through electoral bonds, of which BJP received Rs 5,272 crore and the Congress received Rs 952 crore, while the rest went to other parties. Thus 57 % of the total amount has come to the BJP. This is one index of the degree of corporate confidence in the parties. There has been a huge controversy over the constitutionality of these bonds and a slew of petitions filed before the Supreme Court was eventually heard recently after five years. The verdict is still not out. Whatever the verdict, the damage to the electoral democracy of the country has been allowed to be done. 

The source of funds flowing to political parties, particularly the ruling party is however not limited to these election bonds. Numerous other channels can still be open as before. With regard to the expenditure by the parties, they have not been adding since at least 2014 with the permitted limits but there is no institutional action by the Election Commission, which is mandated to monitor it. It had raised the expenditure limit for candidates contesting elections from Rs 54 to Rs 70 lakh (depending on states) to Rs 70 lakh-Rs 95 lakh for LokSabha constituencies and fromRs. 20 to 28 lakh to 28 to 40 lakhs (depending on states) for assembly constituencies. The kind of money spent is in multiples of this in reality and that is an open secret. Indian elections have already become the most expensive elections on the planet. For instance, in the 2019 elections total spending by political parties, candidates and regulatory bodies was reported by the Centre for Media Studies to $8.6 billion as against an estimated $6.5 billion spent in the US in the 2016 presidential and congressional contests, according to ‘Open Secrets’, an American non-profit organization. BJP spent close to Rs 27,000 crore, or nearly half of it. According to CMS chairperson N BhaskaraRao, the 2024 General Elections could cross Rs 1 trillion.

The corporate funding to political parties made opaque to public by the schemes like electoral bonds by the Modi government is the floodgate of corruption. There is always quid pro quo between the party in power and corporations. The pro-corporate bias of the BJP government in the name of vikas well correlates with the kind of donations it has been receiving from the corporations. These are not very different from the formalized kickbacks. According to Business Standard, “Mother of all corruption lies in the spiralling election expenditure”.

A Pew research poll held few years back asked people across the world about their faith in democracy and other questions. Seventy five percent of those supported representative government in India (the lowest in all of the Asian countries polled); 65 percent supported direct rule by experts ( One of the highest in all the countries polled), and more Indians supported  autocratic rule by a strong leader (55 percent) than in any other country polled. Is this responses from the Indian electorates pointing to the genuine craving for dictatorship among the Indians. If so, do you have any explanation on What fueled this craving? 

I am personally not surprised by these findings. I can off hand provide at least four reasons.

One, In India, historically speaking, and contrary to certain claims conflating the pre-Buddhist republics with democracy, democracy has never been experienced by common people. As a matter of fact nothing changed materially for common people after independence or India became a republic. With the British bureaucrats sans caste consciousness and cunning, exiting from the country, the experience of majority of the lower caste people was bound to be worse. The democracy for them has been the forced ritual to cast their vote in elections every five years. Neither do they know whom they voted for nor do they have any clue as to what is expected from them in return. These days, most people get money or booze for voting for someone by his agent. Democracy has been such a mockery in India. No wonder India ranked lowest in the percentage of people supporting the representative democracy. As a matter of fact, with the first-past-the-post type of election system that we have adopted to actuate our democracy, does not give a truly representative democracy. It structurally excludes at least nearly half the people from representation. No government during the last seven decades had consent of even half the population. People are not fools not to see this naked truth. The realisation of this deceit will make people rank India with the lowest score for democracy. 

Two, Indians have lived with the caste system which is antithetical to democracy. As BabasahebAmbedkarhad said, “Democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” In view of this reality, there has not been any attempt to seed democracy in any of the institutions that came up after independence. The political parties that provided leadership to shape the country themselves were ultra-feudal, with a ‘high command’ culture. Naturally, over a long time of seven decades people would be wary to live with the lie. 

Three, the millennial generation (15-35 age group), which I called some time neoliberal generation, is not oriented to value democracy. It is over 300 million strong and gives a damn to democracy.Neoliberalism, which it has grown with, is an ideology of social Darwinism, which believes that the strongest should rule; the most meritorious should prevail. It is against one man, one vote, one value, the theme of democracy. Neoliberalism, since its birth has been undergoing important transformations which have become increasingly dangerous for democracy. In doing so, it has allied with forces which are contemptuous of democracy. This core aspect of the neoliberal project is what is setting the stage for a new breed of radical right leaders across the globe. Today, there is an emerging alliance between neoliberals and big capital drawing on the support of nationalists, social conservatives, and authoritarian populists. It is this alliance that may well pose one of the greatest threats to democratic politics. The young generation, subject to superfluous inputs from social media and capitalist dominated media, is shaped by this anti-democracy ethos.

Four, in India and even elsewhere, the right-wingers have invoked religion to disorient people away from democracy. The fountainhead of the hindutva, the RSS, as seen before, has overtly been contemptuous of democracy. While its political arm, BJP, has used the extant democratic institutions to grab political power, its aftermath has been the devastation of democracy. The people under their spell, and they are in majority, would really want a benevolent dictator, akin to the sarsanghchalak, the supremo of the RSS.

These findings to me are the alarm bells that we are on the verge of becoming a Hindu Rashtra!

Does the callous attitude displayed by the central government in not intervening effectively to rein the Kuki – Meitei confrontation in Manipur ruled by the BJP will trigger electoral reverses to the party. Will such unheard off events as naked parading of women not evoke a nationwide impact against the BJP after opposition leader Rahul Gandhi stated in the Parliament that ‘ Bharat Mata’ was murdered in the North eastern state ? 

Since 2014, people have been subject to so much shock that they ceased to feel anything. Those who sensitized people about moral wrongs around are in prison. Making them an example has generally silenced people. The horrendous killings of Kukis in Manipur by Meitei, and the incidents of parading women naked by the mobs, did shake the consciousness of the nation. But I do not think by the time elections happen these memories would survive. There have been daily such shockers that they ultimately are drowned in the propaganda blitzkrieg. What survives is the last minute theatrics. Ordinarily, there would have been countrywide outrage over the central government responses, particularly from the prime minister. But neither has one sensed it nor did it manifest in the recent state elections. Rather the BJP’s victory in three states has in a way endorsed the manner in which both the central government as well as the prime minister neglected the incident.

I don’t think Rahul Gandhi’s outburst in the parliament really communicates in the prevailing political environment. I am rather amazed at the Congress’s ineptitude in providing leadership to opposition and utter lack of strategy in handling the BJP’s challenge.

The BJP has launched a slew of welfare programmes including UjjwalaYojana, PM AwasYojana, to name a few. What is your perspective on the social and economic change brought in by these projects which often   contradicts with the government’s support to big business houses like the Adani group. Do you see double standards in this move of launching multiple welfare schemes that vouches the pro-poor rhetoric while promoting big corporate groups like Adani? 

There is no contradiction between announcing the welfare schemes and promoting big businesses. Rather there is a complementary relationship between the two. If the government wants to promote the big business out of way, it needs to placate the people with such welfare schemes that they would ignore the former. You asked me about the economic impact of these measures. I don’t think they had any significant economic impact. Most of the schemes are flawed in design itself not to produce any material impact. They however had tremendous propaganda value for the government, which it fully reaped.If there had been any positive impact, the government would not have to provide free ration to 81 crores of people and still have anti-revady rhetoric. The very birth of this government is attributable to a kind of pact between the big capital and the BJP.Essentially, the pro-poor rhetoric is not unique with BJP. This rhetoric has lived through all post-colonial governments. And in corollary the promotion of the big capital also has been concurrent policy of all the governments, overt or covert, albeit with varying degree.

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‘Sangh Parivar Moves Beyond Upper Caste Support’

In this interview with Abhish K. Bose, Prof. Suryakant Waghmore shares his opinion on various issues such as the dominance of upper caste in political institutions, the undercurrents made by the Mandal Commission’s report in Indian politics among other issues.

Suryakant Waghmore is a professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Bombay. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology as a Commonwealth Scholar from the University of Edinburgh (2011).  His areas of research interest broadly revolve around civility and democracy in India. He is the author of Civility against Caste (Sage 2013) and co-editor of Civility in Crisis (Routledge 2020). He was awarded the New India Foundation Fellowship (2022) to work on his book on Caste and Cities (2024). His other forthcoming publications include a co-edited volume Civil Sphere in India (Polity 2024) and second edition of Civility against Caste (Routledge 2024).  He was previously professor and chairperson at the Centre for Social Justice and Governance, TISS (Mumbai), and has held visiting faculty positions at Fudan University, University of Hyderabad, Stanford University, and Göttingen University. He regularly writes columns in national newspapers like Indian Express and provides consultancy to NETFLIX on sensitive and compelling representation of marginal groups.

In this interview, Prof. Waghmore shares his opinion on various issues such as the dominance of upper caste in political institutions, the undercurrents made by the Mandal Commission’s report in Indian politics among other issues.

Excerpts from the interview

1.  The share of upper caste legislators in all the legislative assemblies and parliament has been declining and that of the lower castes rising. The 1990s saw a doubling of the percentage of OBC MPs – from 11 percent to 22 percent whereas the proportion of upper-caste MPs dropped from 47 percent in 1984 to below 40 in the 1990s. It produced a shift in the balance of political power in governments and legislatures, reshaping the very character of democratic politics. Upper castes are still very influential. Even though upper castes are vastly outnumbered by castes below them but they still hold sway over institutional domains and control the levers of power.   Why is this happening?

The politics around Mandal and politicisation of OBCs challenged the dominance of pure castes in North India. Congress as an upper-caste party was decimated and Mandal parties like JDU, RJD and SP made their presence felt with more OBC politicians gaining political power. The antagonism between OBCs and pure castes was however temporal in North India. The limited economic and political mobility of OBCs has attracted more to Hindutva and the discourse of kshatriya-hood of OBCs has helped in status claims. The seduction of Hindutva amongst OBCs is also driven by their proximity to Brahmanism.

Several movements in colonial and post-colonial times like the Arya Samaj and RSS have invested heavily to construct Hindu solidarity and material mobility amongst ‘impure’ castes and this has led to their substantive inclusion in Hindu sociality.

Despite the mandalisation of politics in North India, OBCs are more of politically scattered castes and do not constitute a significant politicised collective and non-brahmin ideological leanings like south-west are still to turn into popular political sentiment. What we have therefore is individual-caste parties or family-centered parties like SP that develop pragmatic political patronage and alliances with other castes and Muslims.

Decades of cadre-based mobilisation of RSS on the other hand has achieved a significant presence of OBCs in RSS and BJP. Leaders like the incumbent CM of Madhya Pradesh, Mohan Yadav and even PM Modi in several ways signify democratisation of Hinduism and making of Hinduism as a civil religion.  Such democratisation is paradoxical — OBCs may have political power but their interests have ideologically merged with the sacrificial ethics of Hindutva. We do not need pure castes at the helm anymore as OBCs too can help achieve the radical aspirations of Hindutva.

2. Thirty years after Mandal social justice politics has been dissipated with the rise of the BJP as the dominant pole of Indian politics, the backward caste politics had indeed hindered the march of Hindutva in the 1990s, with Mandal upstaging religious politics which had been catapulted to centre stage by the Ayodhya movement. Turning the politics of social justice on its head, the Hindu right crafted a broad-based identity politics to undercut Mandal which appeared to have outlived its utility for a critical mass of the socially marginalized, bringing the OBC vote to  the BJP.  Isn’t it a strategic lapse from the part of the Congress in not carrying forward the legacy of the lower caste social justice spearheaded by Mandal which could have stem the growth of the BJP?

Yes, the gains of social justice movement made by Mandal may seem to have been reversed. But the actual opposition to Mandal was from Congress and not Hindutva or BJP. So, Mandal/social justice and Hindutva are not necessarily at odds. There are voices against reservations in RSS but that is a general pure-caste sentiment and not an official position of RSS.

While Mandal movement achieved decimation of Congress in Bihar and UP, Mandal and Mandir are not necessarily antithetical as is imagined by some votaries of Mandal movement and caste census.

Mandal movement was never anti-caste it was merely pro-reservation.  As Congress lost ground, BJP mobilised around a broader axis of Hindu solidarity while othering the Muslims. The economic mobility achieved by OBCs under neo-liberal India along with anti-Muslim common sense that has been cultivated for over a century amongst the Shudra castes, came in handy for success of BJP. Congress may claim legacy to Gandhi and Gandhian politics but Gandhi’s religiosity also laid grounds for success of RSS and BJP.

Congress in past two decadesis increasingly wearing a pro-OBC coat, but this strategy does not necessarily have deeper commitment to politics beyond religion and caste. BJP on the other hand is rooted in the politics of Hindutva and other policies of universal welfare along with politics of polarisation help itconsolidate support from above and below.

3. Historically, the Congress was built as a centrist catch-all party, but to remain a catch-all party became very difficult once powerful cleavages based on caste (after Mandal) and religion (related to Ayodhya)  has  build up, gaining momentum and popular acceptability. This resulted in a major confrontation between the upper and backward castes, displacing the Congress from its position of dominance in north India, most notably in Uttar Pradesh. This had a cascading effect too on the party’s political fortunes in other states. The party never recovered from this transformation of India’s politics which challenged the pluralist foundation of the political system by shifting the discourse towards identity politics. Do you think that without enunciating a strategy to counter the identity politics can Congress win in the  elections?

Congress succumbed to Mandal under pressure from Mandal movements. Its centrism had otherwise survived patronage of dominant castes in North India. The marginal castes and communities gained minimally from the Congress structure. What is understood as the pluralist foundations was fragile and something that corroded immensely with the rise of BJP. A major problem with Congress is that it is not a cadre-based party like BJP. Sadly, no party can match the commitment and passion that RSS cadres bring to BJP. There are fewer patronage-based groups withing BJP as compared to other parties. Congress can make scattered gains due to anti-incumbency and other residual factors but BJP is continually strengthening its foundations after every election due to its ideological clarity and nationalist rhetoric.

In Karnataka Congress was successful because of the Ahinda movement of Siddaramaiah and other leaders. There is some anti-caste ideological basis for Ahinda which helps Congress in Karnataka. We hardly see this in other states. In UP, Congress may not succeed if it fails to tie up with BSP. Similarly, in Maharashtra VBA and MIM may affect chances of Congress. BJP has multiple enemies in the civil sphere but they are all splintered groups, sometimes competing within themselves.

Since Congress lacks cadre-based organisation, sacrificial ethics (sewa) and ideological clarity, it has to bank on alliances. All of this makes BJP seem more principled as other parties continue to be largely family-basedentities.  If Congress plans to turn into a ‘Bahujan’ party, they will have resort to bahujanist icons, culture and mass mobilisation from below and I do not foresee that possibility.

4. Isn’t the key issue for the Congress is defining its response to Hindu nationalism? While the Congress is largely agreed on the necessity of combating communal ideas, politics and policies, it has swung between making ideological compromises with majoritarian nationalism and plotting a frontal battle against it. Are the contradictory pulls exerted by these divergent approaches are partly responsible for the impasse plaguing the party since its spectacular defeat in 2014. From 2014 onwards, the Congress is wary of an engagement with these big issues mainly because it fears losing popular support by being seen as anti-Hindu; hence, most leaders are unwilling to come out openly against majoritarianism. What is your response?

We are a nation steeped in religiosity – poor and the privileged alike are deeply religiousand Congress despite its claim to secular credentials has had religious and even communal roots. Neither Nehru nor Gandhi was comfortable with antagonising Hindu and Muslim radicals, change has always been a slow process therefore. It is not surprising that Kamal Nath was bowing in front of Baba Bageshwar and Hindutva in Madhya Pradesh as part of Congress campaign against BJP. Similarly, BJP has its roots in Arya Samaj, RSS and even Congress.

Our Constitution too carries these paradoxes — it bans cow slaughter (Article 48) along with providing social justice provisions (Article 340) and scientific temper is part of our fundamental duties (Article 51A). All of this may seem like irony of sorts but these complex power processes also make our democracy a stunteddemocracy that thrives on unreason and incivility.

BJP has trumped Congress at politics of caste and religion. By posing Hinduism as the greatest religion of all times and simultaneously framing Hinduism as a civil religion to mobilise Hindu solidarity beyond caste, BJP evokes a formidable sentiment of Hindu citizenship beyond caste. It is not anti-caste but it is ‘violently’ pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim. The only substantive politics that Congress and its intellectuals are banking on is mobilisation of OBCs against BJP, this is a difficult proposition in North India as BJP has successfully accommodated the Shudra castes in its party structure. A demand for caste census may polarise temporally but not necessarily help in the long run, and the politics of OBC representation needs to find some substantive universal discourse of sacrifice and recognition.

5. The frequent conflation of Hinduism and Hindutva has benefited the ruling party. It’s important to expose this conflation and tell people about the misuse of Hinduism for political purposes. In this line of thinking Hinduism is under attack whenever Hindutva is questioned. Ordinary Hindu need to be told that Hinduism is not under attack. Hindutva and Hinduism are different. Hindutva is a political ideology, while Hinduism is a religion. But political mobilization through this strategy may be difficult. This difference has meaning for the people who are well informed and understand Hindutva politics. It is true that the RSS-BJP take advantage of this confusion but to confront them on this issue won’t be easy. What will be the best possible course corrective measure to help convince the ordinary hindu regarding the differences in between hindutva and Hinduism? Is it an impossible goal?

This is not so simple. At times, Hindutva and Hinduism may seem synonymous to modernising Hindus or worse, Hindutva may seem better than Hinduism. The Shankaracharya of Puri slammed Bhagwat for his criticism of caste and varnashrama dharma and insisted these were a gift of Brahmins to India, something that the West should be taught to emulate. This clash of ideas between the Shankaracharya and Sarsanghchalak of RSS makes fresh to one’s mind the distinction between Hindutva and Hinduism that the known postcolonial scholar AshisNandy had thought of. While Nandy hoped for an end of Hindutva at the hands of Hinduism, the former has not only survived but grown leaps and bounds.

Caste constructs the Hindu habits of heart and they affect the formation of civil religion. A modern and free individual beyond caste is almost impossible and broader civic solidarity based on equality beyond religion and caste hierarchy my seem an anathema in Hinduism. Hindutva can be seen as a reformist movement too very much like Gandhianism and other reform movements. It mobilises religion for public goals and national purpose. Hindutva while constructing Hinduism as a civil religion also consistently re-writes meanings of Hinduism and its rituals, makes it incorporative, inclusive towards impure castes and simultaneously generate Hindu pride (not just caste pride) that is anti-Muslim.

The politics of enumeration in colonial times led to several smaller faiths, sects and cults being framed as part of Hindu religion. BJP has been making productive use of the labour of (majoritarian) Hindu reform movements to give a futuristic shape to Hinduism as a national religion where the majority embodies the nation and margins are meant for non-Hindu  minorities. The pure and privileged gain more from politics and policies of Hindutva but the marginal castes too are increasingly drawn into the nationalist Hindu conscience.

6. How is the ideological machinery of the RSS overtly and covertly eliminates Congress ideology from India and Hindutva -ise India apart from changing history and eliminating curriculum ? What are the processes that they underwent so as to realise this? 

We do not have enough studies on this and the problem is much larger here as far as education is concerned. Was the curriculum and history syllabus under Congress able to instil scientific temper and progressive public culture amongst Indians? The answer must be largely negative. Education is not seen as a social good and has mostly been viewed as a commodity. The utility of education is to get one economic and social mobility not to create a humane society. Children learn ‘culture’ at home and such culture is deeply rooted in ritual and superstition.  In most of the world and India too education does not necessarily reform society, a lot depends on social movements and culture of publics.

We are at a juncture where even most educated argue that Ramayana and Mahabharata are not mythological texts. RSS and Hindutva have made most of our family and political culture, and the very nature and meanings of education in India by mixing religion and education so as to produce ‘cultured’ Hindu citizens who privilege rituals over reason and bigotry over compassion.

 7. The RSS and the BJP were fervent adherents of the Varna system till the 1970s. However, they have effected a change in their position on it later. What are the exigencies that compelled RSS – BJP to effect a shift in their stance. Could you explain?

Even Gandhi was a supporter of Varna system. He changed considerably after facing the likes of Ambedkar but such change had limits. RSS and BJP thrive because they have changed and evolved too. Their cadres have worked to build support amongst adivasis and even outcastes. The have systematically cultivated Hindutva amongst Yadavs to counter the rise of regional caste parties like SP and RJD. The religious or social estrangement that shudra castes may have faced within Hinduism is being continually reversed by politics of Hindutva

Historically we see a mix of ideas in RSS, as far as caste and varna is concerned, there were some radicals like Savarkar who hoped that Hindus will become one race beyond caste as they inter-marry. What critics do not see is the labour RSS-BJP have put over last century to accommodate Shudras into the Hindutva fold and several OBCs have climbed the ladder within the party and the organisation. Caste is not a thing of past but RSS and BJP have a way beyond caste and their position has continually evolved to promote Hindu unity over caste separation. The persistent othering of Muslims in everyday life and politics has helped RSS-BJP in forging political unity amongst Hindus beyond caste.

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‘I Always Believe I Have to Give More in My Work’

Katrina said: “I always say that if you don’t have something to give, that is when you should pause as an actor.”…reports Asian Lite News

Actress Katrina Kaif shared that her approach to work is that she always believes that she has to give more and she is constantly cross-checking herself that whatever she is doing is excellent.

Katrina made her acting debut in 2005 with the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer ‘Sarkar’.

Having an 18 year long journey in Hindi cinema have there been moments, where the actress felt that she could have given something more?

“I think my approach to my work is that I always believe that I have to give more. I always believe that I’m not giving enough in every moment. And I’m always checking and cross-checking myself that am I doing everything I can to be excellent, to be the best that I can be. You know, for me, my belief system is really, am I better than I was yesterday?” Katrina told IANS.

The actress, whose latest release is ‘Tiger 3’, added that competition is healthy but her key focus is bettering herself.

The ‘Ek Tha Tiger’ actress said: “It’s not about looking over my shoulder to see who’s doing what around me. Of course, that’s important. And of course, competition is healthy. But really, am I bettering myself? If I’m bettering myself and evolving as an artiste and as an actor, then I’m on the right path.”

The actress gives her heart to every film that she does.

Katrina said: “I always say that if you don’t have something to give, that is when you should pause as an actor.”

The actress, who is married to actor Vicky Kaushal, added: “It’s an indescribable thing. You can’t put your finger on what I’m referring to. But as an actor, you know when you have something to give on screen, you have something to give to that character.”

Mumbai : Actors Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal at the screening of the movie ‘Sam Bahadur’, in Mumbai on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. (Photo: IANS)

“You have something to give to that movie. It’s an energetic thing. It’s an energetic connection and emotion and as an actor, it’s either all in or not at all. You know, I feel that you have to be consumed by your work and you have to be able to be connected to it on a deep level,” she added.

Katrina and Vicky’s Cute Anniversary Snap Wins Hearts

Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif, who recently celebrated her second wedding anniversary with her husband Vicky Kaushal, shared a picture with her hubby on her social media.

The actress took to her Instagram and shared a casual picture of herself and Vicky enjoying the company of each other as they posed for the camera.

The picture shows Katrina in a no-makeup look as she wore a white printed dress. Vicky Kaushal wore a white T-shirt with a cap.

Actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, took to the comments section and rescinded with a heart-eyed emoticon. Filmmaker Zoya Akhtar and Big B’s daughter Shweta Bachchan dropped heart emojis for the couple.

A fan wrote in the comments, “Happy happy wedding anniversary. God bless you both always with happiness and togetherness for a lifetime ahead.” “God she is looking like a teenager,” praised another fan. Someone also said, “Y’all look like a Disney couple.”

Earlier, Vicky took to his Instagram on the special to share a video of his wife as she said that being in her company guarantees him entertainment. Sharing a video of Katrina from one of their flights, Vicky wrote in the caption, “In-flight and in-life entertainment! Love you beautiful… keep it coming.”

In the video, Katrina can be seen boxing as her husband looks totally entertained by her antics. The celebrity couple tied the knot in a private ceremony at the Six Senses Fort Barwara Hotel with friends and family in attendance on December 9, 2021. The ‘Sangeet’ Night’ was held on December 8, Gurdas Maan, Hardy Sandhu, Shankar Mahadevan, Ehsaan Noorani and Manj Musik performed at the ‘Sangeet’ ceremony of the high profile wedding.

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