Mild? Sen is out of his mind! The 1950 Preventive Detention Act was draconian! It permitted the arrest and detention, with no right of judicial review, of anyone suspected of wishing to harm not just 'social stability' but also 'economic development'! To be fair, Government para-military forces and Congress goons were more used to simply killing people rather than locking them up. Sen's Communist pals must have told him about how their people were treated. The Act was supposed to last for only one year but was renewed again and again only lapsing in 1969. But, thanks to the Bangladesh War, the even more infamous MISA was brought in, under which Mrs. Gandhi jailed Opposition leaders and journalists and so forth. The Emergency, which was peak dynastic authoritarianism, was the worst episode in Indian history in terms of mass incarceration, forced sterilization and the unrestricted use of third degree methods on innocent people.
Sen- I remember talking with my grandfather and saying, “Do you think preventive detention is ever going to go away from India?” And him saying, “Not until independence. We have to gain independence for that.” Unfortunately, we have gained independence, and at first the Congress Party introduced preventive detention in a rather mild form.
Interestingly, Sheikh Abdullah, who spent long years in prison, himself brought in a Preventive Detention Act once he was in power in J&K. His son and grandson can now thank him for that.
And now, of course, it is very strong. There is an act called the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which was amended this year to give the government the right to designate someone as a terrorist, without having to provide any proof and without having judicial review.This 1967 Act has been strengthened or weakened depending on the level of the terrorist threat. It is a bipartisan issue. The fact is, if there were no such Act, what we would have instead is more extra-judicial killing which is counter-productive from the Intelligence point of view.
And that is back again, which I never thought would happen now that we are an independent country.Why not? Sen was 18 when the Preventive Detention Act was brought in. He was teaching in Delhi, aged 35, when the Unlawful Activities Act was brought in. He had plenty of friends in Delhi who could tell him what happened during the Emergency. Why did he hold such an absurd belief?
So, Sen was very well connected! No wonder he had such a good start in life! I suppose, for someone as cocooned from reality as him, it would be natural to hold absurd beliefs about Indian politics and economics.
Where was your family in 1947, when Partition occurred?
My father was a professor at Dhaka University, so he was teaching there along with quite a few rather good academics. But, in 1946, I think five or six people left because Dhaka University had so much rioting and trouble that there were hardly any classes. Along with my father, there was S. N. Bose, the physicist known for Bose-Einstein Statistics. My father, who was a chemist, moved, after looking for other jobs, to Delhi, and was Delhi’s land-development commissioner. But then he became the chair of the West Bengal Public Service Commission.
What is admirable about Sen is that he had no illusions that the sort of shite he taught could help India in any way. Thus he migrated to greener pastures where he could gain from intellectual affirmative action and pretend to represent the poor and suffering masses of the sub-continent.
Previously, one dynasty was 'manipulating the situation pretty sharply' to keep itself in power from decade to decade. Sen may think this meant 'pluralism' triumphed because...urm...well, the dynasty made a point of attending Cambridge- though they didn't always get a degree from there- so, obviously, I mean Cambridge wallahs are quite pukka donchaknow.
Does the turn that India has taken in the past five years make you think differently about the founding of the country, and its constitution, or is that too much hindsight?
I think it is too much hindsight. The Indian constitution was pretty well based on analysis of the Constituent Assembly, which had some of the finest discussion of what the constitution should be. What it overlooked, I think, as a committed secular democracy, is that if there is a political group or party or movement that came to get a huge amount of support, which happened in India with the Hindutva movement, they can manipulate the situation pretty sharply. And here I think the Indian Supreme Court is very slow and divided, and, despite the good it has done, hasn’t been able to be as much of a guardian of pluralism as it could be.
The problem with the dynasty was that it was corrupt, crooked and incompetent. So, sooner or later, the Hindu masses would revolt against their rule. Congress pretended that the BJP would kill minorities and tried to scare itself up a vote bank on this basis. However, other caste-based dynastic parties were doing the same thing so the anti-Hindu vote got splintered and the BJP won.
Today, everything is dominated by a hard-nosed, hard-Hindutva thinking. And the President, Prime Minister, the leadership are all Hindu. But if you compare that to a dozen years ago, 2007, let’s say, we had a Muslim President, a Sikh Prime Minister, a Christian leader of the ruling party.The Muslim President was appointed by the BJP. Sonia- the 'Christian leader'- didn't give him a second term. The Sikh Prime Minister could not get elected from Punjab or Delhi, he was nominated from far away Assam. He was a faithful servant of the dynasty. Sen ignores the fact that one family had dominated Indian politics and that it had dispensed with the rule of law and locked up its opponents when it found it convenient to do so. He does not say that the current Home Minister is not Hindu- perhaps he is not aware of this fact. What is certain is that no family controls the BJP the way one branch of the Gandhi dynasty controls Congress. The other branch is with Modi.
The majority of the parliamentarians were Hindu, but they were not trying to impose their way of thinking over everyone. And that’s what’s happened. And now we are suddenly in a position where you can chastise a Muslim for eating beef, which is also very nonclassical.The Constitution has a Directive Principle requiring States to take action to protect the cow. Congress Legislatures introduced draconian laws relating to beef. In large parts of India, the mere possession of beef is a cognizable offense carrying a stiff jail term. This has been true for many years. Sen was subject to such laws when he lived in India- though, perhaps, he was unaware of it.
Whether a thing is 'classical' or 'non-classical' is irrelevant. The law, in some states, says you will go to prison if you knowingly possess or consume beef.
If you go to the very old Sanskrit documents, like the Vedas, there is nothing prohibiting the eating of beef.Sen comes from Bengal where the Navya-Nyaya school flourished. Their savants explained that the ban on beef was 'apadh dharma'- i.e. required in this age. Vivekananda took the same position. Brahmos, like Sen's parents, did not eat beef.
So there is a decline not only from secularism and democracy in post-independence India but also in the understanding of the heritage even of Hindu India.There has been a decline in Sen's mental faculties. However, now dynastic rule has ended, democracy is on a stronger footing. Secularism is meaningless. The Rule of Law matters but this requires more resources.
We are also overlooking the fact that India was quite important in the eastern world, and Sanskrit was pretty much the lingua franca of the first millennium A.D., because of the influence of Buddhist thinking.A lingua franca is a language used in trade. Sanskrit, like Latin or Greek, was a scholarly language known to priests and monks. However, the Buddhist scriptures are written in Pali and it is likely that the relevant 'sprachbund' was based on a sort of creolized Pali
For a thousand years, India was a Buddhist country.No. India was a Hindu country in which Buddhism, Jainism, the Ajivika sect and numerous others flourished alongside Vedic and Agamic worship. It was frequently the case that members of the same family had different preferences as between Shramanic orders. What unified these families was their Vedic purohit or family priest. To this day we see the Thai and Monarch retains the services of a Vedic priest whose distant ancestors came from South India. The Cambodian King too has a hereditary Brahman priest.
That is our heritage, too. When we try to revive Nalanda—which is the oldest university in the world, started in the fifth century, to which students came not only from India but from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia—when we tried to revive that with coöperation with East Asian countries, the government, the Hindu government, made it no longer a prominent Buddhist university, and it was made to look more and more like a Hindu establishment.Nalanda is not the oldest university in the world. The Muslims destroyed it many centuries ago. With help from Sri Lanka, a successful Pali College was set up in Nalanda. It has long been recognized as a University by the Indian Government. The Nalanda International University of which Sen was the first, and worst, Chancellor, was not Buddhist in the slightest greatly to the ire of the Sri Lankans. By contrast, China's Nanhai is a Buddhist University and is doing well. Thanks to Sen and the VC he chose, Nalanda International University was an utter fiasco. Students complained they could not even get yogurt ! No distinguished academic took up residence. Students had to make do with T.As many of whom lacked even a PhD. Thankfully, after Sen, and Yeo, resigned, a sensible man was appointed and an experienced VC took over the running of the place. But this white elephant was doomed from the start because Sen, very stupidly, insisted it be a Post Graduate College teaching soft subjects. Nobody in their right mind would relocate to a backward part of Bihar to study such shite.
Sen does not understand that Hindu establishments want Jainism and Buddhism and so forth to be well taught. They want the leading Acharyas & Upadhyays of those traditions to come and give lectures and hold symposiums. They don't want some silly American turning up and talking nonsense about Yoga having been invented by the Brits.
I am Hindu, too. [Laughs.] I have nothing against Hinduism. In fact, oddly enough, when I was young, Penguin asked my grandfather to write a book on Hinduism. His English was quite limited. So the first book I had to edit and translate was a book on Hinduism.This slim volume has a foreword by him. It shows he thought Buddhism and Jainism were sui generis and wholly independent of what went before or what survived along side them. This shows a remarkable obtuseness of mind and explains why Sen's Economic and Philosophical lucubrations are wholly worthless.
He was always saying what’s gone wrong in Nehru’s India was talk about Hindu-Muslim tolerance, but what was important was joint work rather than tolerance between Hindus and Muslim—that was to be celebrated as part of five hundred years of Indian history.Continually talking shite helps no one- that is true enough. But 'joint-work' is equally useless. What is important is that people buy and sell goods and services they produce by working hard and using appropriate technology. The market can coordinate their actions, well enough. Religion is irrelevant. So is whether or not you sport a mustache or whether you prefer coffee to tea.
The importance of multiple identities is something that comes up time and again in your work, I’ve noticed—Bangladesh got rid of most of its Hindus- including Sen's Dacca relatives. No wonder it has done better than West Bengal which continues to accept Muslim economic migrants from across the border. East Punjab got rid of its Muslims. It performs much better than Bangladesh or West Bengal. Gujarat, under Modi, did even better.
Absolutely. It is very central. And, if you think about that, Bangladesh has been, in many ways, more successful than India now. It used to have a life expectancy lower than that of India. Now it is five years longer. Women’s literacy is higher than in India. And, in terms of the kind of narrowness of Hindu thinking, it is not reflected in a similar narrowness of Muslim thinking in Bangladesh. I think multiple identities have done a lot for Bangladesh.
It was doing a lot for India, too, until there was a deliberate attempt to undermine it.The deliberate attempt was made by the Muslim League. It is the reason many of Sen's relatives had to run away from their ancestral homes. Sen, however, thinks the problem was created by the RSS. Yet, there has been no ethnic cleansing in RSS strongholds. Why is that?
That had been present earlier. In the nineteen-twenties, there was a strong pro-Hindu movement. Gandhi was shot by an R.S.S. [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Fascist Hindu movement] member, which is the dominant influence on the B.J.P. today.Godse was not a R.S.S member. He had been associated with the Hindu Mahasabha. Savarkar, not Gowalkar, was his Guru.
The R.S.S, unlike the Communist parties, stayed clean and did useful work. Thus it is now the only organization of its kind which enjoys respect. By contrast, the Congress Seva Dal- set up 2 years before the RSS- is a byword for hooliganism and corruption symbolized by its former head Jagdish Tytler.
But they were not in office. We didn’t feel threatened because they seemed like a fringe.Sen's people had felt threatened by the Muslim League, which is why they fled Bangladesh- with good reason, it must be said. The RSS poses no threat to Sen. Why does he feel threatened?
But that fringe gradually became more dominant until the latest election, and they had a massive victory, a victory partially based on political effectiveness.The RSS is a voluntary organization in which members use their own resources, they get no subventions from outside. Since it does arduous social work, naturally its growth has been slow and organic. The late Arun Jaitley is a typical example of the RSS mentality. He was the only barrister to ensure that his staff got their full share of relevant fees and, what's more, paid for their houses and children's schooling. There was an outpouring of genuine grief at his death which no Chidambaram or Kapil Sabil will receive. Indeed, Sabil is now being sued by Barkha Dutt for cheating her and other staff of a TV station he set up to support Congress in the elections. She isn't saying he has himself eaten much of the money provided for the purpose- but then she doesn't have to.
That is why he has been elected. We don't want another Nehruvian gas-bag. Every part of India has almost identical problems- these are of an economic or Law & Order nature- and that is what Modi must address. There is no religion or ethnicity in India which needs the P.M to come and lecture them about their own identity. The thing would be an impertinence.
Modi doesn’t have the breadth of vision about India—multireligious, multiethnic India.
He has been, from his childhood, relating to the R.S.S. and the propaganda of that perspective.While Sen has been, from his childhood, relating to the Bengali buddhijivi and the vacous shite they prattle.
On the other hand, as a political leader, he is dynamic and enormously successful. So there was the Modi factor. They also got a massive amount of money. I was quite surprised how the business community, not just two or three that are often quoted as the big donors, they got support from the bulk of the business community. They had more money and gumption at the time of the election than any other party. They won an election with a massive majority, but, again, you have to look at the issues I have written about, even in the context in America. The electoral system has its flaws. That massive majority he had was based on less than forty per cent of the vote.The business community gave him money to improve the business climate. Poor people couldn't give him money, but they gave him their votes because he does 'last mile delivery' better than the other guys. That's it. That's the whole story.
Sen may say- 'Ah! But if the Electoral system was different...' He might as well say, 'Ah! But if India were located between Sweden and Iceland...' Facts are facts. There is no probability that the Electoral system will be changed in India anytime soon. But, Sen may say, does not this undermine the legitimacy of Modi's mandate? The answer is nobody gives a toss about Sen's notion of legitimacy. Only what the Courts say matters in the short term, though, no doubt, medium to long term, it is the people's voice which counts.
Many Hindus have been shot or put in prison? How come Hindus haven't noticed? In my experience, they tend to get quite vocal when such things happen.
Yes, although unlike someone like Trump or Erdoǧan, who struggle to get much more than fifty per cent support, Modi is enormously popular. A large majority of the country approves of him.
It’s not clear that is the case. India is a country of more than a billion people. Two hundred million of them are Muslim. Two hundred million of them are Dalit, or what used to be called untouchables. A hundred million are what used to be called scheduled tribes, and they get the worst deal in India, even worse than the Dalits. Then there is quite a large proportion of the Hindu population that is skeptical. Many of them have been shot. Many of them have been put in prison.
Do the Muslims, or the Dalits or the Adivasis, or 'skeptical' Hindus want the Dynasty? No. Do they want the Commies? Decidedly not. What about the various corrupt, criminalized, Casteist outfits? No thanks. That's why Modi wins.
In these circumstances, to say that a majority supports him would be difficult.The majority supports Modi because he is the Prime Minister and he is discharging that office in a manner superior to any rival. Sen may not like it, but that's how Democracy works. Preferences can only be revealed over actual alternatives.
It’s a situation where there are many restrictions. The newspapers don’t get government ads, and they probably don’t get many private ads, either, if the government is against you. As a result, it is very hard to have independent TV or newspapers, because of difficulties created by the government.This means that an 'independent press' would ignore a famine if it paid better to do so. This undercuts one of Sen's central arguments.
We can't know anything from John Stuart Mill because he never saw a Democracy in his life. All Government involves discussion. So does the management of any type of Enterprise. Deciding where to dine involves discussion.
The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes.
And that is massively true now. People are afraid now. I have never seen this before.Because, during the Emergency, anybody could shout 'Sanjay Gandhi is a cretin' and do so with impunity.
When someone says something critical of the government on the phone with me, they say, “I’d better talk about it when I see you because I am sure that they are listening to this conversation.”Sen must think we are very naive. A guy who is afraid of criticizing the government would not get on the phone with Sen- because Sen is a critic of Modi. He would not be so foolish as to say 'I'll tell you this in person, coz my phone is tapped'. The secret police would assume he had got hold of dangerous information and would have him 'disappeared' or killed in a car crash or something of that sort.
That is not a way to run a democracy.But it isn't the way India is run. This is just the paranoid fantasy of a senile serial liar.
The BJP, we know, is Sen's bete noire. Whom does he like?
There is a category called Naxals, who are supposed to be Maoist extremists. There are people who have been accused of that and put in prison for that.There you have it. Naxals are falsely accused while Modi's minion's eavesdrop on people who call Sen up on the phone.
You wrote, after the election, “Many might prefer the account that the B.J.P. won what is called ‘the ideological argument’ against the Congress Party. But there has been no particular victory for the philosophy of Hindu nationalism and no noticeable vanquishing of the idea of inclusiveness and unity championed by Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore.” Can you explain what you meant by that, and if you still feel that way?The explanation is not far to seek. Hindu nationalism venerates Gandhi and Tagore. Nehru's dynasty, however, is not venerated because it has hurt, not helped the country. The same is true of Sen. People thought he was smart coz he'd got the Nobel, but he turned out to be a cretin whose every policy suggestion was idiotic.
I do feel that way. It is very easy to excite people on particular causes, like Kashmir, which I think is a bad cause, because there is no reason Kashmir should not have continued to have the dispensation it had as a part of the Indian regime. But it is easy to increase popular support. That, of course, happened in the general election, in much the way it happened in favor of Mrs. Thatcher at the time of the Falklands War. If you remember, Mrs. Thatcher was losing the election, and then came the Falklands War.Both Sen and myself were in England at that time. Mrs. Thatcher was not 'losing the election'. She first won the Falklands War and then, after the economy started picking up, she called an election. Labor was in disarray because Michael Foot had initially been gung-ho about the war. After all, the man had been against appeasement and General Galtieri was a genuine fascist.
I was born that year, so I don’t remember. But yes, the “Falklands factor.”
The Falklands changed the British into becoming nationalists. It didn’t last very long, but enough to get Mrs. Thatcher a massive victory.
If you look at the election earlier this year, a part was played by strong propaganda, a part was played by the fear factor, a part was played by the excitement of the war that was going on between Pakistan and India, when there were government claims about a sabotage of an Indian Army convoy. Worse than war was war hysteria. Given that that’s the test of Hindutva being popular, it wasn’t as popular as the vote indicated. Every time there have been attempts to see whether minorities should be crushed, in the rural areas in India, you don’t see that massive desire to crush the minorities.By contrast, in Muslim countries, crushing minorities seems very popular. What makes India different? Is it the fact that the majority are Hindus?
There is a tolerance of minorities, and that is a strong tradition that continues to this day.His name was Rajiv Gandhi.
India did elect someone as Prime Minister who presided over massive ethnic violence against minorities.
That is true, yeah. One of his big successes has been to get the court to squash the case against him and the Home Minister, Amit Shah, in the Gujarat killings of 2002.Modi was acquitted of that before he came to power. Amit Shah was charged with an extra-judicial killing in 2005. He too was cleared because evidence was fabricated.
And so lots of Indians do not believe it. [In 2002, shortly after Modi became the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, more than a thousand people were murdered in anti-Muslim riots.The anti-Sikh riots in Delhi claimed at least 5000. This was directly linked to Rajiv. Modi, by contrast, brought in the Army to put an end to the violence.
Modi was barred from the United States after being accused of helping incite the violence and failing to intervene to stop it.This happened after Congress came to power. The thing was done at their request. Modi is the only person to whom this has happened. But it was an own goal for Sonia. She was showing that either she was doing something illegal or else the Indian Courts did not have the courage or ability to punish wrongdoing.
I think if you wanted to say there was a victory of the Hindutva idea, then it has to be the case that everyone has a great chance of finding the truth. More public discussion, more newspaper freedom, more television freedom. And with no one threatened with being in prison.Then why shouldn't everybody simply tell lies the way Sen does? The answer is that fake news does not matter, cretins discussing shite don't matter. Hindutva prevailed because people stopped voting their caste rather than casting their vote. This meant that dynasties which depended on caste based vote banks suffered while the BJP gained.
So I think I wouldn’t say that there has been a victory. There would have been a victory if there was a press without fear, censorship from government, and the tyranny of advertising control.Sen is being silly. Why would we be influenced by a mercenary Press only concerned with lining its own pockets? Journalists gain salience when they reject blandishments and threats. People take the Press seriously when some of its members show themselves willing to go to jail. You can't create an independent press by paying it and protecting it. The spirit of independence must be pre-existent in at least some members of the press. Otherwise, the Press loses salience and the sacred flame passes to some other type of actor.
If all this hadn’t happened, and he had won the election, I would have said yes.Sen misses out the most important point. India has been dominated by one increasingly corrupt and incompetent dynasty. Getting rid of that dynasty is a noble ideal- 'Congress mukht bharat'.
It seems to me that it is a longstanding R.S.S. desire to change India in ideological ways.
Yes, they have generated an outlook which is quite effective: “This country has been dominated by Muslim invaders for a long time, and it is our time, and we should destroy that for once and all. And the country is mostly Hindu, and that should be reflected.”
But it overlooks that, in Hindu history, there is a lot of tolerance of different points of view.Sen's own history is one of intolerance of criticism.
I once wrote a book called “The Argumentative Indian,” where I discuss how much arguing there was. They have constructed an ideology, which they have sold and which has become very, very effective.Sen, too, constructed an ideology. Rahul Gandhi adopted it. He explained to a bewildered audience of Indian industrialists that the office of the Prime Minister, even that of an M.P, had lost all importance because his Mum had empowered poor women with all sorts of Rights which they could use to rise up. This was Sen's 'Development as Freedom'. Modi, by contrast, said being Prime Minister was a big deal. If he got the job he'd do a lot for poor people. He made good on this promise and was re-elected. We don't know if he has an ideology. We know Rahul has nothing but an ideology- a 'vichar dhara'. But Rahul's ideology is wholly ineffective. Indeed, it is nonsensical. So is the Communist ideology. But Modi is effective. That's it. That's the whole story.
It’s a sad story, but I think it is a mistake to play up the sadness too much because it is still in our hands. When I grew up in British India, the British were immeasurably more powerful than the Indians were at that time, than Gandhi was, for example, and yet it became possible to win that war.When Sen was fourteen, Lord Wavell was telling the British Cabinet that Britain was so weak that he, as Viceroy, needed to make a contingency plan- Operation
Madhouse- so as to minimize White casualties by executing a ' - withdrawal of the British, province by province, beginning with women and children, then civilians, then the army ..."
However, the fact remains, those Indians who supported the Brits were stronger than those who did not during the entire British Raj. That's the only reason it existed.
In the past month, things have obviously worsened in Kashmir, but Kashmir is also a place where things have been bad since Partition, and especially in the past thirty years. Do you think there was a failure on the part of Indian liberals and intellectuals to speak out about Kashmir during the past several decades?
I think it is certainly part of the story. Kashmir looked like it was Indian-administered, rather than part of India. But, after recognizing that, Indians often carried out very punitive retaliation of the separatist tendencies, sometimes even more than pro-Pakistani tendencies. It was often the case that the separatists got more harmed by the Indians than the pro-Pakistanis, because the pro-Pakistanis could escape to Pakistani Kashmir, whereas the separatists had nowhere to go, and it was easier to destroy them, thereby making the anti-Indian movement turn more pro-Pakistan than for independence. So there were all kinds of political mistakes that were made by the previous governments, too. And, as you rightly say, by a kind of apathy by the Indian majority, even secular majority, to get involved in that story. I think that was a mistake that should have been addressed much earlier.Indian liberals, or intellectuals, are wholly useless. In any case, they quickly move to the West when they get the chance. What good could they possibly have done? The fact of the matter is that India punishes separatism. So does Pakistan. It does not matter if a mere half a percentage of the population, in a border area, are disaffected. India has more than enough military power to crush any resistance there. The fact that it is only Muslims who are disaffected is all the more reason to do so. After all, non-Muslims- like Sen's East Bengali relatives- have been killed or chased out of Muslim majority areas- or areas that subsequently became Muslim majority. The same thing will happen in the Kashmir Valley. It should have been done earlier- but it was always on the cards.
Do you wish you had addressed it more?Sen jumped on the poverty and gender inequality bandwagon somewhat belatedly- when he realized that Economic Journals didn't want to publish any more Social Choice stuff because the thing was nonsensical. His work on Famines, on the other hand, was egregiously false and mischievous. He was saying Democracy could prevent famines though two big Famines had happened in Bengal during his life-time under democratically elected, but corrupt and incompetent, Muslim leaders. These guys also chased his people out of their ancestral homes. By contrast, Hindu Bengal did not retaliate. The Bangladeshi writer, K.Anis Ahmed, has written in the NYT that Muslims who emigrated from West Bengal did so for purely economic reasons. No one was forced out.
Possibly, but I had enough to do. People had other callings, and often found Kashmir difficult to really understand, particularly because you are dealing with essentially an alienated people. And people kept on saying that there was no way of avoiding the situation, except by tough actions. And that was a mistake. Do I think I, too, should have written more about Kashmir? Possibly, yes. I think the answer is yes. But, on the other hand, can I explain why I didn’t? I can, because with famines and poverty and gender inequality and so many other things, my hands were pretty full. So yes and no.
The Gates Foundation just announced they were going to give Modi an award. Are you surprised that internationally he is still seen as a statesman?Gates had previously cosied up to Rahul Gandhi- he spent some time in a village with him- because as he explained on a clip repeatedly aired by NDTV, nobody knew his name in the Indian hinterland. Everybody knew Rahul's. Thus, his Foundation benefited by being associated with that dynast. Gates, it will be remembered, employed a lot of Indians and had a lot Indian customers. However, Gates has now discovered that Rahul is seen as a cretin. Modi, on the other hand, has achieved a lot. So he gives Modi a prize. That is not surprising at all.
Yeah, I think the world likes success, and I think the Gateses like success. And Modi is so powerful that he is often seen as a success of some kind. I was surprised and shocked, quite frankly, by the news of the Gates award to Modi.
You have written a lot about famines and the importance of democracy in preventing famines, the need for democratic accountability, and so on. When you see democracies where institutions get weakened, or respond less, or get captured by non-democratic forces, does that make you think differently on the work you have done on things like famines?Yet the Bangladesh famine happened after free and fair elections had been held and a very popular leader was firmly in the saddle. Indeed, his daughter still rules Bangladesh. It is true that Mujibur Rehman moved in an authoritarian direction- but that was after the Famine was over.
No, I still think famines take place only in the absence of democracy.
Democracy does not succeed so much in preventing non-visibly explosive nastiness, such as regular undernourishment, regular inequality of women, and so on.Nor did it succeed in preventing mass famine in Sen's Bengal twice during his lifetime. In both cases, an Army man did better than a democratically elected politician.
It can be used to do that, but that depends on political organization. Democracy isn’t an automatic remedy of anything.Then why pretend it is?
It isn’t like quinine to kill malaria. Democracy is a way of enabling.Democracy, in Bengal, was a way of disenabling District Commissioners from declaring a Famine and implementing the Famine Code. The result was that some politicians and associated criminals got very rich while millions starved.
The enabling circumstances are very easy with famine. And that is why, even though British India had famine right to the end of imperial rule, it stopped immediately when press freedom became widely available and there was a multiparty election.This is completely untrue. Britain had ended Famine in India by 1902. However they devolved power over Food to popularly elected Provincial Governments in 1935. In Bengal, this led to a big Famine sparked by an exogenous shock or 'Food Availability Deficit'. The fact that there was a free press and multiparty coalitions did not matter. Wavell, a soldier, ended that famine.
It was extremely easy to politicize the nastiness of famine.It is also extremely easy to write stupid lies about Famines and get a Nobel by posing as the 'Mother Theresa of Economics'.
But the nastiness of regular undernourishment, the regular deprivation of women compared with men, and the continuation of bad schooling for children, these are much harder to politicize.Fuck off! These are extremely easy to politicize. The cry 'roti, kapada aur makan' brought down the Old Congress when Sen was in his thirties writing shite about Utilitarianism in Delhi.
I don’t know if I use the word “democracy” too much. But for some things it is a very easy remedy. For others, it is harder work.Bengal's experience shows it is no remedy at all for economic ills.
You seem generally more sanguine about things, and less depressed about the state of the world, than I expected to find you.Sen is being silly. These uncles of his wanted to make common cause with the Japs- who would have fucked India over much more heinously if their invasion had succeeded. Keeping idiotic 'buddhijivis' locked up was in their own best interests. They could have easily got released by giving an undertaking not to be so silly in the future. Many did so under the pretext of being Communists and wanting to 'fight Fascism'.
I wouldn’t say sanguine, but I am sometimes less hopeless than I am expected to be. [Laughs.]
Why do you think you are expected to be hopeless, and why do you think you are not?
Because as a child I came through an experience where things looked really bad. When I was growing up, all my uncles were in prison, in preventive detention, and there was no hope for when they would be released.
When I was nine, there were things like the Bengal Famine, which I saw, where three million people died. I saw Hindu-Muslim riots, including a Muslim day laborer who had come to our largely Hindu area and got knifed by the local Hindu thugs. I was playing in the garden, and he came in profusely bleeding, and he came looking for help and water. I shouted to get my father and I did get a glass of water. He was lying on my lap. My father took him to the hospital, and he unfortunately died there. He told me in an inarticulate way, and my father in a more articulate way, that his bibi, his wife, had told him not to work in a Hindu area, but he said the children had not eaten anything, and he had to get income to get them a little food.Sen did not experience getting knifed by Muslims. On the other hand, his family did lose ancestral property in East Pakistan.
I had never seen anything like that, and the experience, at the age of ten or eleven, to have someone bleeding profusely, and then my father, from the description he gave, had picked up which thugs had killed him. He told that to the police, and the police in this Hindu area refused to do anything. I experienced that, and I experienced India becoming independent.
So I have seen big problems and then their being solved.How were the problems of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan solved? Did they get any compensation? I suppose a few did- in Delhi's Chitaranjan Park. Perhaps people like Sen's father helped, or helped themselves, thanks to their position in the bureaucracy.
That doesn’t mean that I am sanguine. I am not sanguine about anything. It does mean that I don’t see that one has to be hopeless before such hopelessness is due.This is not apparent in Sen's analytical work. His framework is atemporal.
Is there some subject or area you wish you had worked on more?
There are some philosophical problems. I have been so tied up with things that I haven’t gotten back to epistemology, so I have to do more on that.
Because it is important or because it is the type of thing you would like to do?
Both. But I can’t withdraw from politics, especially with what is going on in India. I am a very proud Indian. I am not only a proud Indian. [Laughs.] I am also a proud Asian and proud human being. One of the great advantages of the school I went to, Tagore’s progressive school, was that I was allowed to specialize even as a child of eight or nine, so I studied a lot of history.
Then why does Sen and his ilk do little else?
I once read that you called yourself an “unreformed secularist.” Are you still?
Yeah. That’s not an issue, actually. There should be no need to talk about secularism.
No?How does playing up your identity help when democracy fails? What you need to do is get behind a strong Law & Order guy- otherwise, like Sen's people you have to flee your ancestral home and then keep emigrating farther and farther West till you find a safe haven as a parasite on some more productive People.
Democracy should cover that your origin doesn’t matter. But, if you need to play that up, that is because democracies often fail, and that is why multiple identities become very important.
Do your kids read your work?Does Sen think of himself as a 'high-grade achiever'? He is an Indian Economist who has only harmed the Indian economy. He may have written some sophomoric shite fit only Credential seeking swine but that is a less worthy occupation than writing children's books.
Not a lot. [Laughs.] One is a journalist. Another writes children’s books. Another is a musician. And one is an editor of a magazine. I never particularly wanted them to be high-grade achievers rather than doing what they liked doing.
I didn’t have any predetermined idea about how they should excel. I was astonished to see some actress going to jail, because she tried to push her child—Because people like Sen teach there.
Oh, Felicity Huffman.
What she did seems exorbitant. It may be quite important if you think it is important for your child to go to a good school. It can’t be all that important. [Laughs.]
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