Interview/ Mani Shankar Aiyar, former Union minister
Mani Shankar Aiyar says the biggest reason for his success and fall from grace was his gift of the gab. In his latest book, A Maverick in Politics (Juggernaut), Aiyar, true to form, does not mince words. He takes a no-holds-barred look at the last three decades plus of his high-profile public life. And in turn, he casts the lens on the tumultuous progress of politics in India, post-liberalisation.
Ranging from his falling out of favour with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and how P.V. Narasimha Rao got more done without doing anything even as the nation burned, Aiyar makes good copy, describing how he almost got lynched by J. Jayalalithaa’s party mobs, his apprehensions as a sports minister at the goings on leading up to the Commonwealth Games scam, and the umpteen power struggles in the Congress party in general, and the UPA in particular.
Being frank to a fault, Aiyar does try to justify the many comments he made that landed him in hot water, right from calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi neech to quipping that Sheila Dikshit was like a gangster’s moll in a Bollywood flick. As his exclusive interview with THE WEEK shows, the ex-diplomat does not believe in remaining diplomatic in the sunset years of his life and he is convinced that the future of India lies in being fundamentally secular. Edited excerpts:
Q/ In your book, you have detailed issues that have cropped up because you said things some people did not like. You firmly believe in a particular way of life where you can have opinions which may differ from somebody else’s, but you can still be friends and work together. That kind of an approach seems to be lacking now.
A/ For good reason. I was six years old when Jawaharlal Nehru became prime minister. My growing up years were all in the ethos of the idea of India which Nehru had spelt out in his Discovery of India. And that idea of India was what enabled him to do something that nobody in the world had done before―to trust the illiterate Indian, to trust the superstitious Indian, to trust the fractious Indian, to express his opinion openly as to who should run the country and how the country should be run.
Nobody believed that we could have a Westminster-style democracy in India on day one.
And Nehru brought it in full scale, along with affirmative action, which had never been known in the world before, for the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes.
In that atmosphere, it was normal and natural to regard opponents in politics or even ideological opponents as opponents who could be converted or who could convert you to their view or thinking. They were not enemies, they were opponents. And they had their own reasons and you had your own reasons. And reason should be pitted against reason.
But, unfortunately, from about the year 2000, when in opposition, the Congress Parliamentary Party under the influence of Priyaranjan Das Munshi started [the practice of] demonstrating more than debating.
I had objected to that at that time, saying that the BJP will quickly learn from us. And that is what has happened. We are now on an escalation of demonstration rather than debate.
And the BJP has no sense of democracy because hindutva is based on violence. It is based on domination. It is based on majoritarianism. It is based on arbitrary rule.
We are losing our sense of democracy. The result is chaos in Parliament, session after session.
Q/ You say that Modi’s idea of India could be an accidental aberration. But do you think things have changed so much that that is now the idea of India?
A/ I have attempted to lay out the rationale behind Nehru’s idea of India. And quoting extensively from Savarkar, Golwalkar, and then in recent times what has been happening [and] what’s being said, I have laid out the alternative idea of India that is being propagated by Mr Modi with the full backing of the BJP, the RSS, and the rest of the sangh parivar.
It is quite clear that these two alternative ideas of India are not compatible. And in my view, the distinction is that the Nehruvian idea is a civilised idea, encompassing the importance of reconciling differences of opinion.
There is a certain brutality about the sangh parivar’s idea of India, and that brutality does not translate into a democratic or even a moral ethos. It is an unethical attempt at domineering. That’s not democratic. Unfortunately, our country in the last 11 years or so, has been ruled by people who have this alternative idea of India.
Now, Nehru’s justification for his idea of India was that it was based on the evolution over 5,000 years of a certain attitude of mind, which Amartya Sen brilliantly summed up in the title of his book, The Argumentative Indian. And as argumentative Indians, we took nothing as carved in stone. We keep an open mind.
Look at the way India was ruled from Delhi by Muslim rulers for 666 years, from 1192 till 1858. India is the only country in the world that was never completely defeated by Islam, as were all the countries from Afghanistan to Mauritania, the whole of north Africa… through Indonesia, which is the biggest Muslim country in the world, to southern Philippines. They were victorious everywhere. They were defeated outside France and [kicked out from] Andalusia after ruling it for 700 years.
So, elsewhere in the world, Islam was either triumphant or totally defeated. But here in India, they were so integrated with the existing ethos that after 666 years of Muslim rule in Delhi, only 24 per cent of Indians were Muslim. It just shows that the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate before them realised that they couldn’t convert this country out of its own Indic civilisation.
The Indic civilisation was capable of absorbing and assimilating the influences from outside, with the result of the Sufi movement of the Muslims and the Bhakti movement of the Hindus, which incidentally took place entirely through the period of Muslim rule in Delhi.
And that is why, while the Muslims may have ruled, they didn’t even try to convert the entire country to Islam as they did elsewhere. So, this is the genius of India and instead of accepting the genius of India, you start talking about Aurangzeb levying the jizya (tax on non-Muslims)!
So, what do you want to do? Do you want to levy a jizya on the Muslims and the Christians of India? What nonsense is this?
To answer your question, the hindutva system of thought is based on prejudice. The Nehruvian idea of thought is based on 5,000 years of civilisation. What we have to see in the future is whether the basest instincts of India and Indians will prevail over the long 5,000 year tradition of accepting diversity.
So, are we going to get unity through uniformity or will we have to stick to unity through diversity? I believe that apart from this aberrant time through which we are living, basically, India will either disintegrate by forcing it into a unity in uniformity, or we will flourish, as we have flourished for 60 years or 65 years before Modi came to power as a country dedicated to the principle of unity in diversity and constitutional democracy.
Q/ One of the factors which even many of the so-called liberals will kind of agree to is that politically, all said and done, there has been some element of appeasement that has happened towards Muslims, which is probably at the core of why there has been a reaction from the other side. Would you agree?
A/ What the sangh parivar calls tushtikaran (appeasement) is what I call compassion.
Are you trying to tell me that Islam is a religion of evil? That the only thing they have is evil social practices? That [Hindus] are so noble that we have no undesirable social practices? How did the SC come? How did the ST come? It was because social discrimination was not only written into the Hindu way of life, it was also sanctified by the Manusmriti.
Now, we have changed those because we are a hugely majority Hindu country. But I’ve often wondered how a Parliament of 4 per cent [membership of Muslims] can determine what Muslim law should be.
Every single religion and every single culture in the world requires reform. But it has to be done consensually. If it is imposed from outside, it won’t last very long.
But if you put a community under siege, then naturally they will react. Is India a Hindu country or is India a composite of every religion that the world has known, along with a phenomenal diversity of language, of culture, of ethnicity?
There’s no country in the world that has the diversity of India. And it’s only because wise people like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru realised that you can only preserve the unity of the nation on the basis of not just respecting, but celebrating, diversity.
And that is what makes our country great. That is what’s called secularism. And these people reduce it to triple talaq!
Q/ Going back to the idea of India and the new idea of India. With all your experience and hindsight, what do you think is the future of Modi’s new idea of India? Do you think it’s going to last?
A/ First, I reject the word new. Modi is pretending that he has produced something new. He is just repeating what Savarkar has been saying. And that’s a century old.
So, it’s not a new idea. It’s an alternative idea. And I don’t like this alternative idea. Because I don’t think it is rooted in the Indian reality. It’s not rooted in the Indian identity. And that is why I would much rather rely on 5,000 years of an Indic civilisation to determine the future of this country than an aberration of 10 or 11 years.
Don’t forget that at least 60 per cent of Indians have never voted for the BJP. If Modi is in power, it’s because of the peculiarity of our first-past-the-post system. And he is trying to use this completely false majority to substantially alter the nature and ethos of our Constitution. And so, he needs to be opposed with the confidence that we can defeat him.
If we can only rally the 65 per cent of Indians together and not have their vote split. In 2024, we were just 10 seats behind Modi. If we had just put in a further effort, we could have easily been the single largest bloc in Parliament.
So, it didn’t happen this time. And it may not have happened in Haryana and Maharashtra because the alliances were not fully made. And it may not happen in Delhi now.
But ultimately the answer lies in the Congress party recognising that it is no longer the natural party of governance. And that being so, we should adjust ourselves not in terms of becoming a pale imitation of the BJP, which is what many Congressmen want it to be, but by asserting the independent philosophy of Gandhi ji, Nehru and all the other leaders who have, through the Congress, brought secular ethos to this country. A secular ethos that is acceptable to a range of regional leaders starting perhaps with M.K. Stalin and the DMK, extending to Mamata Banerjee, continuing through Tejashwi Yadav to, I would say, Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. And of course the Aam Aadmi Party and even the Akali Dal or the National Conference.
We are the natural alliance to run the government. The Congress may no longer be the national party of governance but INDIA is the natural alliance of governance.
And if only we can make it stronger, make it more cohesive, make its identity deeper in the Indian psyche, then Modi and these ghastly 10 years, which are now going to extend to 15, can be put away in history as being a bad dream, like Aurangzeb’s rule was a bad dream. And that lasted much longer.
Q/ It is not just political transformation, it is also a massive cultural and sociological change that has happened among the public, regarding this new concept of India. What do you think the Congress should do? Not just in politics, but in these areas, too.
A/ I would like to emphasise again that half the Hindu population of India has never voted for the BJP. And at times, like the 2024 Lok Sabha election, perhaps 60 per cent of Hindus didn’t vote for him.
You ought to have faith in 5,000 years of civilisation, not temporarily somebody changing his opinion. You know, sometimes I wear a red tie and sometimes I wear a grey tie. That doesn’t mean that I fundamentally change. So, these people are going along with the wind.
The idea of India is much wider [than saying] ‘I don’t like Modi; that’s not the idea of India’―it is much more all-embracing. I would ask the Congress to do, as John Major famously said, return to basics.
Get back to making every single Congress worker read some readable version of The Discovery of India. Give it in every language, give the main points. And that is how we engage in an ideological battle. The political battle will automatically be won. [But,] you also need to win the battle of minds.
All this will come only if we reassert our belief in the Gandhian, Nehruvian ideal of India. If we can go back to our ideology and fight them on the ideological front at every level―if not through the Congress party then through the INDIA Alliance, we are going to prevail. Perhaps as quickly as the next five years.
And certainly we can defeat anybody who is non-biological and believes he is on a divine mission from God. What kind of rubbish does the man think?
Q/ As an insider and an outsider to the Congress party, what are the concrete steps you feel Rahul Gandhi needs to take to take this concept forward?
A/ I am not an adviser to the Congress president Mr Kharge nor to Rahul Gandhi who is otherwise the leader of the Congress.
I don’t have any advice to give, as I am on the margins. But there are two elements of an approach I have outlined―one, recognise that we are not the natural party of governance [and] stoop to conquer by accepting the other leaders of the alliance as equal to ourselves. Concentrate on consolidating this alliance.
And two, as far the sangh parivar is concerned, fight it ideologically at all the levels.
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A Maverick in Politics: 1991-2024
By Mani Shankar Aiyar
Published by Juggernaut
Price Rs899; pages 411