Plain English with Derek Thompson - What Kind of a Superpower Is India Becoming?

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Today’s episode is all about India.You don’t have to believe that demography is pure destiny to appreciate the fact that the future of India is the future of the world. In 2024, today, India is the largest country by population on the planet, having surpassed China two years ago. In 2050, India is still projected to be the largest country in the world. In 2100, when I am 114 years old and this podcast is hosted by my cryo-frozen vat brain, India's projected to be larger than the next two biggest countries combined: China and Nigeria. This spring, nearly one billion Indians are eligible to vote in India's election, and the big winner is almost certain—the highly popular and highly controversial Prime Minister Narendra Modi. What kind of a country is India becoming under Modi? Ravi Agrawal, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, joins us to discuss. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ravi Agrawal Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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New episodes starting March 28th. On Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is all about India. At this very moment, the largest democratic election in the history of the world is taking place in India. More than 960 million people out of a population of 1.4 billion are eligible to vote over the next few weeks. The big winner of this election is almost certain, polls.

strongly suggest that the charismatic leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, BJP, will win a third consecutive term. Modi is a highly controversial figure, but an objectively popular one in his own country. According to a recent morning consult poll, 78% of Indians approve of his leadership. That is by far the highest mark of any leader in the world. No other president or prime minister in the poll scored above 70, no Euro. European leader scored above 60. Biden, for what is worth, is bouncing around somewhere in the low 40s. But as we discuss, Modi is also widely considered a leader with authoritarian tendencies.

His decade in power has overseen a growing economy, yes, but also a decline of the free press and an increase in sectarian religious violence. You don't have to believe that demography is pure destiny to appreciate the fact that the future of India is truly the future of the world. In 2024, today, India is the largest country by population on the planet, having surpassed China two years ago. In 2050, India is projected to still be the largest country in the world. In 2100, when I will be 114 years old and this podcast will be hosted by my cryo-frozen vat brain, India is projected by the UN to not just be the largest country in the world, but larger in population than the next two biggest countries combined.

That would be China and Nigeria. But as India grows and grows and grows, and the largest democracy in the world becomes a bigger player on the world stage, we should ask the question, what kind of a country is India becoming? As Ravi Agarwal, the editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, writes in a long and comprehensive cover story this month, The idea of India is changing from the inside.

A nation founded with an eye toward progressive values is asserting a new identity that is significantly more illiberal and Hindu first. Today's guest is Agarwal, who hosts the FP Live podcast. We talk about a brief history of the idea of India, how the country plays a surprising and unpredictable role in foreign affairs, and how Prime Minister Modi is charting a new path for the country that will almost certainly be the world's largest for the next 100 years. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Ravi Agarwal. Welcome to the show.

Great to be on. The latest issue of foreign policy is devoted to the rise of India. At the biggest picture level, what is it that you think Westerners and maybe Americans in particular don't understand about India? Well, I think one of the things in general is that in the West, we tend to think that every other country in the world wants to be more like us, more Western, more democratic necessarily, more free. And that didn't work out with China. And I don't think it's true of India either.

I think India has its own sense of what it wants to be in the future. When it thinks about models of what it wants to be, there's an element of envy in the way at which it looks at America and also Britain, but also China and also Singapore. and also its own history. So it's very complicated. Indians are going to chart their own path for what they want their country to be. It is democratic in that sense,

and it's what the people want. Your new essay on India and Prime Minister Modi, which anchors the new India issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, is called the new idea of India. And as long as we're discussing the new idea of India, maybe we should start here,

what is the old idea of modern India, according to you? So as with any country, you know, all countries have foundational myths. All countries have ways in which they have debated and contested ideas about who they really are, who they really want to be, what their vision is. And India is no different in that sense. It has always had a vibrant debate and discussion about what it really is. And in the 20th century, the early 1900s when India was beginning to,

put forward a freedom fighting movement to overthrow British colonial rule, there were many different ideas for what India could be. The idea that ended up winning out was an idea of a progressive, liberal, secular country. And the country's founding fathers who put together this idea of what India could be, you know, they had a profound understanding that India was a very divided country. India today as well is a collection of states where people speak different languages. There are different cultures and micro histories, certainly different cuisines. You travel a hundred miles and, you know, there's an entirely different dialect that people might be speaking. And in many senses in 1947, the year India became independent, the idea of uniting all of these groups together was an unlikely

idea. And so what India's founding fathers tried to do is that they united the country through an idea that for this to work, it has to be secular, it has to be liberal, it has to be a vision that is evolving and inclusive, and in many senses different from, say, Pakistan, which was founded as a homeland for Muslims. So in that Pakistan was exclusionary, India would be inclusionary. And that was the vision and the idea of India that prevailed for several decades of, you know, the first sort of version 1.0 of India's existence. I picked the phrase idea of India, by the way, from a book that was a very famous book that came out in 1997, the 50th year of India's anniversary. And it was written by the historian Sunil Kilnani. And his point was

exactly this, that India was an unlikely democracy. What knitted it together was secularism and democracy, basically. So India's progressive, liberal, secular identity was embodied in many ways in its first prime minister, Nehru. He was anglicized, you write, he was Cambridge educated, he went by Joe in his 20s, and that stands in sharp contrast to the current prime minister, Narendra Modi. Before we talk about Modi's policies, let's maybe spend a little bit of time on his biography. How does Modi's upbringing and his early history compare stand in contrast with Nehru? Oh, they were so different. And without ascribing any value judgments, good or bad to any of this, as you point out, Nehru was very anglicized, came from a rich family, you know,

upper middle class at the very least. Before Cambridge, he went to Harrow. So he was as anglicized as it gets. And in many ways, in the first few decades of India's existence as a country, people like Nehru were seen as the ideal of what Indians could be. Fluent English speakers, insider outsiders, but also speakers of an Indian language, deeply knowledgeable about the country, with a vision for what the country could be. Modi is different primarily in that he doesn't come from Nehru's world. he doesn't come from an elite background.

His family was lower cost, lower middle class. His father was a tea seller. Modi was not a fluent English speaker. Still isn't really, he speaks English, but really what he is known for when it comes to his oration, which he's very good at, is Hindi. He's a fantastic Hindi speaker. But when you look at Modi's formative education,

Yes, he's spent some time at a university, not a very well-known one. He joined the RSS, the Rastria Swayam Seva-Ksung, which is best described as a Hindu social movement, also a paramilitary group that has about 5 million members. And Modi essentially traveled around the country as a Hindu community organizer. he'd sleep in ordinary people's homes really got a sense of what the anxieties of the average Indian middle class family were like of what their hopes and dreams and aspirations were like

in many senses if you speak to biographers of Modi that was the thing he often ruined as the source of his thinking as his formative education as it were so he could not be more different from Nehru he comes from a totally different world And before Modi became prime minister, and I think most of the rest of our show is going to be talking about really Modi's India and what makes it distinctive. Before he became prime minister, 10 years ago, he was minister of his home state, Gujarat, on the west coast of India. And in 2002, there were infamous riots in that state that resulted in thousands of deaths and the legacy of this riot.

And Modi is overseeing it, or at least being the main. minister of the state while it happened has been a huge part, I think, of the way that people see him externally and maybe also in India as well. So maybe just tell us a little bit before we finally arrive at the details of the Indian identity in 2024, what happened in Gujarat in 2002? So this is a set of events that have defined Modi and has never left Modi. It's an important part of his biography. He might hate speaking. about it, but it defines him. So in 2002, a group of Hindu pilgrims were coming back from the holy town of Ayodhya, which is a very important town in India today as well, but also in its history.

They were returning to Gujarath, to a place called Godra. And we still don't know why or how this happened, but a carriage of their train compartment caught fire. Fifty-eight of the Hindu pilgrims died in this fire. Almost immediately, Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, sort of like a governor in an American sense, he declared that the incident was an act of terrorism. There is no evidence to this day that what happened was terrorism or that it was caused by someone.

We just don't know what happened. Almost immediately afterwards, rumors began to circulate that Muslims were responsible for the fire. And then very quickly, a mob, a Hindu mob, goes on a rampage. And in that rampage, over the course of two or three days, about a thousand people end up dying. And the overwhelming majority of those people happen to be Muslim. Now, this is remarkable because Muslims are a real minority in the state of Gujarat, and yet an extreme majority of them were killed.

There have been investigations into what happened, and I should point out that no court has ever found Modi guilty of any formal involvement in what happened. He may have stood by. He clearly, this happened on his watch. That is indisputable. But there's been no legal consequences for him for what happened in Godra, which some human rights activists will call a form of a genocide or at the very least a crime against humanity. But here's the thing politically, 22 years on from what happened. This much we know, this event has followed Modi in ways that have been damaging to him, but also in ways that have been to his advantage.

They're damaging because they horrify liberal Indians, they horrify Muslims. In the West, we can't have a discussion with Modi at length without bringing this up. And yet domestically, it's important to know. that there is a fairly large constituency of Hindus who look at an event like Godra in 2002, and their takeaway is, this guy, he would keep us safe. He would do anything to keep us safe. That is their takeaway from 2002.

Remember, since then, he hasn't lost a major election. He kept winning in Gujarat again and again as chief minister. Then in 2014, he tries to become Prime Minister of India, succeeds. 2019, wins with an even bigger majority, and majorities are extremely rare in a country like India, which is a parliamentary democracy. And usually, for most of its history, you've had coalition governments. So whatever happened hasn't really hurt Modi electorally. Modi becomes Prime Minister of India, as you said in 2014. And so if the old idea of India that's been on the way out was secular, progressive, liberal,

What would you say is the new idea of India that has emerged in the last decade? So this is where I think my essay begins to get a little bit controversial. A lot of people have been tweeting about it and responding to me about it. It sparked a little bit of a debate. And I think debate is good. So I think the new idea of India, in my opinion, Modi's vision of India is a country that prioritizes religion and culture over any notions secularism and liberalism. And when I say religion and culture,

I mean specifically Hinduism, 80% of Indians are Hindu, and also to a degree Hindu culture or Hindi speaking. And this vision of Modi's, it's not just his. So I call it a new idea of India. It is also an old idea of India.

I mentioned the RSS earlier, the Rastria Swaram Seibak Sang. back in the 1920s, the people who founded the RSS, they were talking about exactly this. They were saying that if India were to become independent, it should be a Hindu nation because a nation like this would never be a holy land for Christians or Muslims, and therefore Hindus need a holy land,

and that land should be India. So the idea that Modi is now bringing to Frusian is actually a 100-year-old idea from a group that he was part of, that was part of his foundational thinking and acting and learning, and he is now executing on that very vision. He's executing it in a position and from a position of strength, electoral strength, strength in terms of his own popularity, and strength finally in terms of where the country's at. And in any country that has a contestation of ideas, a debate about its identity, things evolve, things change, people change. Sometimes you have an idea whose time isn't right.

Sometimes you have an idea that has just arrived at exactly the moment that people are willing to accept it. I want to pick up the thread of cultural and religious change in India in a moment. But first, I actually want to do a quick turn to economics first, because I want to make it clear when we finally get to the specific record of liberalism or the decline of secular liberalism in India, that we keep that conversation alongside the fact of India's extraordinary growth under Modi. So first, give us a sense of the growth of India in the last 10 years. So in the last decade, India has been growing some years at 7 or 8%, some years a little bit slower, four or five percent. COVID was obviously a huge bit of noise in the data and the trend lines.

It's very clear, though, that India in general has been the fastest growing large economy for a better part of the last decade. I think where it gets more complicated is how much of that has to do with Modi, how much of that has to do with a country that is actually starting from a very low base and has a lot to catch up with. So GDP per capita in India is roundabout in the $2,500 a year range. This is really low. I mean, China is around about 12,000. Mexico's around about 12,000.

If you look at some countries that were at the same level as India in 1970s, say South Korea, well, South Korea is orders of magnitude bigger when you look at average incomes today. So if you look at that bigger picture Zoom, then it seems like India just has a lot of catching up to do. And some would argue that no matter what, its fast growth in the last few years, is something that just was going to happen automatically. This is market forces, globalization, education, you know, gains from mortality rates, gains from people living longer, gains from health care advances, all the kinds of things that many other countries around the world have been through decades ago.

India is going through all of that at the same. time right now. This isn't to say that Modi's stood in the way. He actually has done a few things that I think have encouraged growth in the country. He really has embarked on a massive infrastructure spree. So spending on roads and highways, building train lines, building new airports, the number of airports has doubled in the last decade. He has heavily invested in electricity lines, which are up by 45% in the last decade, the construction of toilets, gas connections. There are all of these things that Modi has really paid a lot of attention to. This is electorally popular.

Now, it's muddy, as all data always is. All of these electricity connections don't always work. All of the toilets aren't always used, et cetera, et cetera. Some of the roads can be shoddy. Construction can often take much longer than you would like. There might be corruption involved, et cetera, et cetera. But by and large, I think if you look at how Indians view Modi, they still see him as someone who is at least mobilizing and trying to put his shoulder to the wheel when it comes to growing the country and trying to bring industry on board. There are problems here.

FDI, foreign direct investment, is actually down over the last five or six years. A bit of a mystery. And domestic investment is also down. And a major sort of reason slash critique here is that, you know, Moby has his sort of preferred partners for his industrial policy, big families like the Mbani's or the Adonis. These are two of India's richest men, billionaires many times over. There's a sense that if you're not them, then things are very difficult in India. There's a lot of red tape. And so investment has been hard to come by. And then finally, employment. India's employment situation is. is not great, especially youth unemployment, which is quite high, much higher than its peers, say Bangladesh, for example, and definitely bodes ill for India's future prospects. It's demographic dividend that everyone loves to talk about could become a demographic disaster. Your book, India Connected, focused on India's digital transformation. And when you look at the

rise of internet penetration in India, and just the sheer number of people, 700, 800, 900 million people connected by internet in one country. It almost seems to me like a little bit the same way that the car was technically invented in Europe that really reached its industrial apex in America. The internet was invented in America, but has arguably transformed India as much as any other country.

Talk a little bit about how India has capitalized on the smartphone and internet boom and maybe just leave a little bit of space in your explanation for how digital payments and biometrics in India work. Because I think this part, of the essay was, I think it's going to be

really unfamiliar to some American audiences and I found it so interesting. Yeah. So thanks for mentioning my book. So India Connected was basically making the case that just as America

was transformed by the car a century ago, which built an ecosystem, the interstate system, suburbia, the picket-fenced home, and along the way an entire ecosystem

of the drive-in mall and theaters and shopping malls and factory outlets and at a cultural level dating, most Americans may have had their first kiss in a car, listen to the release of their favorite song in the car. The car is sort of defined Americana for a couple of generations.

And the case I made in India connected is the smartphone is doing exactly that for Indians. For most Indians, the cheap smartphone, and by this I mean a $30, 40, 50, $60 smartphone that is made by a Chinese company you've never heard of, like Opo or Vivo or an Indian company like Micromax. Those smartphones are for most Indians, their first TV, their first Walkman, their first MP3 player, their first map device,

their first so many things. It is the thing that most Indian teenagers will have their first kiss on and their first date on. It really is building an infrastructure that didn't exist before. In the year 2000, only 2% of Indians had PCs and only 2% of Indians had telephone landlines. Go figure only 2% of Indians were connected to the internet. And that's because I mentioned GDP per capita earlier,

when you make $2,000 a year average income, most people are never going to buy PCs. They are never going to buy laptops. Therefore, they are never going to get online. Smartphone comes along. It's very cheap. Cheap data comes along. It is transformative.

So within the space of 15 years, 700 million people come online for the very first time. They discover the internet. And as they do that, they're discovering it not just in English, but in Hindi and Bengali and Telugu and Tamil and Google's sort of infrastructure of the internet and other languages is taking off. Even illiterate people, by the way, there are 250 million illiterate people in India who can't read a write at all.

They speak to Google in Hindi or Bengali. and they use the internet sometimes, not very well, but they do. So the internet has really become this transformative force equalizer. It has helped many people get online with bank accounts. And much of this, by the way, is a private sector story. Notice how I've been talking about companies and their cheap smartphones, companies and cheap data. The government mostly in the history of India has gotten in the way, hence telephone line lines being so hard to come by.

What Modi has done very well is cash in. So today, for example, with UPI, the Unified Payments Interface, which is the government-run payments, digital payment system, three out of four online payments are made through this system. You go to any roadside vendor from Bombay to Baroda, and your Chaiwala will be able to accept a payment on an Indian app that is the version of Venmo that Indians use, whether it's phone pay or WhatsApp pay or UPI.

That stuff is transformative for a country that is learning a lot of these things, banking, transactions, that is picking up a lot of these things in one fell sweep. and really, I think, is the most transformational force in Indian history. I've always been so interested in the second Industrial Revolution in American history and the idea that in 1865, let's say, there was no such thing as a light bulb, there was no such thing really is electricity, there was no airplane, there was no car, there was no aspirin, there was no Coca-Cola, there was no baseball, There was no, all of American culture was basically invented in this like 30-year sprint of ingenuity. And by the 1910s, we had all of it.

And it wasn't just that we had baseball and hamburgers. We had networked homes. We had houses that were being built with plumbing and often they were being built with telephones as well and working toilets. And it's so interesting to see how actually in a way, the 30-year revolution of the second industrial revolution in America doesn't hold a candle maybe to the changes that India has seen. in the last 20 years. You're talking about a world where 20 years ago, internet penetration was maybe below 2% and now this is an economy

whose payment system has been digitized in just a sensational way. The entire economy or consumer economy now is a digital phenomenon. I always think it's fascinating to think that, I mean, forget within one person's lifetime, within one person's birth to high school graduation journey, the economy has just changed so, so much.

So I want to hold these two things in tension right now. On the one hand, we've talked about India's record of growth. It is growing quickly, partly because of Modi's policies, partly because of catch-up growth, which is a global phenomenon. It's extraordinary rapid technological change. And then at the same time, you have this cultural religious revolution, which in western eyes might seem more like a devolution. There's been a lot of assessments of India's declining freedom in the last decade. And you quote this in your piece, Reporters Without Borders ranked India 161 out of 100,000, out of 180 countries for press freedom.

And in the Freedom House rankings, India has fallen as much as Russia in the last decade. These kind of assessments, you know, it's not like measuring the temperature or measuring GDP. These are agencies' attempts to create a number out of a bunch of different anecdotes and hard to come by data.

What are these assessments picking up on that's important? Why are these agencies all come to the same that India's freedom is declining? I think quite simply because it is. There's truth to it. Indians don't like to hear it. They bristle at these assessments. They say that these assessments are biased or they're Western,

but the truth is they're comparative. That's why they're valuable. This isn't just an assessment of India. When you have global rankings, you're assessing everyone with the same yardstick. And by the same yardstick, India has been declining. And I think that that's the key thing. So there are several axes to it

and the axes don't look good for India. I think if you examine why, I think there are some obvious things that are going on. You know, on press freedom, Modi has never done a press conference. Unlike any other Indian prime minister in its history, he has never done a big press conference. He did one in the United States when he was here with Biden.

But he doesn't like to do them. He does not sit down for interviews with journalists who will ask him tough questions. The Indian media ecosystem has really struggled in the last decade. A lot of the big TV channels, a lot of the big newspapers are owned by, in some cases, families that are close to Modi, in some cases, families that are scared of Modi. The way in which, say, subscriptions work in India, for example, we're obsessed with subscriptions in America, but, you know, Indians don't pay much for content, and we can get into that later. But most of Indian media has subsisted off of advertising. Most advertising is government advertising. And so the government has been able to use levers of, you know, basically money to try and get the media writ large to comply, to provide it favorable.

coverage and Modi's being able to pull all of these levers more effectively than anyone else has before. So the media ecosystem in India is not great anymore. It is harder and harder to practice free and fair journalism. This goes hand in hand with democracy. So a lot of people, especially Indians, they don't like to believe the rankings that show that India is a weakening democracy. They say, look, elections are largely free and fair. The BJP routinely loses state elections and usually wins at the national level. That is proof and evidence. And just to be clear, the BJP is Modi's party. Yes? That's right. That's right. So the BJP, the Bharati-Ajanta party is Modi's political party, different from the RSS, which is the BJP's sort of spiritual umbrella figure

party, to put it simply. So India has elections, which makes a democracy. That's the argument that Indians like to make. And it's true. India is an electoral democracy. But the reason why I call it an illiberal democracy is that when you look at sort of classical liberalism, which prioritizes individual rights, which enshrines freedom of speech, which enshrines secularism, the freedom to profess your faith, for example, those freedoms are dwindling in India as freedom of the press is declining, as the judiciary is becoming less independent.

A lot of scholars have written about this. And so, again, a lot of people in India don't like to hear this, but India's becoming a classic illiberal democracy that is able to sort of have elections and the facade and veneer of democracy, but actually is changing from within, is prioritizing a religion over others

that is electing a national leader who has a dictatorial authoritarian bent to him, sees himself as a CEO-type figure who doesn't need parliamentary debate, who is corolling power in his cabinet, who is picking technocrats to run key parts of his government on his own. So someone who is doing things

that no other elected Prime Minister in India has done before to corral power. In a way, however, that looks democratic outside. As long as we're talking about the dwindling of freedoms, I want to make sure we spend a little bit of time talking specifically about the dwindling of freedoms for Muslims in India. Modi and his party have explicitly sought what you call a Hindu-first agenda. Specifically, how have his policies either elevated the power, of Hindus or alternatively made it harder for Muslims to vote or live or practice?

They've not made it harder for Muslims to vote, but there's a climate of fear and hostility. Some of this is the dog whistles of insinuations. You know, a cricket match could be going on between India and Bangladesh or India and Pakistan and the notion that if you're Muslim, oh, you can't be supporting India. You're Muslim. You must be. supporting Pakistan. Some of that used to just be unsaid. Now it seems like it can be said more openly. There are some things that have changed through legislation. Kashmir, which is majority, Muslim, the only majority, Muslim stayed in India and had always had a separate set of rules that were governing it. Its special status was revoked. This is something that was on the BJP's platform for quite a while. It was in its election manifesto. But again, this has weakened the ability of Muslims to have Kashmir as a state that was a little bit different, a little bit set aside.

It makes it easier for Hindus to come in and buy land and change the demographics of Kashmir. There have been pretty much open vigilante campaigns to attack Muslims who were dealing in butchery, for example. Hindus see the cow as holy. Muslims, of course, eat beef. And for quite a while now, well over a decade, there's been a

spate of high-profile attacks on vigilante attacks even, on Muslims who deal in that trade, and so on and so forth. If you're a Muslim and you want to rent a property in a predominantly Hindu area a little bit harder, you might be said, no, this isn't a place for you

or no, we're not looking for people like you. Little things like that that add up that make it harder for Muslims to feel like they are equal. That's just been mounting over the last decade. Some of it is legislative, some of it is less clear.

There's a climate of fear, climate of hostility. And the other fear is that as the BJP becomes more powerful, this is Modi's party, as it wins more seats in the lower house, as it wins more seats in the upper house, it could even change India's constitution

and change the secular nature of India that was enshrined in the constitution simply because it could amass that much power in both houses of parliament. So there are real fears if you were Muslim. It's not imagined. You write that Indian progressives are in denial about Modi,

and in particular they're in denial about the fact that his brand of a liberalism, even if it doesn't reflect the, let's call it, old idea of India, that his brand of a liberalism is actually in active demand among Indians today. Again and again, in this interview, you said he's a liberal, but also these are open elections. He is winning elections. In fact, it sounds like he won a larger share of the vote in 2019 that he won in the first election 2014. I'd love you to explain a little bit more about who is demanding.

modiism, if we can call it that. If we can say, for example, that Trump's core support in America is middle-aged, white men without a college degree, can we similarly pinpoint a geographical or demographic core of Modi's support in India? I don't think the American political spectrum maps very well to India. But what I can say is that liberal... like to see Modi as purely a supply side issue

so a magnetic, charismatic leader who is autocratic dictatorial, who is able to get his way and so the sense that everything he's doing is top down and there's an appeal to that because it means it's isolated

to one person or one party. I think and this is a provocation I advance in my essay, it's not a popular provocation, A lot of Indian thinkers I know reached out to argue with me. Some were convinced, some haven't been. But I think it's an important provocation to advance and for all of us to contend with.

And here it is. There could be a demand side equation here that there are enough people in India who feel that actually this is what I want. So I know what Modi is doing. I assess all of the changes across economics, the social stuff, the religious, stuff, and I think I'm okay with it. And net net, this is where I think the country should be headed. And this comes back to where we began about the old idea of India, the new idea of India. There was always a sense among some Indians that India should be a Hindu nation. There was always a sense that this is who we are. And when you look at surveys, so the Pew Research Center did

a survey in 2019, 2020, and it found that 64% of Hindus believed that being Hindu was very important to being truly Indian. Fifty-nine percent said that speaking Hindi was foundational in defining Indianness. 84% considered religion to be very important in their lives. You can't ignore those data points. There is clearly a constituency in India that cares enough about religion and Hinduism, that they are not repulsed by the idea of a Hindu nation. So that's one sense of what part of Modi's demographic could be, of his constituency could be.

Quick follow up. What's the deep story there? India has been having democratic elections now for 76, 77 years. So if the popular idea, if the democratically elected idea of the country, has changed significantly of the last few decades from a demand-side perspective that suggests that demand has changed. It is voters' attitudes

about their own identity that has changed. I'm not going to try to do, well, I was going to say, I'm not going to try to do the thing where, as an American, I just try to relate everything to Trump. I am actually going to do that a little bit. I think with Trump,

there's all sorts of political analysts who have a deep story on offer for what happened to America, what happened to the Republican Party, such that the gates open for a character like Trump to entire, inhabit the GOP.

Why is there, let me see if I can get this question exactly right, why do you think the Hindu identity has a stronger salience in 2024 than it had, say, in the 1980s and 1990s before this kind of politician was broadly successful? That's a great question. So I think supply doesn't change on its own,

demand doesn't change on its own. I think they move hand in hand over time. But I think the biggest thing, is that India is just different than what it was 30, 40 years ago. It is richer, it is more powerful, it is more confident, it is more assertive. And so the people who felt 50, 60 years ago

that the ideal person or the way to be was an anglicized Nehruvian type, they now look at Modi and they're like, wow, this guy is, you know, shaking hands with Joe Biden and hugging Barack Obama. well, maybe that's the way to be. And he's a Hindi speaker, and he dresses like, you know, he's a proud Indian,

what used to be called a Neru vest, and now people call a Modi jacket. If he can do that, why can't we? If he can make us proud to just be who we are, then what's wrong with that? So there's a sense of Hindu revivalism, a sense of an awakening of pride, a sense of a civilizational destiny that Modi is able to play on very well. And I think when it comes to that, you see both supply and demand changing at the same time. So some of that is a self-actualization. I think the Trump comparisons are really interesting to make.

I mean, my own sense is that Trump co-opted the party. If you try to understand what exactly the GOP is today or what's left of it today, it sort of begins and ends with whatever Trump wants or whatever he's thinking and saying in that current. moment becomes GOP policy and there's no sort of older ideological consistency or through line across at all. With Modi, you can't really say that. Like, there is an ideological consistency. There is a party line. There is a party route in the RSS, which we were discussing earlier. And so there's a 100-year through line to many of the things Modi is trying to bring. And so when you have like liberal scholars pointing out that actually the next step could be,

be turning India formally into a Hindu nation, that's because that is exactly what the ideological forebears of Modi have argued for. So the through line is actually quite important there and is a warning we must all heed.

There are many other differences, I think, between Modi and Trump. Modi is actually a fairly competent executor of policies. He's made big mistakes, but he is competent. He is predictive. He is predictable. He is not chaotic. He likes to get his hands dirty with policy. He picks a lot of

technocrats. All of those things are not things you could say about Trump. Yes, they are both strong men. Yes, there's an element of populism to both. Yes, both rely on the forces of nationalism. Yes. Both like to pick fights with the media. Both have presided over, regimes that have hurt the press, that see the press sometimes as an enemy of the people. There are commonalities, of course. They may even be learning from each other as dictators and strong men around the world do. They are not the same. One big difference between Modi and Trump that I'm hearing in this interview is that Modi has an ideology. He has a very consistent ideology over decades. Trump's ideology doesn't extend any further than his skin. His ideology is,

I want to be rich and I want to be famous, and I'll say and do whatever I can to be rich and famous. And unfortunately, people that are under him essentially have to find some way to shoehorn what is essentially grandiosity into a kind of politics. But he has no clear, I mean, he has some policy consistencies. He's been against China for a long time. He's been against it appearing that America loses trade deals for a long time. But by and large, his ideology is entirely self-serving, Whereas it seems like love it or hate it, and obviously hundreds of millions of people feel both ways, Modi has a very clear ideology that it's been consistent for many decades. It is interesting, and you can respond to this or not, but you've already alluded to it in a way.

Interesting, the degree to which I think there's an assumption that maybe goes back to Fukuyama and end of history, that wealth and liberalism and freedom exist in a kind of flywheel. And as I'm hearing you talk, it's interesting that the U.S. right now is probably the single fastest-growing industrialized country in the world, India is one of the fastest growing developing countries in the world. Both of these countries that are richer than they've ever been by GDP and maybe GDP per capita may very well elect strongmen that are objectively illiberal in their outlook. And this relationship between liberalism and wealth isn't necessarily a clean, linear relationship. I think your former boss, Reid Zakaria has written about this.

More than a few times, I don't know if he wanted to dial it on that point. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is where I think Fukuyama got it completely wrong. History didn't end with 1989. And Farid had it exactly right. I mean, in many ways, and I've said this to Farid, we're living in Farid's world. So in his book, The Future of Freedom, he pretty much advanced and popularized the idea that as we reward countries for becoming democracies, they are then encouraged to sort of provide us with the fig leaf of democracy,

but many of them will become illiberal democracies. And we are now seeing that play out in country after country after country around the world, perhaps even in a way that Farid may not have anticipated. And then his other big book, The Post-American World, which gave birth to the phrase the rise of the rest, that is exactly the world we're in, a world of relative American decline and the rise of the rest, which is best exemplified by a country like India. And so you have the relative rise of India, which comes after the relative rise of China, and a world in which countries like India, they smell American decline, they see that they can call themselves democracies and yet not take the trouble to put in place

all the things that liberal democracies need to do, a free press. solid human rights, so on and so forth. You don't need to do that because you can just call yourself a democracy by having elections and you can practice an illiberal form of that. And then here's the cherry on the cake. A lot of people want that. So there's enough people who feel that this is the right way to go. And it's kind of where we began this discussion because a lot of Indians, they, you know, there are elements of America that they look to with some envy. But they're also elements of Singapore that they look to and admire. There are elements of China that they look to and admire. And they often think, well, look at how clean the roads are there. Look at the infrastructure.

Look at the number of airports. Look at how well there people are doing. What are we getting wrong? Why can't we do some more of that? And that's part of the impetus for going with someone like Modi, rightly or wrongly. I mean, there are many economists who will say, you know, if you needed a business-friendly prime minister, there are many other people you could have gone for. There are people who are far better at economics than Modi, of course. And he's made many mistakes on that front.

But this is all about perception and marketing, and that's how most Indians are thinking. I want to be clear that I don't, not suggesting that wealth is creating illiberalism, In many ways, it seems to me that the BJP is according to your own reporting, their dominance is in the country's north, whereas it's the wealthier south where the tech firms are flourishing and literacy rates are higher, where more people are voting against Modi. And not that Modi is the Indian Trump, but there are similarities there where college-educated Americans are moving toward the Democratic Party, and it's less educated Americans that are sticking with the Republican Party. And so in a way, it's not that as people get richer, they become more liberal. It's more that in America, at least, economic growth has coincided with both cultural and

economic inequalities. Economic inequality, people feel like they're falling behind economically, cultural inequality, people feeling like these, you know, hoity-toity progressives in the ivory towers and living in New York or forcing a cultural revolution on them that they don't want. And then they turn to a strong man who can defend the liberal wave. And so it's a complicated set of dominoes, but it is interesting hearing a few echoes between India and the U.S. there. I would be a pretty bad interviewer if I had the chance to speak to the editor-in-chief of foreign policy, and none of my questions were about foreign policy. So let's end with foreign policy.

Many Americans right now fear and many American journalists are talking about the tightening relationships between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, this sort of dark access of powers in the East. India seems like an interesting free agent here. India buys a huge amount of Russian crude, which goes against Western policies. The U.S. is trying to economically embargo Russia. But there doesn't seem to be a very warm relationship between China and India. How should we see India's foreign policy relative to the great power struggle that seems to be emerging between the West and this nexus of power in the East, led by China and Russia? Yeah, that's a great question. And so, you know, historically, India has been what it likes to call non-aligned.

Back in the day, Nehru and Tito of Yugoslavia and Nasser of Egypt, you came together and they would run the non-aligned movement summit. And of late, of course, that movement then, you know, ended up becoming, you know, something that a lot of Latin American countries and very sort of left-oriented ended up dominating. But India, over the last decade, has become a little. bit less non-aligned in that it doesn't necessarily want to stay out of great power competition. It wants to act more from a position of strength. Most of all, it wants to assert its self-interest in every single situation. So, you know, when it comes to Ukraine, for example, you know, India looked around, it saw that U.S. sanctions on Russia were steep and it realized that a couple of things. One, that it could buy a lot of Russian oil on the cheap, which it did. Two, by the way,

that wasn't the worst thing for the world, because if India didn't buy it, global oil prices would go up. So it's not like Washington doesn't know India's doing this. It's not like Washington doesn't even want India to do this. They're all okay with it. It's just that India's buying it on the cheap, which means Russia gets less money, hence the oil cap, the price cap. By the way, India also refines a lot of that oil into diesel, a lot of which finds its way to Europe. So a lot of Russian oil actually is ending up in Europe. No one likes to talk about it, but it's happening. But the moral of this really is that India likes to pick and choose its moments.

It likes to, someone's called it before, Alacart foreign policy. So to be everyone's friend, it has this old historic friendship with Russia, for example. It has had a sort of frenemy relationship with China. and it knows, by the way, that America needs it, in part because it sees India as this balancing force in Asia. But India's also been able to spin it in a way in which America doesn't know that if it had to go to war with China over Taiwan, it has no idea whether India would come to its help. By the way, I don't think India would come to China, to America's help. India's in it for India. And again, this is where foreign policy has become domestic, policy, all of this that I'm describing is incredibly popular at home.

So last year, Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, accused India of assassinating someone on Canadian soil. This was a Sikh person that India has declared a terrorist because he wanted to found a state called Khalistan and carve it out of Punjab in India's west. India sees him as a terrorist, rightly or wrongly. Canada says India paid someone to assassinate him. Now, for Canada to come out and say that, they must have had some proof. They must have felt that no matter the consequences, we have to come out and say this. India's reaction was, no, we didn't do it.

And that reaction, so you would think that the Prime Minister of Canada accuses Modi in public of orchestrating a murder of someone else on another country soil, another democracy soil. You'd think that Modi would pay some domestic price for this. No, the general response in India was, no, no, no, we didn't do it. But if we did, we did the right thing. Because our time has come. Because we are strong.

Because we are muscular. Because Hindus can do these things too. Because India has a tough, assertive, strong foreign policy. And so a lot of this that I'm describing is, connected with Modi's domestic policies and with Modi's Hindu revivalism and his creation of this idea of a stronger Hindu nation. You've mentioned a few times that you published this essay, The New Idea of India, and some people said that they disagreed with its fundamental argument. What would you being wrong look like? What would you have to learn about India in the next six months, year, to suggest that you had the wrong idea?

That's such a great question. Well, for starters, Modi could lose, and then I would look pretty stupid. That's one thing. Two, he could also win, but not with a real majority. And the thing is, you know, I don't care about being right or wrong in any of this. Like, that's not the point of it. The point of the essay was a provocation, which is to say that, A, India's changing, B, the change isn't just top down. Some of it is bottom up. After all, this is a country in which

half of the population is under the age of 25. So when things are changing, they're changing rapidly from new voters and new constituencies who might have a very different idea of what the country is. And we might not have any idea who they are and what they want. So the elections are important in that sense. I think, you know, some people have read my essay and taken from it a sense of finality that when I say there's a new idea of India, that this is it, this is done. That's the only thing India is ever going to be. And I think that would be an incorrect reading of the essay. I'm just saying that there has always been a contestation of ideas of India, of what India could be. Right now, it seems like Modi's vision,

which is the RSS's vision, of Hindu pride, Hindu revivalism, of prioritizing religion and culture over secularism and liberalism, this is a moment where that idea is flourishing.

20 years from now, that could change again. No society is static. Countries always have an ongoing contestation of ideas. And I think that's likely where India will head in the future as well. Ravi Agarwal. Thank you so much.

Real pleasure. This is fun. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Biroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. For feedback and episode suggestions, email us at plain English at spotify.com.