Podcasts about tripurdaman singh

He's lived a rich life as a journalist, a human rights activist, an author, a columnist -- and now he's written a great book on Gujaratis. Salil Tripathi joins Amit Varma in episode 409 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his life, his learnings, these times we live in -- and the times that came before. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Salil Tripathi on Twitter, Instagram, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Amazon. 2. The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community -- Salil Tripathi. 3. The Colonel Who Would Not Repent -- Salil Tripathi. 4. Offence – The Hindu Case -- Salil Tripathi. 5. Detours: Songs of the Open Road -- Salil Tripathi. 6. For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit -- Edited by Shilpa Gupta and Salil Tripathi. 7. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 8. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 9. Saraswatichandra (Gujarati) (English) -- Govardhanram Tripathi. 10. Gujarat Ni Asmita -- KM Munshi. 11. I Follow the Mahatma -- KM Munshi. 12. Devdutt Pattanaik and the Stories That Shape Us — Episode 404 of The Seen and the Unseen. 13. Ahimsa: 100 Reflections on the Harappan Civilization — Devdutt Pattanaik. 14. Until the Lions -- Karthika Nair. 15. Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity — Manu Pillai. 16. The Forces That Shaped Hinduism -- Episode 405 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Manu Pillai). 17. Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain -- Fintan O'Toole. 18. Understanding Gandhi: Part 1: Mohandas — Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 19. Understanding Gandhi: Part 2: Mahatma — Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 20. Gandhi Before India -- Ramachandra Guha. 21. Objects From Our Past -- Episode 77 of Everything is Everything. 22. The Diary of Manu Gandhi (Part 1) (Part 2) -- Edited and Translated by Tridip Suhrud. 23. The Ferment of Our Founders — Episode 272 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Kapila). 24. Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister — Amit Varma. 25. Akhil Katyal's poem on caste. 26. Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie. 27. Bare Feet – a Poem about MF Husain -- Salil Tripathi. 28. My Mother's Fault -- Salil Tripathi. 29. Jejuri -- Arun Kolatkar. 30. Yashwant Rao -- Arun Kolatkar. 31. The Patriot -- Nissim Ezekiel. 32. Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne -- Satyajit Ray. 33. You're Missing -- Bruce Springsteen. 34. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Ved Mehta and John McPhee on Amazon. 35. All We Imagine as Light -- Payal Kapadia. 36. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha Is the Impartial Spectator — Episode 388 of The Seen and the Unseen. 37. On Tyranny -- Timothy Snyder. 38. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity — Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen. 39. Saving Capitalism From The Capitalists -- Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales. 40. Check out Johan Norberg's great work. 41. The Life and Times of the Indian Economy — Episode 387 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 42. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality — Amit Varma. 43. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs — Episode 46 of Everything is Everything. 44. On Inequality — Harry Frankfurt. 45. Economic growth is enough and only economic growth is enough — Lant Pritchett with Addison Lewis. 46. Sample SSR conspiracy theory: He's alive! 47. Amit Varma's 2022 piece on the mess-up at The Wire. 48. Television Price Controls — Episode 27 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashok Malik). 49. The Selfish Altruist -- Tony Vaux. 50. Sadanand Dhume's tweet on the hypocrisy around The Satanic Verses. 51. Bad Elements -- Ian Buruma. 52. Biju Rao Won't Bow to Conventional Wisdom — Episode 392 of The Seen and the Unseen. 53. Can Economics Become More Reflexive? — Vijayendra Rao. 54. The Life and Times of Teesta Setalvad — Episode 302 of The Seen and the Unseen. 55. Aakar Patel Is Full of Hope — Episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen. 56. The Wal-Mart Effect -- Charles Fishman. 57. Modern South India -- Rajmohan Gandhi. 58. The Adda at the End of the Universe — Episode 309 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Sathaye and Roshan Abbas). 59. Whatever happened To Ehsan Jafri on February 28, 2002? — Harsh Mander. 60. Jai Jai Garvi Gujarat -- Narmad. 61. The Populist Playbook -- Episode 42 of Everything is Everything. 62. Where the Green Ants Dream -- Werner Herzog. 63. People's Linguistic Survey of India -- GN Devy and others. 64. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal — Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 65. Stage.in. 66. Reading Lolita in Tehran -- Azar Nafisi. 67. Two Concepts of Liberty — Isaiah Berlin. 68. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 69. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 70. Shruti Rajagopalan's talk on the many amendments in our constitution. 71. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back — Subhashish Bhadra. 72. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 73. Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life — Episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen. 74. Goodbye Solo — Ramin Bahrani. 75. The desire to help, and the desire not to be helped — Roger Ebert's review of Goodbye Solo. 76. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada -- Shahu Patole. 77. Firaaq -- Nandita Das. 78. How the BJP Wins — Prashant Jha. 79. The BJP's Magic Formula — Episode 45 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Prashant Jha). 80. The Year of Living Dangerously -- Peter Weir. 81. Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Francois Truffaut and Aparna Sen. 82. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and London Review of Books. 83. Ravi Shankar, Zakir Hussain and Vilayat Khan on Spotify. 84. Nadine Gordiner, Fintan O'Toole, Ilya Kaminsky, Karthika Nair, Ruchir Joshi, Kiran Desai, Nilanjana Roy, Sunil Gavaskar and Mike Brearley. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Asmita' by Simahina.

He's a polymath who cares deeply about the world, tries to understand it, and straddles many fields. He's played a key role over the last few decades in India's journey towards development. Ajay Shah joins Amit Varma in episode 402 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life and times. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.)   Also check out: 1. Ajay Shah on Twitter and Substack. 2. Everything is Everything -- Ajay Shah's YouTube show with Amit Varma. 3. Life Lessons -- A course taught by Ajay Shah and Amit Varma. 4. In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 5. XKDR Forum. 6. The LEAP blog. 7. Previous episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 8. The Surface Area of Serendipity -- Episode 39 of Everything is Everything.  9. The Economic Lives of the Poor -- Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. 10. The Universe of Chuck Gopal — Episode 258 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. The Hiking Episode -- Episode 35 of Everything is Everything. 12. Declutter -- Episode 30 of Everything is Everything. 13. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande — Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. Pushpesh Pant Feasts on the Buffet of Life — Episode 326 of The Seen and the Unseen. 15. The Life and Times of Ira Pande -- Episode 369 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. A Meditation on Form -- Amit Varma. 17. A Passion for Cycling -- Episode 53 of Everything is Everything. 18. Il Lombardia: Tadej Pogačar delivers historical fourth consecutive victory. 19. Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. 20. Seven Stories That Should Be Films -- Episode 23 of Everything is Everything (including Ajay's retelling, 'The Fat Frogs of Tatsinskaya'). 21. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 22. VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India — Narayani Basu. 23. Five Epic Stories That Must Be Films -- Episode 29 of Everything is Everything (including Amit's retelling of VP Menon's story). 24. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt. 25. The God That Failed -- Edited by Richard Crossman. 26. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 27. Free to Choose -- Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. 28. Both Sides Now -- Joni Mitchell. 29. How to Write a Paper -- Episode 62 of Everything is Everything. 30. Jim Corbett on Wikipedia and Amazon. 31. Trek The Sahyadris -- Harish Kapadia. 32. Inflation Targeting Rocks! -- Episode 68 of The Seen and the Unseen. 33. The Heckman Equation. 34. A Deep Dive Into Education -- Episode 54 of Everything is Everything. 35. The Two Cultures -- CP Snow. 36. Shivaji and His Times -- Jadunath Sarkar. 37. Suyash Rai Embraces India's Complexity — Episode 307 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Seeing Like a State — James C Scott. 39. The Tyranny of Experts — William Easterly. 40. Are You Just One Version of Yourself? -- Episode 3 of Everything is Everything. 41. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 42. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan — Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 43. Our Population Is Our Greatest Asset -- Episode 20 of Everything if Everything. 44. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 45. Plato (or Why Philosophy Matters) — Episode 109 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rebecca Goldstein). 46. How to Do Development -- Episode 57 of Everything is Everything. 47. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity — Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen. 48. The Life and Times of Chess -- Episode 52 of Everything is Everything. 49. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 50. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 51. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 52. The Beauty of Finance -- Episode 21 of Everything is Everything. 53. What's Wrong With Indian Agriculture? -- Episode 18 of Everything is Everything. 54. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 55. The Importance of Finance — Episode 125 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 56. India in Transition: Freeing the Economy -- Jagdish Bhagwati. 57. The UNIX Episode -- Episode 32 of Everything is Everything. 58. Don't Mess With the Price System -- Episode 66 of Everything is Everything. 59. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything. 60. The Ghost and the Darkness -- Stephen Hopkins. 61. India's Massive Pensions Crisis — Episode 347 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah & Renuka Sane). 62. Understanding India's Pensions Disaster -- Episode 65 of Everything is Everything. 63. What Bruce Springsteen Means to Us -- Episode 13 of Everything is Everything. 64. Distance From Delhi -- The Takshashila Institution. 65. Beyond A Boundary -- CLR James. 66. Letters for a Nation: From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers 1947-1963 -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 67. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister — Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. 68. The Long Road to Change -- Episode 36 of Everything is Everything. 69. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills — Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 70. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working -- Jonathan Rauch. 71. Understanding deviations from the fiscal responsibility law in India -- Pratik Datta, Radhika Pandey, Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah. 72. Who Lends to the Indian State? -- Aneesha Chitgupi, Ajay Shah, Manish Singh, Susan Thomas and Harsh Vardhan. 73. The Percy Mistry report. 74. Bare Acts. 75. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 76. Shruti Rajagopalan on our constitutional amendments. 77. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 78. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 79. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back — Subhashish Bhadra. 80. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 81. The Matrix -- Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski. 82. How Family Firms Evolve -- Episode 34 of Everything is Everything. 83. From Imperial to Adaptive Firms -- Episode 37 of Everything is Everything. 84. Graduating to Globalisation -- Episode 48 of Everything is Everything. 85. Jeff Bezos on The Lex Fridman Podcast. 86. Born to Run -- Bruce Springsteen. 87. Go to the root cause (2007) -- Ajay Shah. 88. Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah Will Not Wear a Blue Tie to Work — Episode 389 of The Seen and the Unseen. 89. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 90. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 91. When Should the State Act? -- Episode 26 of Everything is Everything. 92. Public Choice Theory Explains SO MUCH -- Episode 33 of Everything is Everything. 93. Public Choice – A Primer -- Eamonn Butler. 94. The Journey of Indian Finance -- Ajay Shah. 95. Amrita Agarwal Wants to Solve Healthcare -- Episode 393 of The Seen and the Unseen. 96. Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care -- Robert Graboyes. 97. We Love Vaccines! We Love Freedom! -- Episode 27 of Everything is Everything. 98. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 99. Pranay Kotasthane on Amazon. 100. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox -- Henrik Karlsson. 101. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway. 102. Essays in Persuasion -- John Maynard Keynes. 103. The Ascent Of Man -- Jacob Bronowski. 104. How to Modernise the Working of Courts and Tribunals in India -- Many authors including Ajay Shah. 105. How to Modernise the Working of Courts and Tribunals in India -- Ajay Shah. 106. The lowest hanging fruit on the coconut tree — Akshay Jaitly and Ajay Shah. 107. Climate Change and Our Power Sector — Episode 278 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshay Jaitley and Ajay Shah). 108. The Brave New Future of Electricity -- Episode 40 of Everything is Everything. 109. False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet -- Bjorn Lomborg. 110. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs -- Episode 46 of Everything is Everything. 111. Nuclear Power Can Save the World -- Joshua S Goldstein, Staffan A Qvist & Steven Pinker. 112. But Clouds Got In My Way -- Ayush Patnaik, Ajay Shah, Anshul Tayal and Susan Thomas. 113. Everybody Lies — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 114. The Truth About Ourselves — Amit Varma. 115. Capitalism and Freedom -- Milton Friedman. 116. Against the Grain -- James C Scott. 117. The Beatles, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen on Spotify. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Dreaming' by Simahina.

Monocle's US editor, Christopher Lord, on the Senate's approval of a long-delayed $95bn (€88bn) aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Plus: France uncovers a Russian disinformation campaign in Europe, the Super Bowl breaks TV records and a special interview with historian Tripurdaman Singh about his new book, ‘Sixteen Stormy Days'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

He's been an important force in shaping legal policy over the last decade. He's written an essential book on our constitution. He's worked closely with government -- but done so with a sense of public purpose. Arghya Sengupta joins Amit Varma in episode 366 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about  his life, his work and his learnings.  (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out 1. Arghya Sengupta on Twitter, LinkedIn, Times of India and Vidhi Center for Legal Policy. 2. The Colonial Constitution -- Arghya Sengupta. 3. Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. 4. Insiders and Outsiders -- Amit Varma. 5. The Ideas of Our Constitution — Episode 164 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhav Khosla). 6. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 7. Murali Neelakantan Looks at the World -- Episode 329 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. Rahul Matthan Seeks the Protocol -- Episode 360 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Apar Gupta Fights the Good Fight -- Episode 353 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10.  The Life and Times of KP Krishnan -- Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State -- Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 12. The Right to Property -- Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 13. Shruti Rajagopalan on our constitutional amendments. 14. 'कोस-कोस पर बदले पानी, चार कोस पर वाणी।' 15. Devangshu Datta Traded His Corduroy Pants -- Episode 348 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. Ao. 17. Enid Blyton, Five Find-Outers, The Famous Five, Billy Bunter, Just William, Hardy Boys, Three Investigators and Jeffrey Archer. 18. Kane and Abel -- Jeffrey Archer. 19. Bimbo -- Jim Reeves. 20. Chandril Bhattacharya interviewed at Kolkata Literary Meet 2016. (Listen to him 5:40 onwards). 21. Chandrabindoo on Spotify and YouTube. 22. Rabindra Sangeet. 23. The Complete Adventures of Feluda — Satyajit Ray. 24. Chander Pahar (Bengali) -- Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. 25. Sonar Kella -- Satyajit Ray. 26. Donoghue v Stevenson. 27. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — Ludwig Wittgenstein. 28. Law, Legislation and Liberty -- Friedrich Hayek. 29. Nationalist Thought in a Colonial World -- Partha Chatterjee. 30. The Truth Pill -- Dinesh Thakur and Prashant Reddy. 31. Taxi No 9211 -- Milan Luthria. 32. Kashmir and Article 370 — Episode 134 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Srinath Raghavan). 33. The Overton Window. 34. From Addict to Convict -- Neha Singhal, Arpita Mitra and Kaushiki Sanyal. (Scroll down on the page for Punjabi version.) 35. Punjab's drug menace: Secrecy renders women substance abusers 'invisible' -- Neha Singhal & Sumathi Chandrashekaran. 36. End of Life Care in India: A Model Legal Framework 2.0 -- Dhvani Mehta and Akshat Agarwal. 37. Gyan Prakash on the Emergency — Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. The Collected Writings and Speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. 39. Annihilation of Caste -- BR Ambedkar. 40. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad -- Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 41. Where Have All The Leaders Gone? — Amit Varma. 42. The Federalist Papers — Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. 43. Marching For Salt (2015) -- Amit Varma. 44. Two Concepts of Liberty -- Isaiah Berlin. 45. Why Freedom Matters -- Episode 10 of Everything is Everything. 46. Sandipto Dasgupta on the Anxious Administrator. 47. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 48. Hind Swaraj — MK Gandhi. 49. Understanding Gandhi. Part 1: Mohandas — Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 50. Understanding Gandhi. Part 2: Mahatma — Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 51. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back -- Subhashish Bhadra. 52. Of Gods and Men -- Xavier Beauvois. 53. Devi -- Satyajit Ray. 54. Jalsaghar -- Satyajit Ray. 55. Advaita on YouTube Music, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram and Twitter. 56. Junoon and Coke Studio Pakistan. 57. Now and Then -- The Beatles. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘'The Engine Room of Law” by Simahina.

How does technology affect our rights? Do we need protection from the state and Big Tech? Apar Gupta joins Amit Varma in episode 353 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his battle for digital rights in India. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out 1. Apar Gupta on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, IFF and YouTube. 2. Internet Freedom Foundation. (Donate to it!) 3. Apar Gupta's application to the Ashoka Fellowship (effectively a mini-autobiography). 4. IFF Wrapped, Unwrapped -- 2022 year-end event. 5. The Fine Line of Free Speech in India -- Apar Gupta. 6. When lawyers speak, they argue -- Apar Gupta. 7. I Don't Know -- Apar Gupta. 8. The archives of India Law and Technology Blog. 9. Aakar Patel Is Full of Hope — Episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 10. The Life and Times of Teesta Setalvad — Episode 302 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. Amartya Ghosh on Spotify. 12. Neighbours Envy, Owners Pride -- Onida commercial. 13. Mungerilal Ke Haseen Sapne. 14. Permanent Record -- Edward Snowden. 15. Nehru's India -- Taylor Sherman. 16. The Life and Times of Vir Sanghvi — Episode 236 of The Seen and the Unseen. 17. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality — Amit Varma. 18. The Shallows -- Nicholas Carr. 19. The Incredible Curiosities of Mukulika Banerjee — Episode 276 of The Seen and the Unseen. 20. Why India Votes— Mukulika Banerjee. 21. Vlogbrothers, Tom Scott and Hardcore History. 22. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto -- Marc Andreeson. 23. Zero to One -- Peter Thiel. 24. Narendra Modi interviewed by Rajeev Shukla. 25. Sacred Games. 26. The Road Ahead -- Bill Gates. 27. The Prem Panicker Files — Episode 217 of The Seen and the Unseen. 28. Vladimir Nabokov on Wikipedia and Amazon. 29. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald. 30. Ruth Bader Ginsberg on Wikipedia and Amazon, 31. The Notebook Trilogy — Agota Kristof. 32. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 33. Jinnah -- Jaswant Singh. 34. Gujarat High Court lifts ban on Jaswant's book on Jinnah -- Saeed Khan. 35. Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. 36. Charges dropped against girls held for Facebook post -- PTI. 37. Nikhil Pahwa on Twitter, LinkedIn, MediaNama and his own site. 38. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Nikhil Pahwa: 1, 2, 3. 39. Chandrahas Choudhury on Instagram, Amazon and The Middle Stage. 40. Chandrahas Choudhury's Country of Literature -- Episode 288 of The Seen and the Unseen. 41. Kiran Jonnalagadda on Twitter and Hasgeek. 42. Sedition charges dropped against Aseem Trivedi -- PTI. 43. Justice K.S.Puttaswamy(Retd) vs Union Of India. 44. Hello world - and happy Independence Day! (2016) -- Apar Gupta. 45. IFF on Reddit. 46. Twitter and Tear Gas — Zeynep Tufekci. 47. Radically Networked Societies — Episode 158 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane). 48. Anushka Jain's thread on SRK and digital rights. 49. IFF's Aarogya Setu Infographic. 50. The AgriStack: A Primer -- Rohin Garg. 51. Naushad Forbes Wants to Fix India — Episode 282 of The Seen and the Unseen. 52. The Struggle And The Promise -- Naushad Forbes. 53. Shruti Rajagopalan on our constitutional amendments. 54. The Right to Property — Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 55. The Ideas of Our Constitution — Episode 164 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhav Khosla). 56. Emergency Chronicles — Gyan Prakash. 57. Gyan Prakash on the Emergency — Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen. 58. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 59. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 60. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 61. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 62. Why Freedom Matters — Episode 10 of Everything is Everything, hosted by Amit Varma and Ajay Shah. 63. India's Far From Free Markets (2005) — Amit Varma in the Wall Street Journal. 64. Don't Insult Pasta (2007) — Amit Varma. 65. The Matunga Racket (2007) — Amit Varma. 66. One Bad Law Goes, but Women Remain Second-Class Citizens (2018) -- Amit Varma. 67. The Colonial Constitution -- Arghya Sengupta. 68. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 69. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 70. A People's Constitution -- Rohit De. 71. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 72. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back — Subhashish Bhadra. 73. Roland Barthes and John Berger on Amazon. 74. Bombay Progressive Artists' Group and Gond art. 75. Bill Evans on Spotify and YouTube. 76. Night Song and Mustt Mustt -- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with Michael Brook. 77. Doppelganger -- Naomi Klein. 78. Automating Inequality -- Virginia Eubanks. 79. The Speaking Constitution --  KG Kannabiran. 80. The Wages of Impunity -- KG Kannabiran. 81. The Good Fight. 82. Court and The Disciple -- Chaitanya Tamhane. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Carrying a Torch' by Simahina.

Earlier this month police in Delhi raided the homes of several prominent journalists in connection with an investigation into the funding of news website NewsClick. Officials are reportedly investigating allegations that NewsClick got illegal funds from China - a charge it denies, the case is currently in the Indian supreme court. Are the raids an attempt by the government to "muzzle" free speech, as some activists say - or simply a straightforward police investigation into the funding of news website Newsclick? Critics say the harassment of journalists, nongovernmental organisations, and other government critics has increased significantly under the current administration. In addition to this, Prime Minister Modi's premiership has been dogged by persistent allegations over his political party's anti-Muslim stance. Has Modi's re-definition of India as a Hindu nation intensified discrimination against minorities? India is known as the world's largest democracy - over one billion people are eligible to vote in its general election in 2024. But is democracy now under threat in India? Shaun Ley is joined by: Lisa Mitchell - Professor of anthropology & history in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Author of a recent book: 'Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections'. Debasish Roy Chowdhury - journalist and co-author of the book 'To Kill A Democracy: India's Passage To Despotism'. Tripurdaman Singh - a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London Also featuring: Swapan Dasgupta - national executive member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Hartosh Singh Bal - the Executive editor of Caravan News Magazine Produced by : Rumella Dasgupta & Ellen Otzen This programme has been edited since originally broadcast (Photo : Journalists protesting in Delhi this week, Credit : Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

He's a philosopher, a political theorist, a runner, a wine lover, an Ambedkarite -- and he used to be a Dharma Bum. Aakash Singh Rathore joins Amit Varma in episode 340 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his unusual journey and his unconventional insights. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Aakash Singh Rathore on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, Deccan Herald and his own website. 2. Poorva Paksha -- Aakash Singh Rathore's columns in Deccan Herald. 3. Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj -- Aakash Singh Rathore. 4. Ambedkar's Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India -- Aakash Singh Rathore. 5. Becoming Babasaheb: The Life and Times of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (Volume 1): Birth to Mahad (1891-1929) -- Aakash Singh Rathore. 6. Vision for a Nation: Paths and Perspectives -- Edited by Aakash Singh Rathore and Ashis Nandy. 7. A Scientist in the Kitchen — Episode 204 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Krish Ashok). 8. Cathedral — Raymond Carver. 9. Both Sides Now -- Joni Mitchell. 10. Some ancient wisdom for the modern world -- Aakash Singh Rathore. 11. The Three Languages of Politics -- Arnold Kling. 12. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man -- Marshall McLuhan. 13. Understanding Media -- Marshall McLuhan. 14. Phaedrus -- Plato. 15. Why Are My Episodes so Long? -- Amit Varma. 16. A Meditation on Form -- Amit Varma. 17. Philosophy, Cognition and Writing: A Talk on the Writing Process -- Aakash Singh Rathore. 18. Ghare Baire / Home and the World -- Rabindranath Tagore. 19. Ghare Baire -- Satyajit Ray. 20. Citizen Kane — Orson Welles. 21. A Movable Feast -- Ernest Hemingway. 22. The Life and Times of Jerry Pinto — Episode 314 of The Seen and the Unseen. 23. Murder in Mahim — Jerry Pinto. 24. Eric Weinstein Won't Toe the Line -- Episode 330 of The Seen and the Unseen. 25. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas — Natasha Dow Schüll. 26. The Dharma Bums -- Jack Kerouac. 27. The Beat Generation. 28. Kicking Schoolbags -- Amit Varma. 29. The Sex Pistols and Clash. 30. Unsatisfied — The Replacements. 31. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 32. Yukio Mishima on Wikipedia, Britannica and Amazon. 33. The Poetic Feminism of Paromita Vohra -- Episode 339 of The Seen and the Unseen. 34. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Life and Mission -- Dhananjay Keer. 35. CB Khairmode's 12-volume Marathi biography of Ambedkar. 36. The Ferment of Our Founders — Episode 272 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Kapila). 37. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu). 38. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 39. Hind Swaraj -- Mohandas Gandhi. 40. Understanding Gandhi: Part 1: Mohandas -- Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 41. Understanding Gandhi: Part 2: Mahatma -- Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 42. The centre-Left in India is more concerned with dirty politics -- Aakash Singh Rathore interviewed by Caravan. 43. Coriolanus -- William Shakespeare. 44. The Incredible Curiosities of Mukulika Banerjee -- Episode 276 of The Seen and the Unseen. 45. The Pathan Unarmed — Mukulika Banerjee. 46. Josh Felman Tries to Make Sense of the World — Episode 321 of The Seen and the Unseen. 47. Relativity: The Special And The General Theory -- Albert Einstein. 48. I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) -- Aakash Singh Rathore. 49. Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers -- Jeremy Corbell. 50. The Fermi Paradox. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Running to Find the Light' by Simahina.

Joya Chatterji has written about the South Asian twentieth century in her new book called Shadows at Noon. Tripurdaman Singh has been researching Indian princely states. Novels by Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004) are being republished. Her daughter Kim Oliver and literary scholar Alastair Niven discuss Nectar in a Sieve. A bestseller when it first came out in 1954, it's a story about a tenant farmer, his wife and the impact of a tannery built in a neighbouring village. Rana Mitter hosts. The books recommended by our guests are: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Those-Days-Sunil-Gangopadhyay/dp/0140268529 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lady-Alice-Bhatti-Mohammed-Hanif/dp/0099516756 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/23130761 Producer: Julian Siddle

In a democracy, every vote should be equal. But in India, that's not the case. Shruti Rajagopalan joins Amit Varma in episode 336 of The Seen and the Unseen to give a detailed primer into the complex issue of Delimitation -- and to suggest her own radical solution. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Shruti Rajagopalan on Twitter, Substack, Instagram and her podcast, Ideas of India. 2. Demography, Delimitation, and Democracy -- Shruti Rajagopalan's detailed post on Delimitation. 3. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Shruti Rajagopalan, in reverse chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. 4. India's Emerging Crisis of Representation -- Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson. 5. Of Openings and Possibilities -- Pranay Kotasthane on Delimitation. 6. South India Would Like to Have a Word — Episode 320 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nilakantan RS). 7. Jayaprakash Narayan Wants to Mend Our Democracy -- Episode 334 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jayaprakash Narayan). 8. The Life and Times of Shanta Gokhale — Episode 311 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. The Life and Times of Jerry Pinto — Episode 314 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. Amit Varma on the Creator Economy -- A recent episode of the Ideas of India podcast. 11. Gurwinder Bhogal Examines Human Nature -- Episode 331 of The Seen and the Unseen. 12. The Prism -- Gurwinder Bhogal's Substack newsletter. 13. Public Choice Theory — Episode 121 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. Public Choice: A Primer — Eomonn Butler. 15. Public Choice -- Politics Without Romance -- James M Buchanan. 16. Politics Without Romance -- Amit Varma's column archives for Bloomberg Quint. 17. David Hume on Britannica, Wikipedia and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 18. Adam Smith on Britannica, Wikipedia and Amazon. 19. James M Buchanan on Britannica, Wikipedia, Econlib and Amazon. 20. Gordon Tullock on Wikipedia, Econlib, Mercatus and Amazon. 21. The Calculus of Consent — James M Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. 22. Democracy in Deficit -- James M Buchanan and Richard E Wagner. 23. Shruti Rajagopalan on our constitutional amendments. 24. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State -- Episode 33 of The Seen and the Unseen. 25. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back — Subhashish Bhadra. 26. Where Have All The Leaders Gone? -- Amit Varma. 27. The Political Theory of a Compound Republic -- Vincent Ostrom. 28. Urban Governance in India — Episode 31 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 29. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 30. Great Soul -- Joseph Lelyveld. 31. Understanding Gandhi. Part 1: Mohandas — Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 32. Understanding Gandhi. Part 2: Mahatma — Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 33. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength — Amit Varma. 34. A Life in Indian Politics — Episode 149 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jayaprakash Narayan). 35. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 36. Nehru's Debates — Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain.) 37. Coalition Politics and Economic Development -- Irfan Nooruddin. 38. The Laffer Curve. 39. The Anti-Defection Law — Episode 13 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra). 40. Our Parliament and Our Democracy — Episode 253 of The Seen and the Unseen (w MR Madhavan). 41. The Four Quadrants of Conformism — Paul Graham. 42. ‘Let Me Interrupt Your Expertise With My Confidence' — New Yorker cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein. 43. Eppur si muove. 44. Jagdish Bhagwati's co-written defence of demonetisation, and Shruti Rajagopalan's co-written rebuttal. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Figure it Out' by Simahina.

India is like a caged tiger -- and the cage is unseen by most and difficult to break through. Subhashish Bhadra joins Amit Varma in episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe the many ways in which the Indian state holds back the Indian people -- and also to introspect on his own journey. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Subhashish Bhadra on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. 2. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back -- Subhashish Bhadra. 3. Freedom at Midnight -- Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. 4. The Universe of Chuck Gopal — Episode 258 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home) -- Marvin Gaye. 6. From Cairo to Delhi With Max Rodenbeck — Episode 281 of The Seen and the Unseen. 7. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life — Episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Yeh Honsla -- Song from Dor. 10. Gurwinder Bhogal Examines Human Nature -- Episode 331 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. The Perils of Audience Capture — Gurwinder Bhogal. 12. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 13. The State of Our Farmers — Episode 86 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gunvant Patil). 14. The Indian State Is the Greatest Enemy of the Indian Farmer -- Amit Varma. 15. Power and Prosperity — Mancur Olson. 16. A Tale Of Two Bandits: Naxals And The Indian State -- Amit Varma. 17. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 18. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 19. The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty -- Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. 20. Paul Graham's essays. 21. Malevolent Republic — Kapil Komireddi. 22. Who Broke Our Republic? — Episode 163 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Kapil Komireddi). 23. A New Idea of India -- Harsh Madhusudan and Rajeev Mantri. 24. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 25. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Ep 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 26. The Transformative Constitution -- Gautam Bhatia. 27. The Great Repression — Chitranshul Sinha. 28. India's Sedition Law — Episode 146 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Chitranshul Sinha). 29. Georges Simenon on Amazon. 30. The Road to Serfdom — Friedrich Hayek. 31. Leviathan -- Thomas Hobbes. 32. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 33. Emergency Chronicles — Gyan Prakash. 34. Gyan Prakash on the Emergency — Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen. 35. Participatory Democracy — Episode 160 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 36. Minimum government, maximum governance: A manifesto for a limited state -- Reuben Abraham and Vivek Dehejia. 37. We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State -- Amit Varma. 38. India's Far From Free Markets (2005) -- Amit Varma in the Wall Street Journal. 39. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 40. The Lost Decade — Puja Mehra. 41. The Great Redistribution — Amit Varma. 42. The Delhi Smog — Ep 40 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 43. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills — Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 44. The Emergency: A Personal History — Coomi Kapoor. 45. Coomi Kapoor Has the Inside Track — Episode 305 of The Seen and the Unseen. 46. Memories of a Father -- TV Eachara Varier. 47. Flying Spaghetti Monster. 48. Don't Insult Pasta (2007) — Amit Varma. 49. Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India -- Abhinav Chandrachud. 50. South India Would Like to Have a Word — Episode 320 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nilakantan RS). 51. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century -- Yuval Noah Harari. 52. Rethinking Public Institutions in India -- Edited by Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav. 53. Black Mirror on Netflix. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Cage' by Simahina.

Society cannot be designed in a top-down way. Central planning was a historic blunder that harmed India -- even though it was conceived by great men with good intentions. Nikhil Menon joins Amit Varma in episode 306 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about the flawed genius PC Mahalanobis, the planning commission, and his own life as a scholar. (For full linked show notes, go to SeenUnseen.in.) Also check out: 1. Nikhil Menon on Amazon and University of Notre Dame. 2. Planning Democracy: How A Professor, An Institute, And An Idea Shaped India -- Nikhil Menon. 3. The Evolution of Everything -- Episode 96 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Matt Ridley). 4.  The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 5. Sherlock Holmes, Ramayana and Mahabharata. 6. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 7. Religion and Ideology in Indian Society — Episode 124 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Suyash Rai). 8. Political Ideology in India — Episode 131 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). 9. The Decline of the Congress -- Episode 248 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). 10. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva — Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 11. Aakar Patel Is Full of Hope — Episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 12. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 13. The Discovery of India -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 14. The Collected Writings and Speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. 15. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad -- Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Chandra Bhan Prasad). 16. John Locke on Wikipedia, Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 17. John Dewey on Wikipedia, Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 18. The Ideas of Our Constitution — Episode 164 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhav Khosla). 19. Friedrich Hayek on Wikipedia, Britannica, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Econlib. 20. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism -- Friedrich Hayek..  21. ये लिबरल आख़िर है कौन? — Episode 37 of Puliyabaazi (w Amit Varma, on Hayek). 22. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 23. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 24. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 25. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia -- Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 26. The Gentle Wisdom of Pratap Bhanu Mehta -- Episode 300 of The Seen and the Unseen. 27. On Exactitude in Science (Wikipedia) — Jorge Luis Borges. 28. What is Libertarianism? — Episode 117 of The Seen and the Unseen (w David Boaz). 29. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 30. Angus Deaton, John von Neumann, Albert Einstein and Howard Aiken. 31. The Life and Times of Vir Sanghvi — Episode 236 of The Seen and the Unseen. 32. Les Misérables -- Victor Hugo. 33. Hardy Boys on Amazon. 34. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 35. Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 36. Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie. 37. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 38. Shahid Amin and Sunil Kumar. 39. 300 Ramayanas -- AK Ramanujan. 40. Nehru's Debates — Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain.) 41. Whatever happened To Ehsan Jafri on February 28, 2002? — Harsh Mander. 42. Who Broke Our Republic? — Episode 163 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Kapil Komireddi). 43. John McPhee on Amazon. 44. Mumbai Fables -- Gyan Prakash. 45. Emergency Chronicles — Gyan Prakash. 46. Gyan Prakash on the Emergency — Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen. 47. Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India's Capital -- Rotem Geva. 48. A People's Constitution — Rohit De. 49. Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi — Vinay Sitapati. 50. The BJP Before Modi — Episode 202 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 51. India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy -- Ramachandra Guha. 52. Roam Research. 53. Zettelkasten on Wikipedia. 54. Linda Colley on Amazon and Princeton. 55. Gandhi as Mahatma -- Shahid Amin. 56. Tanika Sarkar, Neeladri Bhattacharya and Janaki Nair. 57. The Great Man Theory of History. 58. Pramit Bhattacharya Believes in Just One Ism — Episode 256 of The Seen and the Unseen. 59. Demystifying GDP — Episode 130 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 60. Milton Friedman on Amazon, Wikipedia, Britannica and Econlib. 61. The Man of System — Adam Smith (excerpted from The Theory of Moral Sentiments). 62. The Idea of India — Sunil Khilnani. 63. The Rocking-Horse Winner -- DH Lawrence. 64. Taylor Sherman and Niraja Gopal Jayal. 65. Kamyab Hum Karke Rahenge -- Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi on central planning. 66. Naya Daur -- BR Chopra. 67. Chhodo Kal Ki Baatein -- Song from Hum Hindustani. 68. Char Dil Char Raahein -- KA Abbas. 69. Jhootha Sach (Hindi) (English) -- Yashpal. 70. Marxvaad Aur Ram Rajya — Karpatri Maharaj. 71. Narendra Modi takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma. 72. The Importance of Data Journalism — Episode 196 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 73. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes — Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 74. Circe -- Madeline Miller. 75. The Song of Achilles -- Madeline Miller. 76. The Thursday Murder Club -- Richard Osman. 77. Only Murders in the Building. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Central Planning' by Simahina.

Tripurdaman Singh is a historian of South Asia and currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Born in Agra, India, Tripurdaman read politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, and subsequently earned an MPhil in modern South Asian studies and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Universiteit Leiden and an Indian Council of Historical Research Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Agra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the author of three books: Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sixteen Stormy Days (Penguin, 2020) and Nehru (William Collins, 2021). He lives in Cambridge, UK and Agra, India.

Voices seeking rewriting of #IndianHistory are not new. For decades there have been myriad groups expressing their discontent with the mainstream history as it is taught in Indian schools and universities. Some of the most repeated criticisms include under-appreciation of ancient Indian achievements, exploitative portrayal of #caste, undue importance to #Mughals and neglect of those who resisted them, Delhi-centric narrative and oversight of histories of #Kashmir, North-East and South India, romanticisation of #precolonial inter-communal relations, airbrushing of #British atrocities and disproportionate importance to #Gandhi and #Congress leaders in the freedom struggle at the expense of revolutionaries such as #Bose and #Savarkar. In the last few years these voices have become increasingly louder with the rise of social media and ideological state support. A strong impetus came two years ago when India's home minister, Amit Shah called upon historians to re-write history. Yet for many professional historians such demands are puzzling, as they seem to suggest that Indian history was some sort of a static gospel. They point out that history writing is a continuous process. New research and re-examination of available evidence are always underway. This however has failed to assuage the critics who allege a systemic bias in Academia resulting in what they view as “distorted history”.Explore More at - www.argumentativeindians.comDISCLAIMER:We invite thought leaders from across the ideological spectrum. The guests in our sessions express their independent views and opinions. Argumentative Indians does not profess to subscribe, agree or endorse the same or be in anyway responsible for the stance, words and comments of our guests.

He grew up in Cairo, spent many years writing on the Middle East, saw the Arab Spring coming, and was bureau chief of the Economist in South Asia. Max Rodenbeck joins Amit Varma in episode 281 of The Seen and the Unseen to share his experiences in journalism, the lessons he learnt in India, and the troubling ways in which it resembles Egypt. Also check out: 1. Max Rodenbeck on Twitter, The New York Review of Books and Wikipedia. 2. Cairo: The City Victorious -- Max Rodenbeck. 3. Selected stories on India by the Economist: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. 4. The Power of Arabic -- Max Rodenbeck. 5. The Father of Violent Islamism -- Max Rodenbeck. 6. How She Wants to Modify Muslims -- Max Rodenbeck. 7. Bin Laden's Death: Why the Arab World Shrugs -- Max Rodenbeck. 8. The Long Wait -- Max Rodenbeck. 9. Max Rodenbeck interviewed on What I Did Next. 10. Top Gun -- Tony Scott. 11. The Godfather -- Francis Ford Coppola. 12. Once Upon a Time in the West -- Sergio Leone. 13. Creature Features. 14. Godzilla and Creature From the Black Lagoon. 15. Agatha Christie on Amazon. 16. Tintin on Amazon. 17. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. 18. Enid Blyton on Amazon. 19. The Golden Age of Murder -- Martin Edwards. 20. $41,754,153! -- Brandon Sanderson. 21. Brandon Sanderson's record-breaking Kickstarter campaign ends with $41.7 million -- K Holt. 22. Brandon Sanderson on Amazon and YouTube. 23. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones — Pradip Krishen. 24. Gell-Mann Amnesia. 25. A Nile Journal -- Thomas Gold Appleton. 26. Lawrence Wright on Amazon. 27. Roam Research — and Zettelkasten. 28. US-Bangladesh blogger Avijit Roy hacked to death -- BBC. 29. Inside Bangladesh's killing fields: bloggers and outsiders targeted by fanatics -- Emma Graham-Harrison and Saad Hammadi. 30. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 31. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 32. The Incredible Curiosities of Mukulika Banerjee -- Episode 276 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Mukulika Banerjee.) 33. The Pathan Unarmed — Mukulika Banerjee. 34. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 35. Nehru's Debates — Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain.) 36. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes — Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 37. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms -- Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 38. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 39. The Generation of Rage in Kashmir — David Devadas. 40. Radically Networked Societies -- Episode 158 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane). 41. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on agriculture (in reverse chronological order): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 42. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 43. Education in India — Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra). 44. Njáls saga. 45. Honoré de Balzac on Amazon. 46. The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee -- Honoré de Balzac. 47. Michael Pollan on how coffee enabled the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. 48. The Lives of Others -- Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. 49. Yol -- Şerif Gören and Yılmaz Güney. 50. Baden Powell on Spotify. 51. Le Bureau. 52. The Anchoring Effect. 53. Narendra Shenoy and Mr Narendra Shenoy -- Episode 250 of The Seen and the Unseen. This episode is sponsored by Paradigm Shift, a new podcast by Microsoft India, produced by ATS Studios and hosted by Harsha Bhogle..Listen to it on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or any podcast app of your choice. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! The illustration for this episode is by Nishant Jain aka Sneaky Artist. Check out his work on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.

In this episode, Shruti speaks with Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh about their book, “Nehru: The Debates That Defined India.” They discuss homogeneity in parliamentary democracies, tensions between liberalism and cultural traditions, the branches of the Indian and Pakistani governments and much more. Hussain is an assistant professor at Leiden University and a senior research affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg. His research focuses on jurisprudence, comparative constitutional law, international law and the global history of legal and political thought, with a regional emphasis on South Asia and Europe. Singh is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. His work explores the broad themes of sovereignty, state formation, decolonization and constitution making. Full transcript of this episode Follow us on Twitter Follow Shruti on Twitter Follow Adeel on Twitter Follow Tripurdaman on Twitter Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox! 

He grew up breathing Kannada literature -- and he also embraced the globalised world. Sugata Srinivasaraju joins Amit Varma in episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss this confluence of the old and the new, the near and the far, his society and the world.  Also check out: 1. Sugata Srinivasaraju in Outlook, ToI/Mumbai Mirror, New Indian Express, The Wire, Mint, Twitter and his own website. 2. Furrows in a Field -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 3. Pickles from Home: The Worlds of a Bilingual -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 4. Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 5. Sugata Srinivasaraju on his father, Chi Srinivasaraju: 1, 2, 3. 6. Maharashtra Politics Unscrambled -- Episode 151 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Sujata Anandan). 7. Dodda Alada Mara (Big Banyan Tree). 8. GP Rajarathnam, AR Krishnashastry, P Lankesh and KS Nissar Ahmed on Wikipedia. 9. The Tell Me Why series of encyclopedias -- Arkady Leokum. 10. Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire on Amazon. 11. Rayaru Bandaru Mavana Manege -- The KS Narasimhaswamy poem Sugata translated. 12. Phoenix and Four Other Mime Plays -- Chi Srinivasaraju (translated by Sugata Srinivasaraju, who tweeted about it here.). 13. Ahobala Shankara, V Seetharamaiah, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, KV Narayana, Noam Chomsky, DR Nagaraj, Jorge Luis Borges and Tejaswini Niranjana. 14. Lawrence Weschler on how Akumal Ramachander discovered Harold Shapinsky. 15. AK Ramanujan and Gopalakrishna Adiga. 16. The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse -- Edited by Alan Bold. 17. Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-22 -- Shahid Amin. 18. Kraurya -- Girish Kasaravalli. 19. Deconstructing Derrida -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 20. Yaava Mohana Murali -- Gopalakrishna Adiga's poem turned into a song. 21. Ram Guha Reflects on His Life -- Episode 266 of The Seen and the Unseen. 22. Understanding Gandhi. Part 1: Mohandas — Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 23. Understanding Gandhi. Part 2: Mahatma — Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 24. Modern South India: A History from the 17th Century to our Times -- Rajmohan Gandhi. 25. Ki Ram Nagaraja at Book Brahma. 26. A Map of Misreading -- Harold Bloom. 27. The Singer of Tales -- Albert Lord and David Elmer. 28. ಪಂಪ ಭಾರತ ದೀಪಿಕೆ: Pampa Bharatha Deepike -- DL Narasimhachar. 29. The Open Eyes: A Journey Through Karnakata -- Dom Moraes. 30. Dom Moraes on DR Bendre's love for numbers. 31. DR Bendre, Kuvempu, Shamba Joshi, MM Kalburgi, Shivaram Karanth, VK Gokak and Chandrashekhar Patil. 32. Da Baa Kulkarni, Sriranga, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Bhisham Sahni, Kartar Singh Duggal and HY Sharada Prasad. 33. His Will Was His God -- Sugata Srinivasaraju on HY Sharada Prasad. 34. Jeremy Seabrook on Amazon. 35. Aakar Patel Is Full of Hope -- Episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen. 36. The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual — Ramachandra Guha. 37. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande -- Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Sara Rai Inhales Literature -- Episode 255 of The Seen and the Unseen. 39. The Art of Translation -- Episode 168 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arunava Sinha). 40. Negotiating Two Worlds, Bilingualism As A Cultural Idea -- Sugata Srinivasaraju delivers the HY Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture. 41. Karunaalu Baa Belake -- A Kannada version of 'Lead, Kindly Light'. 42. Liberal impulses of our regional languages -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 43. Why Resisting Hindi is No Longer Enough -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 44, The Indianness of Indian Food -- Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 45. Steven Van Zandt: Springsteen, the death of rock and Van Morrison on Covid — Richard Purden. 46. Roam Research and Zettelkasten. 47. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 48. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 49. Nehru's Debates -- Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain). 50. Speaking of Siva -- Ak Ramanujan's translations of the Vacanas. 51. Not Waving but Drowning -- Stevie Smith. 52. Pictures on a Page -- Harold Evans. 53. Notes From Another India -- Jeremy Seabrook. 54. Good Times, Bad Times -- Harold Evans. 55. John Pilger on Amazon. 56. Sugata Srinivasaraju's pieces in Outlook in 2005 on the Infosys land scam: 1, 2. 57. ‘Bellary Is Mine' -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 58. Deca Log: 1995-2005. A history in ten-and-a-half chapters, through the eyes of Outlook -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 59. The Sanjay Story: From Anand Bhavan To Amethi -- Vinod Mehta. 60. Lucknow Boy: A Memoir -- Vinod Mehta. 61. Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker -- Ved Mehta. 62. Off the Record: Untold Stories from a Reporter's Diary -- Ajith Pillai. 63. A Town Offers Its Shoulder -- Sugata Srinivasaraju. 64. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction -- Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. 65. Dhanya Rajendran Fights the Gaze -- Episode 267 of The Seen and the Unseen. 66. The Story of an Income Tax Search — Dhanya Rajendran on Instagram. 67. George Plimpton, 76; 'Paper Lion' author, longtime literary editor, amateur athlete -- David Mehegan. 68. Does The Paris Review Get a Second Act? -- Charles McGrath on literary magazines as "showcases of idealism." 69. My Father's Suitcase -- Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize lecture. 70. Gandhi's Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of India -- Dhirendra K Jha. 71. Harmony in the Boudoir -- Mark Strand. 72. Of Human Bondage -- W Somerset Maugham. 73. Man's Worldly Goods -- Leo Huberman. 74. Autobiography -- Bertrand Russell. 75. Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and George Orwell on Amazon. 76. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert. 77. Reflections on Gandhi -- George Orwell. 78. The Tyranny of Merit -- Michael Sandel. 79. Home in the World: A Memoir -- Amartya Sen. 80. Living to Tell the Tale -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 81. Ayodhya - The Dark Night and Ascetic Games by Dhirendra Jha. 82. Team of Rivals -- Doris Kearns Goodwin. 83. My Last Sigh -- Luis Bunuel. 84. Interview with History -- Oriana Fallaci. 85. Ryszard Kapuscinski on Amazon. 86. Journalism as Literature -- Salman Rushdie on Ryszard Kapuscinski. 87. Mallikarjun Mansur, Bhimsen Joshi and Kumar Gandharva on Spotify. 88. Vachanas sung by Mallikarjun Mansur and Basavaraja Rajguru. 89. Outlander, Knightfall and Money Heist on Netflix. 90. Sugata Srinivasaraju's Twitter thread on the songs of DR Bendre. This episode is sponsored by The Desi Crime Podcast. You'll find them on all podcast apps. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! The illustration for this episode is by Nishant Jain aka Sneaky Artist. Check out his work on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.

How did one of the greatest nonviolent movements in history emerge from within the supposedly violent Pathans of the wild frontier? Why do poor people in India vote even though there seems to be no point to it? Why does an ancient garment like the sari endure -- but democracy seem in peril? Mukulika Banerjee joins Amit Varma in episode 276 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the questions that kept her up at night -- and the lessons they hold for us. Also check out:1. Mukulika Banerjee at LSE, Google Scholar, Amazon and Twitter. 2. The Pathan Unarmed -- Mukulika Banerjee. 3. Why India Votes -- Mukulika Banerjee. 4. Cultivating Democracy -- Mukulika Banerjee. 5. The Sari -- Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller. 6. Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India -- Edited by Mukulika Banerjee. 7. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande -- Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. Thomas Hardy on Amazon. 9. Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov on Amazon. 10. The Proposal -- Anton Chekhov. 11. Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew on Amazon. 12. The House of the Dead -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 13. An American Werewolf in London -- John Landis. 14. The Emergency: A Personal History -- Coomi Kapoor. 15. Where Have All The Leaders Gone? -- Amit Varma. 16. India's Greatest Civil Servant -- Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 17. The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. 18. Abdul Ghaffar Khan: Faith Is A Battle -- DG Tendulkar. 19. Kabuliwala -- Rabindranath Tagore. 20. Kabuliwala (1961 film) -- Hemen Gupta. 21. 'That Killed Cat Lives With Me' -- Isaac Asimov's quote. 22. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock -- TS Eliot. 23. The Life and Times of Nirupama Rao -- Episode 269 of The Seen and the Unseen. 24. The #MeToo Movement -- Episode 90 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Supriya Nair and Nikita Saxena). 25. Urban Governance in India -- Episode 31 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 26. 'Tell a Sanghi/Bhakt at a job interview...' -- SirKazamJeevi's tweet. 27. A Life in Indian Politics -- Episode 49 of The Seen and the Unseen (w JP Narayan). 28. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 29. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 30. Memories and Things -- Episode 195 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aanchal Malhotra). 31. Aakar Patel Is Full of Hope -- Episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen. 32. Modeling Covid-19 -- Episode 224 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gautam Menon). 33. Can the Subaltern Speak? -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 34. Gangubai Kathiawadi -- Sanjay Leela Bhansali. 35. Nehru's Debates -- Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain). 36. Mahanagar -- Satyajit Ray. 37. Everybody Lies -- Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 38. The Truth About Ourselves -- Amit Varma. 39. Electoral Politics in the Time of Change -- Yogendra Yadav 40. The Economics of Voting -- Amit Varma on Rational Ignorance. 41. The Baptist, the Bootlegger and the Dead Man Walking -- Amit Varma on Lal Bihari Mritak. 42. Well Done, Abba -- Shyam Benegal. 43. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes -- Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 44. The Ferment of Our Founders -- Episode 272 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Kapila). 45. Women in Rajniti and Lokniti -- Mukulika Banerjee (Go to page 19 to read). 46. Nick Hornby on Amazon. 47. The Business of Winning Elections -- Episode 247 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shivam Shankar Singh). 48. Collective Effervescence on Wikipedia. 49. The Manchester School of Anthropology. 50. Desert Island Discs on BBC. 51. Deshe Bideshe (Bengali) (English) -- Syed Mujtaba Ali. 52. Uday Bhawalkar performs Raag Bhairav. 53. Dhrupad by Ustad Mohiuddin Dagar. 54. Songs of the Earth -- Soumik Datta. 55. Messengers -- Soumik Datta. This episode is sponsored by Paradigm Shift, a new podcast by Microsoft India, produced by ATS Studios and hosted by Harsha Bhogle..Listen to it on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or any podcast app of your choice. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Illustration by Khyati Pathak.

Programming Note: Anticipating The Unintended will be on a 3 week break. We will send you select pieces from our archives during this period. Normal service will resume from May 15. India Policy Watch #1: Hindi Hain Hum...Insights on burning policy issues in India- RSJThere’s that oft-quoted line of sociolinguist Max Weinreich that goes ‘a language is a dialect with an army and navy’. Like many facetious remarks, it isn’t scientific, but it sounds great. Also, there’s a kernel of truth in it. The only reason a particular dialect races ahead of others and transcends a threshold to turn into a language is when it is backed by political patronage and the power of the state. Examples abound.The version of Hindi that’s official in India today, for instance, wasn’t the kind that was spoken by anyone even two hundred years ago. Many in India find this hard to believe. But it isn’t too difficult to prove. Read any text or literature that was popular in north India before the 19th century, and you will find the language bears no similarity to the official Hindi of today. The great texts of 16th century India will help you with this. Ramacharitmanas by Tulsidas was written in Awadhi, Surdas used Brij bhasha and Guru Granth Sahib is an eclectic mix of languages ranging from Sindhi, Lahnda, Persian and Brij bhasha. The first works that bear a strong resemblance to the Hindi of today appeared in 1870-80s when Bharatendu sought to popularise a combination of Awadhi and Brij with a generous sprinkling of tatsam words from Sanskrit while stripping away the Urdu words. This project gained political support in the late 19th century when there was Hindu revivalism in the air. The decimation of the Mughal empire was complete and with it went the state patronage of Farsi and Urdu. There was desire then to find a purified version of the Hindustani language that preceded the Delhi Sultanate. Bharatendu filled this gap and his efforts were ably supported by the Raja of Benaras and the Kashi Dharma Sabha. Post-independence, this version of Hindi got its ‘army and navy’ with the might of the state behind it. And it turned into a language.Quite appropriately, it was called the ‘rajbhasha’; the language of administration or the language of power. What’s the point of this bit of historicising? Well, here’s the press release from the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee held last week that was presided over by the Union Home Minister (HM):“Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages.Time has come to make the Official Language an important part of the unity of the country, when persons from States which speak other languages communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India.”The usual furore followed. This isn’t the first time the HM has made this sort of an appeal. Every year on the occasion of Hindi Diwas there’s a similar pitch about Hindi. The usual benefits are stated. That we need a ‘link’ language for India and Hindi is best suited for it. Not English. That’s a foreign tongue and the language of our colonial humiliation. We will be somehow more united if we all speak in Hindi. It will foster a feeling of togetherness among Indians. Or that’s what I have understood as the benefits of this push. I’m sceptical of the unity argument because it makes limited sense. There are better ways of fostering unity than asking people to privilege a specific language in a country that has as many languages with long histories as India. In fact, it will likely lead to more divisions and strife. On the other hand, the ‘link’ language argument has some merit. What common language should people use to converse with each other when they are native speakers of languages as diverse as Punjabi, Bangla and Tamizh? It is a good question. But there’s no need to find a planned answer to this question. This is a question that was possibly as relevant during the times of Ashoka, Chandragupta, Akbar and Lord Canning, as it is today. The courts of those times used Pali, Persian or English as the official language of the state. But that didn’t mean these became the languages of the masses. People developed their own dialects and languages that worked for them to communicate with one another. A language can have its army and navy but those won’t make it the ‘link’ language. Because the adoption of a language and its usage in a society is the best example of spontaneous order at play. Spontaneous orders aren’t planned by anyone. There is no intentional coordination of actions by any external agent. Every participant acts in their individual best interest for their own objectives. However, these individual actions aggregate into a pattern of their own. It is the ‘unintended order of intentional action’ that emerges on its own and it adapts to the ongoing changes. Language is a classic example of this. No one individual could have designed it. There’s no central design of associating a sound with an object or an emotion. It evolves by the attempt of separate individuals trying to solve the problem of communicating with one another. The sounds that are easy to use and adopted by most individuals evolve into the lingua franca of the community. Language is ‘the result of human action, but not of human design’. As the language becomes more widely adopted, there are attempts to formalise its structure and syntax. As these structures become more rigid and people are forced to use a language in only a certain way, it begins losing its flexibility and its utility. People find a more flexible mode of communication and a new order emerges. A new language of the people is born. This is how Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian continued to be the languages of the church, court or the temples but the continuing rigidity of their grammar and their top-down imposition on people led to their decline. Spontaneous order killed them off. If the people feel the need for a link language, they will find one through the millions of everyday transactions that they undertake. In India, this could be Hindi, English or some motley mix of tongues that will work for people. That’s the direction we will head into as we find more reasons for domestic mobility and interactions. Any attempt to centrally plan for greater usage of an official language is therefore futile. It takes away time and attention of the state to focus on more real issues. And it leads to divisive politics over the imposition of Hindi over regional languages. World history is rife with examples of civil unrest and strife because of such impositions. These are unnecessary distractions that we can live without.Or maybe that’s the point of all this.India Policy Watch #2: …Watan Hai Hindustan Hamara Insights on burning policy issues in India- RSJI wrote a couple of weeks back about ‘Nehru: The Debates that Defined India’ by Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh. The book examines the key debates Nehru had with four of his peers, namely, Iqbal, Jinnah, Patel and S.P. Mookerjee, on questions of religion, foreign policy and civil liberties. The authors set up the historical context for each debate and why it was critical at that juncture and then reproduce the letters, columns, or speeches of the protagonists.I have picked up the debate between Nehru and Iqbal this week. Iqbal and Nehru were temperamentally similar with both having studied at Cambridge and trained as barristers. They were steeped in enlightenment philosophy, had a taste for western literature and were socialists by instinct. Where they differed sharply was in their confidence in the transplanting of such values into Indian soil. They came at the idea of nationalism in a subcontinent as diverse as India with widely divergent first principles.Nehru believed in a kind of inclusive nationalism where people would voluntarily shed those parts of their identity that separated them from others while retaining the core somehow. This was a difficult notion to explain, let alone implement. For Nehru, the state was to be secular with joint electorates, a reformed social code for Hindus and Muslims while simultaneously letting people practise their religions without any other interferences. Iqbal thought this was an impossible task. This utopian ideal of fusing the different communities into a single nation was fraught with disappointing everyone equally. The state would tread into areas of citizens’ lives that it had no business to be in. Democracy where numbers matter would make this risky for the minorities. There was a need to think of nationalism while protecting the identities of communities and giving them their space to breathe. Trying to hoist a unitary, majoritarian version of democracy without thinking about proportional or specific representation would lead to a situation where ‘the country will have to be redistributed on the basis of religious, historical and cultural affinities.’ Iqbal thought Nehru wasn’t thinking of the long term where those holding the power of the state would be different from them.Needless to say, this idea itself was abhorrent to Nehru. He wrote a long response to Iqbal from the Almora district jail where he has housed in 1935. Titled ‘Orthodox of All Religions, Unite’, it gives us a window into Nehru’s thoughts on the consequences of the nationalism advocated by Iqbal. Reading it 87 years later is clarifying. It is a debate between an idealist who wants to ‘will’ a perfect society. Against whom is pitted a realist who knows this is futile and the best course is to set up a system that’s in sync with how the society works. This would then be supplemented by a code or set of guidelines that would provide the incentives for right behaviours by those in power than force a philosophy down their throats.I have quoted parts of Nehru’s response below. It is a fascinating blend of idealism and naïveté which characterised the man:“Other far-reaching consequences would follow the adoption and application of the joint views of Sir Mohamad Iqbal and the sanatanist Hindus. The ideals aimed at will largely be (subject to some inevitable adjustment with modern conditions) the reproduction of the social conditions prevailing in Arabia in the seventh century (in the case of the Muslims) or those of India two thousand or more years ago (in the case of Hindus). With all the goodwill in the world, a complete return to the golden ages of the past will not be possible, but at any rate all avoidable deviations will be prevented, and an attempt will be made to stereotype our social and economic structure and make it incapable of change. So-called reform movements will, of course, be frowned upon or suppressed. The long tentacles of the law of sedition may grow longer still and new crimes may be created. Thus to advocate the abolition of the purdah (veil) by women might (from the Muslim side) be made into an offence, to preach the loosening of caste restrictions or inter-dining might (from the sanatanist side) be also made criminal. Beards may become de rigueur for Muslims, caste-marks and top knots for Hindus. And, of course, all the orthodox of all shapes and hues would join in the worship and service of Property, especially the extensive and wealthy properties and endowments belonging to religious or semi-religious bodies.Perhaps all this is a somewhat exaggerated picture of what might happen under the joint regime of the sanatanists and the ulemas, but it is by no means a fanciful picture as anyone who has followed their recent activities can demonstrate. Only two months ago (in June 1935) a Sanatan Dharma Conference was held in Bezwada [Vijayawada]. The holy and learned Swami who opened the Conference told us that ‘co-education, divorce and post-puberty marriages would mean the annihilation of Hinduism’. I had not realized till then that these three or rather the absence of them, were the main props of Hinduism – this is rather involved but I suppose my meaning is clear.It is an astonishing thing to me that while our millions starve and live like beasts of the field, we ignore their lot and talk of vague metaphysical ideas and the good of their souls; that we shirk the problems of today in futile debate about yesterday and the day before yesterday; that when thoughtful men and women all over the world are considering problems of human welfare and how to lessen human misery and stupidity, we, who need betterment and raising most, should think complacently of what our ancestors did thousands of years ago and for ourselves should continue to grovel on the ground. It astonishes me that a poet like Sir Mohamad Iqbal should be insensitive to the suffering that surrounds him, that a scholar and thinker like Sir Mohamad should put forward fantastic schemes of states within states, and advocate a social structure which may have suited a past age but is a hopeless anachronism today. Does his reading of history not tell him that nations fell because they could not adapt themselves to changing conditions and because they stuck too long to that very structure which he wants to introduce in a measure in India today? We were not wise enough in India and the other countries of the East in the past, and we have suffered for our folly. Are we to be so singularly foolish as not even to profit by our and others’ experience?Bertrand Russell says somewhere: ‘If existing knowledge were used and tested methods applied, we could in a generation produce a population almost wholly free from disease, malevolence and stupidity. In one generation, if we chose, we could bring in the millennium. It is the supreme tragedy of our lives that this millennium should be within our reach, so tantalizingly near us and yet so far as almost to seem unattainable. I do not know what the future has in store for India and her unhappy people, what further agonies, what greater humiliation and torture of the soul. But I am confident of this that whatever happens, we cannot go back inside the shell out of which we have emerged.”  Advertisement: If you enjoy the themes we discuss in this newsletter, consider taking up Takshashila’s Graduate Certificate in Public Policy course. Intake for the next cohort closes next week. 12-weeks, fully online, designed with working professionals in mind, and most importantly, guaranteed fun and learning. This mindmap from the last session of every cohort gives a good idea about what students learn in the course. Do not miss it.Global Policy Watch: Why have Political Parties by Women and for Women Not been Successful Electorally?Indian perspectives on global events— Pranay KotasthaneOn International Women's Day last month, I went back to a question that has perplexed me for a long time: what explains the electoral insignificance of political parties by women and for women? We see in India that political tribes—and parties—get created along many different identitarian dimensions. The proliferation of political parties backed by a small and reliable electoral base is quite common in India. And yet, we don’t see political parties created on the basis of gender. Most probably, there are structural reasons why this hasn’t happened yet in a society prejudiced against women. However, India is not an exception in this case. Women’s political parties have been electorally insignificant even in Western Europe and Scandinavia. What gives? In this article, I am sharing a few notes from my ongoing search.The Quillette asked this question in the UK context. Louise Perry's article has interesting insights. For instance, she writes that political tribes form when there is little interaction across tribes, which is not possible with gender as an identity variable. In her words,Most political tribes live in close proximity to one another. We tend to live in neighbourhoods in which most people share our race, class, and regional identities, and therefore vote in the same way. One thing to emerge from the aftermath of the Brexit referendum is that many voters knew very few people—if any—who had voted differently from themselves. The Remainer and Leaver bubbles have significant influence and it’s easy to feel animosity towards other political tribes when they are imagined as faceless strangers.None of this is true for women. The dream of a minority of Second Wave feminists that women would leave their husbands en masse and establish female-only communities never came to pass. Women are not an isolated group—they not only live among men, but also often love them as spouses, sons, fathers, and brothers. And that’s as it should be. But one effect of this is that true female solidarity is vanishingly rare. When asked to choose between identifying with other women, or identifying with “their” men, most women will choose the latter option. This means that women’s political parties will always struggle to gain a significant share of the vote.Of course, Perry also highlights that feminist parties are not the only way to reduce gender discrimination.We have witnessed within the last century the most remarkable progress in women’s political representation in the West. Decriminalized abortion, funding for rape crisis centres, reforms to the criminal justice system, anti-discrimination legislation, and many more landmark achievements—all this has taken place within a democratic system and without the existence of women’s political parties.Further, Perry cites more studies to highlight that gender does not impact voting behaviour by much.When it comes to electoral politics, however, women are not an identity bloc and they never have been. Gender has a small impact on voting behaviour, in that women tend to lean left and are also less politically engaged on average. But, on the whole, knowing a person’s sex gives you very little insight into how they are likely to vote. Although the gender gap is enough to influence an election result, sex has much less of an impact than other demographic factors. Simplistic references to “the women’s vote” overlook this fact.In another article, Corwell-Meyers et al make an important distinction: not all women’s political parties are feminist parties.In fact, surveying the platforms and manifestos of women’s parties reveals three types of parties: depending on the degree of transformation the party seeks, women’s parties can be feminist (challenging patriarchy), proactive (advancing women’s inclusion) or reactive (espousing conservative or traditional roles for women).The authors conclude with a more considerate view of women's political parties and argue that there are some second-order benefits of such organisations, such as:They tend to emerge in places where women perceive that the mainstream political parties neglect women or their issues, usually by not running female candidates or addressing women’s concerns. Because they typically emerge alongside or out of the grassroots politics of the women’s movement, they tend to do politics differently. As outsider organisations operating inside the system, they can recruit women to political activism, disrupt the perception that politics is a male-domain and connect women’s movement organisations to formal politics. And, even those that lack a large following have, in some cases, pressured the larger, more mainstream parties to run more female candidates or pay greater attention to women’s interests in their platforms and policies; because women’s parties have resources that civil society actors lack, they can impact both the descriptive and substantive representation of women and women’s interests. And, as both established and emerging democracies currently face reactionary pressure from populist and far right actors, women’s parties can challenge anti-woman and anti-minority group narratives.That’s all I’ve managed to gather on this topic thus far. If you have any helpful links or articles on this topic, do leave a comment.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Podcast playlist] Ambedkar Jayanti was celebrated earlier this past week. Check out our four episodes (1,2,3, and 4) on the great man’s writings at Puliyabaazi. We often like to say that the best way to understand Ambedkar is to read him rather than read about him. [Article] Arthur C Brooks’ three-step approach to changing people’s minds on contentious issues. To be read together with Ian Leslie’s Guardian article on the same issue. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

Our freedom fighters didn't just fight the British. They also grappled with each other in the marketplace of ideas and actions. Shruti Kapila joins Amit Varma in episode 272 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe how so many of our founders were also innovative political philosophers -- and how we still fight their battles today. Also check out: 1. Shruti Kapila at Cambridge, The Print and Twitter. 2. Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age -- Shruti Kapila. 3. An Intellectual History for India -- Edited by Shruti Kapila. 4. Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India -- Edited by Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji. 5. The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs. 6. Nehru: The Debates that Defined India — Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain. 7. Nehru's Debates — Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain.) 8. Tryst With Destiny (Text) (Video) -- Jawaharlal Nehru's speech at Independence. 9. Jawaharlal Nehru on Amazon. 10. Carl Schmitt on Amazon, Wikipedia and Britannica. 11. Junoon (1978) on IMDb and Wikipedia. 12. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India -- Akshaya Mukul. 13. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism -- Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 14. Hindutva -- VD Savarkar. 15. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva — Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 16. Malevolent Republic — Kapil Komireddi. 17. Who Broke Our Republic? -- Episode 163 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Kapil Komireddi). 18. The Multitudes of Our Maharajahs -- Episode 244 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Manu Pillai). 19. A Life in Indian Politics -- Episode 149 of The Seen and the Unseen (w JP Narayan). 20. Sigmund Freud on Amazon, Wikipedia and Britannica. 21. An Anthropologist Among Historians -- Bernard S Cohn. 22. The Birth of the Modern World -- CA Bayly. 23. CA Bayly on Amazon. 24. Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar on Amazon. 25. Hilary Mantel on Amazon. 26. Song of Myself, 51 -- Walt Whitman. 27. Indian Unrest -- Valentine Chirol. 28. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes -- Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 29. Shrimad Bhagwad Gita Rahasya -- Bal Gangadhar Tilak. 30. The Indian War of Independence, 1857 -- Veer Savarkar. 31. Hind Swaraj -- Mahatma Gandhi. 32. Meatless Days -- Sara Suleri. 33. Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie on Amazon. 34. Aguirre, the Wrath of God -- Werner Herzog. 35. Masaan -- Neeraj Ghaywan. 36. Khayal Gatha -- Kumar Shahani. 37. Mirzapur on Prime Video. 38. Paatal Lok on Prime Video. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free!

Not(PolicyWTF): Trade Deals Are GoodThis section looks at policies that are surprisingly sane.- RSJWe signed a trade deal with Australia yesterday. For over a decade now, we have been trying to get this going. The deal falls just short of a free trade agreement (FTA) but that’s a minor quibble that should get sorted in future. Australia’s desire to reduce its dependence on China as the primary trading partner and India’s willingness to have a stronger link with the Quad on economic matters seem to have brought the deal to fruition. There is a small matter of upcoming national elections in Australia too where the economy will play a key role in setting the agenda. The deal is significant in what it signals about the Indian government’s view on global trade. For the past few years, we have gone on and on about atmanirbhar Bharat whose primary manifestation was an increase in import duties across a range of goods taking us back to the pre-liberalisation era. We have lamented about this wrong turn. As Pranay argues we must focus on atmashakti instead of atmanirbharta. So, reading the key terms of the deal warms my heart. As Reuters reports:“The deal with India removes tariffs on more than 85% of Australian goods exports to India, worth A$12.6 billion, rising to almost 91% over 10 years. Tariffs will be scrapped on sheep meat, wool, copper, coal, alumina, fresh Australian rock lobster, and some critical minerals and non-ferrous metals to India.It will see 96% of Indian goods imports enter Australia duty-free.”That’s good. What’s better was the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) that India signed last month with the UAE. There were the usual agreements on tariffs and duties which is in line with the agreement with Australia. From Mint:“The CEPA between India and the UAE covers almost all the tariff lines dealt in by India (11,908 tariff lines) and the UAE (7581 tariff lines) respectively. India will benefit from preferential market access provided by the UAE on over 97% of its tariff lines which account for 99% of Indian exports to the UAE in value terms, especially for all labour-intensive sectors such as Gems and Jewellery, Textiles, leather, footwear, sports goods, plastics, furniture, agricultural and wood products, engineering products, medical devices, and Automobiles. India will also be offering preferential access to the UAE on over 90% of its tariff lines, including lines of export interest to the UAE.As regards trade in services, India has offered market access to the UAE in around 100 sub-sectors, while Indian service providers will have access to around 111 sub-sectors from the 11 broad service sectors.”But the eye-popping section in this agreement was on government procurement where the UAE based companies will be treated on par with domestic companies. This is a first and quite remarkable when you consider India hasn’t even signed the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) as a member of WTO. UAE companies will now have the ability to bid for government contracts of value greater than Rs. 200 Crs while being seen as an equivalent to a domestic company. The unwillingness to agree on government procurement has stalled other FTAs between India and the EU, UK, and Japan. So, the UAE agreement appears like a watershed moment.There has been the usual noise in some quarters about how this will impact the domestic producers, but that swadeshi lobby has been having it good for the last few years. So, maybe they will have to lump it this time. Having sat out of the RCEP much to my disappointment and raising the protectionist rhetoric in the past few years, these two agreements signal a shift in the government’s thinking. This is for the good. Indian manufacturers must see the world as their market. They must learn to compete with the best in domestic markets, improve the quality of their products and use the existing factor cost advantage to win in global markets. Also, opening up government procurement to suppliers from other countries will help improve the quality of government projects. The shoddiness we have come to associate with such projects owes its origins to colonial-era L1 (lowest cost) guidelines that are being dismantled, and to the jugaad mindset that’s prevalent among the suppliers to the government. Things can only get better if there is a global competition for such projects with best-in-class project management and governance practices. And like we have often argued here, voluntary trade doesn’t happen between countries. People transact with one another. And all voluntary trade is a win-win as has been demonstrated over and over again. The Indian consumer will eventually benefit.There is also a geostrategic element to these trade deals. Closer integration with Australia on the eastern Quad and stronger relations with Israel and UAE on the so-called ‘western’ QUAD are good measures to build a counter to China on trade. They also provide these countries with access to India and the Indian subcontinent markets. Lastly, stronger trade integration is the best counterweight to bigotry in domestic politics. There is no credible domestic political force that’s left that can stem the tide on this. We need global markets and trade deals for growth. And closer economic cooperation with other nations will mean a responsibility to behave well on the domestic front. It may sound optimistic at this stage. But in the long run, global trade and the broader trend of decentralisation are the key countervailing forces to a fast-narrowing domestic polity.But…—Pranay KotasthaneThe trade agreements with the UAE and Australia deserve praise. However, my worry stems from inadequate state capacity. A multilateral trade agreement is useful also because it can override points of bilateral contention. Moreover, multilateral agreements also make it easier for a government to convince its domestic stakeholders (recall Putnam’s paper Diplomacy and Domestic Politics). India seems to have opted for a bilateral approach instead where it will fine-tune the deal specifics with countries. Such an approach will be protracted. It will face opposition from domestic lobbies, who will want to keep their products out of deals with states having competing suppliers. Finally, this approach would require immense and sustained political, intellectual, and administrative capacity. Without building this capacity, the Commerce and External Affairs ministries are likely to satisfice rather than maximise. So, I remain sceptical of the outcomes. India Policy Watch: The Paradoxes of India’s Westernophobia Insights on burning policy issues in India- Pranay KotasthaneOnce again, the Russia-Ukraine war has brought India's geopolitical stance into focus. The last two weeks witnessed visits by delegations from the US, UK, European Union, Japan, Russia, and China. High profile visits by the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers, in particular, have led to heated debates about India's position. Some commentators in the West see these visits as further proof of India's Westernophobia. In contrast, some Indian commentators interpret that the Russia-India-China (RIC) grouping is not dead after all.I think Westernophobia is self-defeating and RIC is good riddance. What K Subrahmanyam said with characteristic incisiveness in a Pragati interview fourteen years ago still remains a sound principle for guiding India’s foreign policy:“India has to leverage this situation and change the US-EU-China triangle into a rectangle. Until then it is in our interest to help America to sustain its pre-eminence. After all, in a three-person game, If America is at Number One, China is at Number Two and we are lower down, it is in our best interest to ensure that it is America that remains Number One.”With intense US-China contestation in play, the convergence of interests and values between the West and India is at an all-time high. A deeper collaboration with the West is critical for improving India’s economic, technological, and security futures. China and the East Asian countries benefited massively from a deeper relationship with the West over the last forty years. India now has the opportunity to play the same game. Nevertheless, it does seem that a streak of Westernophobia, particularly its subset anti-Americanism, still exists in India. Why so? Let’s explore. In my view, we should begin the analysis of India-US relationship using a tri-axis framework: state-to-state relations, state-to-people relations, and people-to-people relations.As far as state-to-state relations are concerned, I’m less worried. India’s foreign policy establishment of India adroitly shifted its weight behind the Quad 2.0 as the China threat increased. With Pakistan having moved itself out of the equation, the job of the US and Indian officials has become far easier than it was in the past. The sensible statements made by the US spokespersons in response to India’s stance on Russia in the UN are indicative of the mutual understanding and trust between the two sides. On the people-to-people relationship, there was never any doubt in the first place. On this front, ties between the West and India are absolutely no match for the ties between India and Russia or India and China. Indian elites’ reference network for everything from music to education is American. There is a robust movement of ideas, people, goods and services that has outpaced the state-to-state relationship for nearly three decades. This twitter thread by Brookings Senior Fellow Tanvi Madan gives a good idea of the deep connections.It’s the state-to-people axis which is problematic. Many Indians still seem to harbour a deep frustration with the American state. Charges of unreliability (hint: the 1971 War) or hypocrisy (hint: Afghanistan) always make an appearance in casual discussions on India-US relations. The lesson people derive from such arguments is that if India were to throw its weight behind the US, it would get sucked into fighting America’s wars all over the world, only to be ditched by the US in one fell swoop soon after.Here on, let’s focus on this third axis—the state-people relationship. Without going into the psychoanalytical reasons for why we think this way, there are three paradoxes implicit in this anti-American strand that I want to emphasise. Paradox 1: Vishwaguru and VictimThe flurry of official diplomatic visits over the last two weeks has filled some Indians with pride. Notwithstanding India’s poor and declining economic potential over the last decade, many seriously believe that India’s concurrence is indispensable for any future global order. And that all sides desperately need the vishwaguru on their side. The paradox is that the same people also hold the view that India is a victim of circumstances at the global stage. Hence, it should neither call out Russia’s invasion and revisionism for fear of losing cover in the UN or military supplies, nor should it ally with the US lest it becomes a mere pawn in the global machinations of an unreliable superpower.Clearly, only one of these conceptions can be true. Either way, the conclusion remains the same: India need not stick to its old stance of non-alignment. If India truly is a swing power, it has enough leverage to go against its partners without necessarily facing the worst consequences. It can partner with the US without necessarily committing itself to all the global wars that America indulges itself in. It can also call out the Russian invasion for what it is, without the fear of a proportional retaliation from Russia. On the other hand, if the dominant conception is that India is a victim of global machinations, gaining economic and military power in the shortest possible time remains the only way out. This approach again needs collaboration with richer and more powerful countries with which we have no major divergence on interests and values i.e. the West.Paradox 2: Three is Better than TwoMany Indians seriously believe that a closer India-Russia partnership can wean Russia away from China. Hence, they argue that the answer to India’s current problems lies not in collaborating with the West, but by reinvigorating the Russia-India-China grouping. This argument is often couched under multipolarity mumbo-jumbo that I fail to grasp.It is a paradox for two reasons. First, India’s ability to influence the Russia-China collaboration is exaggerated. India’s GDP per capita is a fifth of both Russia and China. The Russia-India partnership is a single-tracked one, relying on one way movement of defence goods. Contrast that with Russia’s China dependence, which is set to rise further due to the economic sanctions. There’s no scenario in which India would be able to drive a wedge between Russia and China on its own accord. Second, the notion that Russia and China would create a world order that is in India’s interests is truly fantastical. With RIC, the successor to the West’s unipolarity will not be multipolarity, but a Sinocentric world order. Paradox 3: Silent Majority vs the Vocal MinorityThe Westernophobia seen on India Twitter might not be a true representation of the state-to-people axis. I say this based on the first edition of the Global Outlook Survey conducted by my colleagues at Takshashila. To a question ‘Which of these bilateral relationships is the most important for India to achieve its strategic objectives?’, 64 per cent of the non-expert survey takers answered India-US. Russia came a distant second at 10 per cent. Notably, the survey sample is skewed towards the young (63 per cent of recipients) and towards South and West India (57 per cent of recipients). To another question ‘What sort of international order best serves India’s interests?’, 84 per cent of the non-expert respondents opted for ‘a multipolar order with an expanded UNSC’. These two data points highlight an interesting dynamic. While many Indians consider the India-US partnership as supremely important, they also believe that the current world order is inimical to India’s interests. Therein lies an opportunity for the US. Backing India’s inclusion in UNSC, reducing barriers for technology transfer to India, and deeper technology alliance might make the vocal minority irrelevant. In any case, resolving these three paradoxes on the state-to-people axis is a key policy challenge for India.I want to end this essay with a question for all of you: what event, decision, or circumstance would make you reverse your current thinking on the India-Russia relationship? India Policy Watch: Nehru-Jinnah DebatesInsights on burning policy issues in India- RSJI was reading Nehru: The Debates That Defined India by Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh this week. The book has Nehru debating four of his contemporaries with whom he had differences about the fundamental question of the idea of India. Two things struck me. One, the civility of exchanges that were otherwise marked by huge differences in views. Two, how the fundamental questions of that era (1930-50) remain relevant today. In many ways, they have come back to bite us. I will touch upon some of the debates in other editions. The book is a must-read.Today, I will reproduce extracts from the book on the Nehru-Jinnah debate about the question of Muslim representation in a democratic India. I have touched upon this in a previous edition. Quoting from the book:“In Nehru’s view, the Hindu-Muslim problem or communalism was at its core a problem of ‘upper middle-class people’ who only made up a small fraction of the Indian population. If the ‘mass elements take part in the election of the constituent assembly’, communal issues would ‘recede into the background’. Broadly secular in his political outlook, Nehru never warmed to the idea that religion deserved a place in progressive politics. ‘The so-called Hindu-Muslim problem,’ Nehru disclosed his position in usual frankness, ‘is not a genuine problem concerning the masses, but it is the creation of self-seekers, job-hunters, and timid people, who believe in British rule in India till eternity.’For Nehru, therefore, it was telling that Muslim politicians preferred to discuss the communal question from a numerical perspective and connect it to reserved seats in the legislature or the colonial administration. Nehru openly raged against the Communal Award of 1932, the chief institution that the British had established to ensure the retention of separate electorates for Indian Muslims. At its core, Nehru saw reservations opposed to the egalitarian principles of nationalism.‘It is absurd to consider this question [of communalism] from the point of view of numbers,’ Nehru declared in the presence of Jinnah. ‘If there was a question of numbers we thirty five crores [350 million] of people would not have become a slave country being dominated by a small number of people in Britain.’Against the Nehru Report (on Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms), Jinnah proposed his Fourteen Points, which sought, among other things, a federal constitutional make-up of India with residual power vested in the provinces, a fixed Muslim representation in the Central legislature and the upholding of separate electorates. However, Jinnah signalled that he was willing to consider joint electorates if the Congress met his other demands. Clothed into concrete modifications to the Nehru Report during an ‘All Parties Conference’ in Calcutta, Jinnah pressed the committee members who were deciding on the merits of the Nehru Report that at least ‘one-third of the elected representatives of both the Houses of the Central Legislature should be Musalamans’.In a moving speech on the fifth day of the convention, Jinnah clarified that his desire was not to overwhelm the Congress with demands that would make it look soft on Muslims in front of the Hindu Mahasabha. Instead, Jinnah’s demands were guided solely by dry constitutional observations from other countries. According to Jinnah, by the 1920s, it had become conventional wisdom that ‘majorities are apt to be oppressive and tyrannical and minorities always dread and fear that their interests and rights, unless clearly and definitely safeguarded by statutory provisions, would suffer […].’Jinnah reasoned that because the Nehru Report predicted that a third of the legislature would consist of Muslim delegates anyway, there would be no harm in implementing this figure as a formal constitutional safeguard. Such a written anchor would also allow Indian Muslims to distribute those seats more evenly and distribute the excess seats that they would receive in the Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab to regions where Muslims were numerically weaker.The delegates roundly rejected Jinnah’s proposal. Dissent to his suggestions even emerged from within the ranks of the Muslim League. Other parties rejoiced over the open split in the Muslim League. M.R. Jayakar of the Hindu Mahasabha, for instance, poked right into this wound. In his response to Jinnah’s speech, Jayakar cautioned the audience to ‘bear in mind that the demands, as set forth by Mr Jinnah, do not proceed on behalf of the entire Muslim Community, not even a large bulk of it’. With some justification, Jayakar reiterated that the position Jinnah voiced reflected the desires of ‘a small minority of Muhammadans’.This speech left a mark on Jinnah. Responding to Jayakar, he moved away from his otherwise carefully measured statements that tended to evoke constitutional principles as an acid test for minority protections. Now Jinnah asserted that lasting harmony between communities could not be established in ‘a Court of Law’ or through a constitution ‘however perfect from a theoretical point of view it may seem’. Instead, it could only turn into a reality through ‘the highest order of statesmanship and political wisdom’ and the recognition that ‘there is no progress for India until the Musalmans and Hindus are united’. The alternative Jinnah presciently predicted was ‘a revolution and civil war’.When Jinnah re-emerged on the political scene in 1934, after an extended hiatus to heal from the humiliation in the aftermath of the Nehru Report, he began to filter politics more squarely through the lens of war and peace….Moving from contractual obligations to honour was reflective of Jinnah’s changed perspective. Earlier, he had viewed Indian Muslims primarily as a minority community, constantly vying to petition for rights from the British crown or the Congress party. Now he saw Indian Muslims as a distinct and separate nation capable of ensuring their rights through force. This view clashed severely with the secularist outlook of Jawaharlal Nehru, who could only interpret Jinnah’s religious posturing as a profound symptom of political alienation: a desperate attempt to plaster over existential anxieties that ranged from colonial oppression to unemployment and food scarcity. With constitutional reforms bringing more and more Indians into the realm of electoral politics, Jinnah and Nehru’s contradictory ideas of India clashed soon after their joint appearance in Lucknow.In the 1937 provincial elections, the Indian National Congress secured a resounding victory. At the polls of India’s first large-scale election campaign that departed from the established system of dyarchy and increased the vote to thirty-six million Indians, including some women, the Indian National Congress secured more than 750 of some 1,500 seats. This sweeping success did more than underline the Congress’s claim of being a national party. It altogether transformed the Congress from a mass movement to a political party. Congress members now occupied ministries in five provinces outright and constituted coalition governments in another two.Jinnah suffered a crushing defeat. His All-India Muslim League secured less than 5 per cent of the Muslim vote, although this slim vote share amounted to some 108 seats from 485 reserved for Muslims under the Communal Award….In full awareness that the Congress did not require the League to rule, Nehru conducted this communication from a position of strength. Jinnah refused to acknowledge that the election result was an adequate measure of the political value of the Muslim League. To him, the communal question remained the most critical issue to determine India’s future. Jinnah’s cold responses were his way to shake Nehru out of this false sense of security that the Hindu-Muslim issue had receded into the background and given way to lofty ideas around socialism and constitutional democracy. Perhaps for this reason, Jinnah refused to lay the Muslim case to Nehru anew.”Advertisement: If you enjoy the themes we discuss in this newsletter, consider taking up the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy course. Intake for the next cohort is open. 12-weeks, fully online, designed with working professionals in mind, and most importantly, guaranteed fun and learning. Do not miss.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Article] Check out our take on Hypocrisy in International Relations in edition #52.[Article] This post by Yiqin Fu has some cool insights on the consequences of a mobile-first internet with Chinese characteristics. [Podcast] On Puliyabaazi, we discussed organic farming troubles in Sri Lanka. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

Things are bad -- so bad that he's written two books about it. Aakar Patel joins Amit Varma in episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss politics, the media and his reasons for being hopeful in spite of all the doom and gloom. Also check out: 1. Aakar Patel on Twitter, Amazon, Deccan Chronicle, Business Standard and the Times of India. 2. Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here -- Aakar Patel. 3. Price of the Modi Years -- Aakar Patel. 4. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva -- Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 5. The Tank Man video. (And the Wikipedia page.) 6. August Landmesser, who may have been the man who didn't salute. 7. The Life and Times of Abhinandan Sekhri -- Episode 254 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. Amit Varma's Twitter thread on Westland shutting down. 9. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty -- Albert O. Hirschman. 10. Selected episode of The Seen and the Unseen on the economy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 11. Nehru: The Debates that Defined India — Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain. 12. Nehru's Debates -- Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain.) 13. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 14. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism -- Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 15. A People's Constitution -- Rohit De. 16. Narendra Modi takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma on Demonetisation. 17. Most of Amit Varma's writing on DeMon, collected in one Twitter thread. 18. India's Undeclared Emergency -- Arvind Narrain. 19. The Silent Coup: A History of India's Deep State — Josy Joseph. 20. India's Security State -- Episode 242 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Josy Joseph). 21. Colours of the Cage: A Prison Memoir -- Arun Ferreira. 22. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 23. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 24. Integral Humanism -- Deendayal Upadhyaya. 25. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind -- Gustave le Bon. 26. Crowds and Power -- Elias Canetti. 27. The Life and Times of Nirupama Rao -- Episode 269 of The Seen and the Unseen. 28. Kashmir and Article 370 -- Episode 134 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Srinath Raghavan). 29. Steven Van Zandt: Springsteen, the death of rock and Van Morrison on Covid — Richard Purden. 30. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century -- Francis Fukuyama. 31. The Origins of Political Order -- Francis Fukuyama. 32. Political Order and Political Decay -- Francis Fukuyama. 33. The Great Man Theory of History. 34. Modi's Domination – What We Often Overlook — Keshava Guha. 35. My Country, My Life -- LK Advani. 36. Modi's Lost Opportunity -- Episode 119 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Salman Soz). 37. A Rude Life — Vir Sanghvi. 38. The Life and Times of Vir Sanghvi -- Episode 236 of The Seen and the Unseen. 39. Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi — Vinay Sitapati. 40. The BJP Before Modi -- Episode 202 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 41. Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister -- Amit Varma. 42. Excerpts from Narendra Modi's interview by Madhu Kishwar. 43. Obituary of a Culture -- Ashis Nandy. 44. The Second Coming — William Butler Yeats. 45. Beware of the Useful Idiots -- Amit Varma. 46. Joy Das's tweet thread about Indian Muslims being called Pakistanis. 47. Television Price Controls -- Episode 27 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashok Malik). 48. Fighting Fake News -- Episode 133 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pratik Sinha). 49. Dhanya Rajendran Fights the Gaze -- Episode 267 of The Seen and the Unseen. 50. Aakar Patel's tweet on protests as a craft. 51. Here Comes The Groom: A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage -- Andrew Sullivan. 52. Radically Networked Societies -- Episode 158 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 53. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Kumar Gandharva on Spotify. 54. The Histories -- Herodotus. 55. Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Julius Caesar on Amazon. 56. Baburnama: A Memoir -- Babur. 57. The Life of the Bee -- Maurice Maeterlinck. 58. Edward O Wilson on Amazon. 59. NASASpaceflight on YouTube. 60. Ludwig van Beethoven on Spotify. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free!

Dr Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London and a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Universiteit Leiden. He is the author of 'Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics: The Bhadauria Rajputs and the Transition from Mughal to British India, 1600-1900' and ‘Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India'. His latest book is ‘Nehru: The Debates that defined India'.

India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, died nearly six decades ago, but it is remarkable how much his legacy continues to color modern Indian life. From the border dispute with China to debates over fundamental rights and Hindu-Muslim relations, the current policy discourse in India cannot be disentangled from Nehru's own ideological convictions and those who did battle against him. A new book by Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh, Nehru: The Debates That Defined India, shines a spotlight on four consequential debates that Nehru engaged in that get to the heart of the Indian polity. The authors join Milan on the show this week to discuss Nehru's enduring legacy, his intellectual sparring partners, and contentious debates over nationalism, communalism, civil liberties, and foreign policy. “Episode 262: Nehru's Debates,” (with Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh), The Seen and The Unseen (podcast), January 31, 2022.Tripurdaman Singh, Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment of the Constitution of India.“Madhav Khosla on India's Founding Moment,” Grand Tamasha, January 29, 2020.

Life is beautiful, but we are too busy to notice. Writing is one way to capture the world, and to make our journey memorable. Amitava Kumar joins Amit Varma in episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe his journey as an author, journalist, artist, Instagrammer -- and to explain the joys of slow-jamming the news. Also check out:1. Amitava Kumar on Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, Vassar and his own website. 2. The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal -- Amitava Kumar. 3. Husband Of A Fanatic -- Amitava Kumar. 4. A Matter of Rats -- Amitava Kumar. 5. Writing Badly is Easy -- Amitava Kumar. 6. Pyre -- Amitava Kumar. 7. Beautiful World, Where Are You -- Sally Rooney. 8. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande -- Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Susan Sontag and Joan Didion on Amazon. 10. Dom Moraes, Khushwant Singh and Suketu Mehta on Amazon. 11. Despatches 15: A World of Stopped Watches -- Amit Varma. 12. A Picture of Hell, and No Kerosene -- Amit Varma. 13. Why I Write -- George Orwell. 14. John Berger and William Maxwell on Amazon. 15. Austerlitz -- WG Sebald. 16. The Art of Translation -- Episode 168 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arunava Sinha). 17. Jejuri -- Arun Kolatkar. 18. Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures — Episode 17 of Conversations With Tyler. 19. The Notebook Trilogy — Agota Kristof. 20. Ved Mehta and VS Naipaul on Amazon. 21. India: A Million Mutinies Now -- VS Naipaul. 22. JM Coetzee, Janet Malcolm, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri on Amazon. 23. Chandrahas Choudhury at The Middle Stage and Instagram.. 24. A Meditation on Form -- Amit Varma. 25. Why Are My Episodes so Long? -- Amit Varma. 26. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. 27. Letters from a Father to his Daughter -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 28. The Mahatma and the Poet — The letters between Gandhi and Tagore, compiled by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. 29. Zadie Smith and Teju Cole on Amazon. 30. Symphony No.3, Op.36 -- Henryk Gorecki. 31. Nehru's Debates -- Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain.) 32. Nehru: The Debates that Defined India — Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain. 33. Tess of the d'Urbervilles -- Thomas Hardy. 34. Martin Amis on Amazon. 35. The Remains of the Day -- Kazuo Ishiguro. 36. Court -- Chaitanya Tamhane. 37. The Disciple -- Chaitanya Tamhane. 38. Ted Hughes and Colm Toibin on Amazon. 39. Narendra Shenoy and Mr Narendra Shenoy -- Episode 250 of The Seen and the Unseen. 40. How Social Media Threatens Society — Episode 8 of Brave New World (Jonathan Haidt speaking to host Vasant Dhar). 41. Memories and Things -- Episode 195 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aanchal Malhotra). 42. Rahul Roy (documentary filmmaker) on IMDb. 43. Most of Amit Varma's writing on Demonetisation, collected in one Twitter thread. 44. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman -- Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 45. The Odd Woman and the City — Vivian Gornick. 46. Private Truths, Public Lies — Timur Kuran. 47. Amit Varma's tweet thread about AI writing fiction. 48. I Vitelloni and Amarcord by Federico Fellini. 49. Eho -- Dren Zherka. 50. Charulata and Aranyer Din Ratri by Satyajit Ray. 51. Ashis Nandy on Amazon. 52. The Prem Panicker Files -- Episode 217 of The Seen and the Unseen. 53. Prem Panicker in The Windowpane Sessions. 54. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the creator ecosystem with Roshan Abbas, Varun Duggirala, Neelesh Misra, Snehal Pradhan, Chuck Gopal and Nishant Jain. 55. Hermit in Paris -- Italo Calvino. 56. Sophie Calle on Wikipedia. 57. Sophie Calle and the Art of Leaving a Trace -- Lili Owen Rowlands. 58. Sankarshan Thakur on Amazon and Twitter. 59. Penelope Fitzgerald on Amazon. 60. So Long, See You Tomorrow -- William Maxwell. 61. Citizen: An American Lyric -- Claudia Rankine. 62. Waiting for the Barbarians -- JM Coetzee. 63. Disgrace -- JM Coetzee. 64. Voices From Chernobyl -- Svetlana Alexievich. 65. A Suitable Boy -- Vikram Seth. 66. English, August: An Indian Story -- Upamanyu Chatterjee. 67. Raag Darbari -- Shrilal Shukla. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free!

Intellectuals need to get out of their ivory towers and take their ideas to the people, learning from them in the process. Barun Mitra joins Amit Varma in episode 264 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss what he learnt from his decades combining reflection and activism. Also check out: 1. Barun Mitra on Twitter, and at The Print, Indian Express and Pragati. Also, a bio. 2. India's Agriculture Crisis -- Episode 140 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra and Kumar Anand). 3. The Anti-Defection Law -- Episode 13 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra). 4. Sell the Tiger to Save It -- Barun Mitra. 5. Lessons From an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister -- Amit Varma. 6. Nehru's Debates -- Episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain). 7. The State of Our Farmers -- Episode 86 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gunvant Patil). 8. Farmers, Technology and Freedom of Choice: A Tale of Two Satyagrahas -- Amit Varma. 9. Down to Earth -- Sharad Joshi. 10. The Ultimate Resource -- Julian Simon. 11. The Simon-Ehrlich Wager. 12. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 13. Too Many People? -- Nicholas Eberstadt. 14. Atlas Shrugged -- Ayn Rand. 15. Ayn Rand on Amazon. 16. ARCH-Vahini and ARCH Gujarat. 17. The Double 'Thank-You' Moment -- John Stossel. 18. Spontaneous Order. 19. The Emergency: A Personal History -- Coomi Kapoor. 20. Understanding Gandhi. Part 1: Mohandas -- Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ramachandra Guha). 21. Understanding Gandhi. Part 2: Mahatma -- Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ramachandra Guha). 22. Romulus Whitaker on Wikipedia, YouTube and Amazon. 23. The Skeptical Environmentalist -- Bjorn Lomborg. 24. The Better Angels of Our Nature -- Steven Pinker. 25. The Three Languages of Politics -- Arnold Kling. 26. How Social Media Threatens Society -- Episode 8 of Brave New World (Vasant Dhar in conversation with Jonathan Haidt). 27. Online Disinhibition Effect. 28. Memories and Things -- Episode 195 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aanchal Malhotra). 29. Think Again -- Adam Grant. 30. Democracy in Pakistan -- Episode 79 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane and Hamsini Hariharan). 31. The Use of Knowledge in Society -- Friedrich Hayek. 32. The Trees -- Philip Larkin. 33. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 34. The Mahatma and the Poet -- The letters between Gandhi and Tagore, compiled by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. 35. Gora -- Rabindranath Tagore. 36. The Home and the World -- Rabindranath Tagore. 37. The Miracle of Calcutta -- Manubehn Gandhi. 38. Lakshmi: An Introduction -- Devdutt Pattanaik. 39. A Godless Congregation -- Amit Varma. 40. Hind Swaraj -- MK Gandhi. 41. Flying Spaghetti Monster. 42. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 43. Taxes Should Be Used for Governance, Not Politics -- Amit Varma. 44. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on Covid-19: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 45. India Awakes. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free!

There was a time when our leaders dived into the public discourse and embraced the world of ideas. Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain join Amit Varma in episode 262 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe four debates that Jawaharlal Nehru entered with Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Sardar Patel and Syama Prasad Mookerjee. These old debates matter today, because those ideas are still being contested. Also check out: 1. Nehru: The Debates that Defined India -- Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain. 2. Sixteen Stormy Days -- Tripurdaman Singh. 3. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 4. Jawaharlal Nehru on Amazon. 5. Shruti Rajagopalan's talk on the many amendments in our constitution. 6. Karl May on Amazon. 7. Christopher Bayly on Amazon. 8. Violent Fraternity -- Shruti Kapila. 9. Amit Varma's tweet about books read, a snarky response, and a, um, weird comment. 10. Jürgen Habermas on Amazon and Wikipedia. 11. Where Have All the Leaders Gone? -- Amit Varma. 12. On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians -- Vladimir Putin. 13. Roam Research -- and Zettelkasten. 14. Niklas Luhmann and his use of Zettelkasten. 15. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi: Volumes 1 to 98. 16. Emily Hahn on Amazon. 17. Ramachandra Guha on Amazon. 18. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen featuring Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4. 19. Nehru: The Invention of India -- Shashi Tharoor. 20. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Ep 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 21. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 22. William Hazlitt on Amazon. 23. Ernst Cassirer. 24. The Last Mughal -- William Dalrymple. 25. Zygmunt Bauman and Perry Anderson on Amazon. 26. The Clash of Economic Ideas -- Lawrence H White. 27. Hind Swaraj -- MK Gandhi. 28. Meghnad Desai on Amazon. 29. Nehru: A Contemporary's Estimate -- Walter Crocker. 30. Ayodhya - The Dark Night -- Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K Jha. 31. India's Greatest Civil Servant -- Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 32. Being Muslim in India -- Episode 216 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ghazala Wahab). 33. The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence -- Faisal Devji. 34. Creating a New Medina -- Venkar Dhulipala. 35. Swami Shraddhanand. 36. Modi's Domination - What We Often Overlook -- Keshava Guha. 37. Selected episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on China: 1, 2, 3, 4. 38. China's Good War -- Rana Mitter. 39. Sturgeon's Law. 40. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays -- William Hazlitt. 41. Preface to Shakespeare -- Samuel Johnson. 42. The Soong Sisters -- Emily Hahn. 43. Empire of Pain -- Patrick Radden Keefe. 44. Kings of Shanghai -- Jonathan Kaufman. 45. Collected Works of Ram Manohar Lohia. 46. Liquid Modernity -- Zygmunt Bauman. 47. The Anarchy -- William Dalrymple. 48. The Silent Coup: A History of India's Deep State — Josy Joseph. 49. India's Security State -- Episode 242 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Josy Joseph). 50. Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens. 51. The Rabbit and the Squirrel: A Love Story about Friendship -- Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free!

In this podcast, Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain talk about their latest book "Nehru: The Debates that Defined India". The book features some riveting discussions that were held between Nehru and Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Sardar Patel, and Syama Prasad Mookerjee. Follow them: Tripurdaman Singh: @tripurdaman Adeel Hussain: @adeelh693 To buy the book visit: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09GH2KD1X/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 #Nehru #Jinnah #SardarPatel --------------------------------------------- Listen to the podcasts on: SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/kushal-mehra-99891819 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1rVcDV3upgVurMVW1wwoBp Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-c%C4%81rv%C4%81ka-podcast/id1445348369 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-carvaka-podcast ------------------------------------------------------------ Support The Cārvāka Podcast: Become a Member on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKPxuul6zSLAfKSsm123Vww/join Become a Member on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/carvaka UPI: kushalmehra@icici To buy The Carvaka Podcast Exclusive Merch please visit: http://kushalmehra.com/shop ------------------------------------------------------------ Follow Kushal: Twitter: https://twitter.com/kushal_mehra?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KushalMehraOfficial/? Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecarvakapodcast/?hl=en Koo: https://www.kooapp.com/profile/kushal_mehra Inquiries: https://kushalmehra.com/ Feedback: kushalmehra81@gmail.com

A democracy is not just about voting, The rules of the game have to protect individuals, and institutions have to keep the government accountable. MR Madhavan joins Amit Varma in episode 253 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his efforts at empowering MPs and MLAs with knowledge -- and why we should not lose hope in our nation. Also check out: 1. PRS Legislative Research. 2. When You Could Only Buy Two Litres of Milk -- MR Madhavan. 3. The Functioning of the Indian Parliament -- MR Madhavan. 4. Dilli Door Nahin: Engaging With the Policy Process -- MR Madhavan. 5. Ulysses and Dubliners -- James Joyce. 6. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 7. Education in India -- Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra). 8. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 9. Taxes Should Be Used for Governance, Not Politics -- Amit Varma. 10. Battles Half Won: India's Improbable Democracy -- Ashutosh Varshney. 11. A Life in Indian Politics -- Episode 149 of The Seen and the Unseen (w JP Narayan). 12. A People's Constitution -- Rohit De. 13. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 14. The Right to Property -- Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 15. The Federalist Papers -- Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. 16. The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution -- Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. 17. The Ideas of Our Constitution -- Episode 164 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhav Khosla). 18. India's Founding Moment — Madhav Khosla. 19. India's Greatest Civil Servant -- Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu). 20. The Anti-Defection Law -- Episode 13 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra). 21. Speech to the Electors of Bristol -- Edmund Burke. 22. A Cricket Tragic Celebrates the Game -- Episode 201 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ramachandra Guha). 23. Bindra's Wishlist -- Amit Varma. 24. The Business of Winning Elections -- Episode 247 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shivam Shankar Singh). 25. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know -- Adam Grant. 26. The Gray Man -- Mark Greaney. 27. PG Wodehouse on Amazon. 28. The Three-Body Problem -- Cixin Liu. 29. Project Hail Mary -- Andy Weir. 30. A Gentleman in Moscow -- Amor Towles. 31. The Lincoln Highway -- Amor Towles. 32. The Paper Menagerie -- Ken Liu. This episode is sponsored by Intel. This episode is co-sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader, FutureStack and The Social Capital Compound. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! And check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

In their latest book, Nehru: The Debates that Defined India, Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh look at four men debated the first Prime Minister – Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Sardar Patel and Syama Prasad Mookerjee – and how theses exchanges came to shape India as we know it today. In this episode, they both join Sandip to discuss what they found out during their research, and what we can learn from these debates.Adeel Hussain is an assistant professor at Leiden University and a senior research affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. And Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

Not(PolicyWTF): Reforming Procurement (Sanjeev Kumar Must Be Smiling)  Pleasant surprises in policymaking in India— RSJSince we take great pleasure in highlighting policy screw-ups around here, it is only fair we appreciate measures that aren’t PolicyWTFs when they make an occasional appearance on our landscape like rare migratory birds. Last week we had one such sighting. (Deep breath). The Procurement Policy Division (PPD) in the Department of Expenditure (DoE) under the Ministry of Finance (MoF), Government of India (GoI) released the ‘General Instructions on Procurement and Project Management’. The press release reads:“These guidelines attempt to incorporate into the realm of Public Procurement in India, innovative rules for faster, efficient and transparent execution of projects and to empower executing agencies to take quicker and more efficient decisions in public interest. Some of the improvements include prescribing strict timelines for payments when due. Timely release of ad hoc payments (70% or more of bills raised) is expected to improve liquidity with the contractors especially Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).”Importantly, it has this line too:“Alternative methods for selection of contractors have been permitted, which can improve speed and efficiency in execution of projects. In appropriate cases, quality parameters can be given weightage during evaluation of the proposal in a transparent and fair manner, through a Quality cum Cost Based Selection (QCBS), as an alternative to the traditional L1 system.”  This is critical. In ‘appropriate cases’, from now on, quality of service will also be given weightage during evaluation of projects. It sounds absurd but it’s true. Quality wasn’t an explicit parameter for choosing suppliers in government contracts so far. So, yes, this is a reform. Bravo!Puraane Paap I have written about the tyranny of the L1 system and its pernicious effects before. From our edition #22 (Trishul: Ek ‘Tender’ Prem Katha):“The procurement of goods and services by the Government of India is still largely governed by the Contract Act 1872 and Sale of Goods Act, 1930 and General Financial Rules (GFR) that are amended periodically. The most prevalent mechanism of awarding a contract in government departments and PSUs over the last century has been the L1 system, also called the Least Cost Selection Method. There is a bit of history to this. The colonial government wasn’t too keen on spending a lot on projects in India. A minimal threshold of quality was all that was needed at the lowest cost. Though alternatives like the Quality and Cost Based System (QCBS) and Quality Based System (QBS) are being gradually adopted, the L1 system still holds sway after seven decades. Yes, we love our colonial past a lot that way. So, you could lie your way through the technical bid claiming excellent capabilities. Once you crossed that threshold, all you needed was some friendly insider who helped you price your bid lower than your rivals only marginally. Voila, you’re in business.Three problems arose out of this. First, since technical bids didn’t have a weightage, the projects were often won by less competent firms who ended up either not completing the project or did a shoddy job. Examples of this are visible all around us in government infrastructure projects. Second, it encouraged rent-seeking behaviour among public servants who had the information about rival bids. In that cult classic, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, municipal commissioner D’mello was playing two builders (Ahuja and Tarneja) to maximise his benefits till one of them bumps him off. Third, it led to crowding out of honest, competent players from the government tender market because they wouldn’t play ball.”   What’s Changed?Anyway, I went through this 22-page document released by the department and a few things stand out. First, there are concrete measures identified to make it easy for suppliers dealing with the government. The guidelines suggest 75 per cent of payment due must be paid within 10 working days of the submission of the bill and the remaining within 28 working days. Beyond this, penal interest would apply. There’s also guidance on how government entities should operate when they get into legal disputes with their suppliers. The entities should not appeal against judgments of lower courts in routine matters and decision to appeal should be reviewed by a special committee that should consider both legal merits and the practical chances of success after doing a cost-benefit analysis. This will encourage those suppliers who have stayed away from government contracts because of the jhanjhat they entail.   Second, a few other common bugbears of the government procurement process have been eliminated. For instance, the single bidder scenario in an open tender. Earlier the tender would be scrapped and a new one floated if there was only one bidder. This is no longer a necessary requirement and if the single bidder checks all the boxes, the process can continue with them to its conclusion. Also, the government entities can now quote a fixed budget for a project in the tender itself for the bidders to apply. This will take away the guesswork and protracted negotiations to get a bid under a budget that the government has in mind for specific time-bound projects. Finally, we have the Quality-cum-Cost Based Selection (QCBS) now allowed for procurement of works and non-consultancy service where the procurement has been declared Quality Oriented Procurement (QOP) by the competent authority and where the estimated value of the tender does not exceed Rs.10 crore. Even here, the weightage of non-financial parameters cannot exceed 30 per cent. This isn’t wholesale dumping of the L1 procurement system as it is made out to be but it is a continuation of the changes in the procurement process that started in 2017. And I hope as the confidence in this grows, we will phase out the L1 system completely and have a procurement framework that’s modern, not a colonial relic.p.s: There’s always a lot of life lessons to learn from any government gazette and this time I learnt the difference between ‘may’, ‘should’, ‘shall’ and ‘allowed’. I have reproduced it below for your enlightenment:“(i) Instructions containing ‘may’ are to be considered desirable or good practices which procuring entities/ project executing agencies are encouraged to implement but not mandatory. (ii) Instructions containing ‘should’ are required to be followed in general. However, there may be circumstances where it may not be practical/ desirable to implement them. In such cases, the concerned officer / agency may deviate by recording reasons in writing for not implementing the same(iii) Instructions containing ‘shall’ are mandatory; any deviation shall require (our take: note the meta level usage of shall here) relaxation of rules from the DoE (iv) Instructions containing ‘allowed’ indicate an optional course of action to be decided upon on merits” Aur kahan milega itna content!A Framework a Week: What’s a Policy Success? Tools for thinking public policy— Pranay KotasthaneWhatay coincidence! I also have something not-so-terrible to discuss. Rarer than sighting rare migratory birds. Anyways, it’s always fun to identify a policyWTF. The gotcha feeling is unmistakable. Policy watchers like us experience immense satisfaction in identifying governments’ stupidities. Moreover, limited state capacity in India means that policyWTFs surface at a daily cadence. Ideas that seemed great on paper regularly morph into egregious policies. As important as exposing government incompetence is in a democracy, we also realise the limits of analyses focusing on policy failures alone. The dominance of the language of incompetence and disillusionment with the State can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Fed only on a diet of policy failures, those of us who can afford, give up entirely on the State. Those who can’t afford, resign themselves to a State that can give occasional handouts and provide short-term benefits. To escape this narrative of cynicism and despair, we need to systematically understand policy successes in India. The caricature that India progresses despite its governments, not because of it, surely can’t be true. There are plenty of examples where government policies effectively resolved the biggest challenges of the day. The Green Revolution, the 1991 reforms, the National Pension System (NPS) reform, Fiscal Budget Responsibility and Budget Management Act, and the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) are just some candidates for successful policy measures that come to mind.But identifying isolated successes doesn’t go far enough. We need frameworks that can help understand what a policy success really entails. We need to understand the elements that are more likely to make policies successful in the Indian context. A search on these lines led me to this book Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand, which has a good review of literature on this topic. Let’s discuss a few of them.Framework 1: Programmatic-Political AxesThe first framework assesses success on two parameters - programmatic efficiency and effectiveness on one hand, and political coalition building and communication on the other. My illustration of this framework is below.This framework helps explain why the farm laws cannot be classified as a policy success or why this government doesn’t project demonetisation as a terrific policy reform anymore. Stories, Stories, StoriesThe crucial point is that calling a policy successful is at its core an intensely political claim. Apart from good “craft work”, it involves shaping the narrative so that it is widely seen as a success. As the authors write:“Policy successes, like policy failures, are in the eye of the beholder. They are not mere facts but stories. Undoubtedly, ‘events’—real impacts on real people—are a necessary condition for their occurrence. But, in the end, policy successes do not so much occur; they are made. To claim that X—a public policy, program or project—is a ‘success’ is effectively an act of interpretation, indeed of framing. To say this in a public capacity and in a public forum makes it an inherently political act. It amounts to giving a strong vote of confidence to certain acts and practices of governance. In effect, it singles them out, elevates them and validates them. For such an act to be consequential it needs to stick; others need to become convinced of its truth and need to emulate it. The claim ‘X is a success needs to become a more widely accepted and shared narrative. When it does, it becomes performative: X looks better and better because so many say so, so often. When the narrative endures, X becomes enshrined in collective memory through repeated retelling and other rituals. Examples of the latter include the conferral of awards on people or organisations associated with X, who then subsequently receive invitations to come before captive audiences to spread the word; the high place that X occupies in rankings; and the favourable judgements of X by official arbiters of public value in a society, such as audit agencies or watchdog bodies, not to mention the court of public opinion. Once they have achieved iconic status, success tales—no matter how selective and biased certain critics and soft voices may claim them to be (see, for example, Schram and Soss 2001)—serve as important artefacts in the construction of the self-images and reputational claims of the policymakers, governments, agencies and societal stakeholders that credibly claim authorship of their making and preservation (Van Assche et al. 2011)” —[Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand]Given the importance of narratives, objective classification of policies into successes or failures becomes difficult. Framework 2: A Fourfold MeasureBuilding on the previous framework, the editors develop a four-fold assessment in order to eliminate getting swayed by narratives alone. Broadly speaking, programmatic assessment measures effectiveness and efficiency, process assessment indicates implementation capability, and political assessment measures narrative power. I quite liked the fourth dimension. The temporal assessment, in the authors’ words, looks at the policy ‘not as a snapshot but as a film’. Policies with desirable effects almost always need regular software updates to account for unintended and unanticipated consequences. Take the case of Minimum Support Pricing policies in the context of food shortage in India. It did achieve the programmatic, process, and political goals but failed the temporal test because it evergreened the subsidies for a few crops. I recommend the book to anyone interested in policy engineering. I hope to do something similar in the Indian context to get out of a declinist policy discourse. Do you have any policy candidates in mind that meet the criteria outlined above? India Policy Watch: Charging For Sedition Is Our Parampara Insights on burning policy issues in India— RSJAnother week and another demand for a sedition case. This time it is from the left or the liberal wing. And their target is the eminent public intellectual Kangana Ranaut who in a discussion with another formidable intellect on Times Now claimed that India got her real azaadi in 2014 and what happened in 1947 was but a ‘bheekh’ (alms) that our generous colonial overlords had given us. This was enough. Demand for sedition charges poured in. Is this sedition? In the world of social media whataboutery, all kinds of parallels were drawn with other cases where this government has filed charges of sedition. It is useful to go back into history a bit to understand sedition in India (Section 124-A of the IPC) and how it has evolved to become the ogre it is today. A Brief History Of Sedition The first documented case of sedition was back in 1891. In the Queen Empress v. Jogendra Chunder Bose case, the proprietor of a weekly Bangla newspaper Bangobasi was charged for articles that appeared in it. What sort of articles? Well, the colonial government was considering passing the Age of Consent Bill which sought to raise the age of consent for Indian girls to be subject to sexual intercourse from ten to twelve. Bangobasi saw this as an unnecessary intervention of the state into the customs of Hindu society and severely criticised it. This would have made an interesting case even today on how much the state should intervene in the traditions of a society. The jury was unable to reach a consensus and Justice W. Comer Petheram discharged the case and let out the accused on bail.It is the next case that set the definition for sedition in colonial India whose imprint hasn’t vanished yet. This was Queen Empress v. Bal Gangadhar Tilak case where Tilak in his newspaper Kesari had carried an article titled ‘Shivaji’s Utterances’ that exhorted Indians to wake up to the foreign debasement of their culture. Tilak had sought for swarajya in his pages using Shivaji’s ghost in heaven as the medium. The article had no direct call for action or incitement to disorder. The case came up before Justice Arthur Strachey of the Bombay High Court and he defined sedition in such broad and blatantly partisan strokes that it was almost impossible for the jury to return any other verdict than guilty. Tilak was sentenced to 18 months of rigorous imprisonment and a precedent was set. Puraane Paap Once MoreSo, what were these broad strokes that Justice Strachey applied on sedition that continue to haunt us in independent India? First, it was not necessary for the speaker (or writer) to incite people to commit acts of violence or insurrection against the state for it to be considered sedition. Just the intention to arouse negative feelings about the government was good enough. Mind you, this almost replaced the state with the government. Abusive language against the government, portraying it as corrupt or hostile to its own people or calling it partial could all be considered sedition. The presumed intention itself going literally by the words of the speaker could be considered seditious. It didn’t matter if they were being used for irony or for satire. The real intent was irrelevant. Second, the judgment introduced a new element in free speech debates. Who is the intended audience and what’s their character? In Tilak’s case, the Bombay High Court was convinced that since Tilak wrote in Marathi, he was talking to an ignorant and gullible class of people who could be easily swayed by the impassioned texts asking them to rise in revolt against the government. So, not only the presumed intent of the speaker was to be judged but also the intellectual abilities of the audience to decide on the seditious nature of a speech or a column. Third, and quite incredibly, it didn’t matter what the consequence of the speech or text was in deciding on sedition charges. The accused couldn’t plead that no one actually developed any negative feelings against the government because of their speech. Nor was the truth relevant. The accused couldn’t argue that what she was saying was the truth. What mattered was presumed intent and the possibility of an impact. Quite honestly, this wasn’t any longer in the realm of law. This was metaphysics. Yet, a large part of this interpretation of sedition is what remains with us till today. By the mid 19th century, sedition was a minor offence (“misdemeanour”) in England and at its worst could attract a few years in prison. It was a bailable offence and there were rarely any convictions on charges of sedition in England by the time it was introduced as Section 124-A of IPC in 1870 in India. However, as we saw in Tilak’s case, the colonial government interpreted this section in the most illiberal way possible. And the tone was set. In the debates at the Constituent Assembly, the speakers who were victims of sedition law under British rule, drafted Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) to take the sting out of sedition charges. After 1947, few of our Courts ruled against sedition charges that were brought up against the leaders of Hindu Mahasabha or the Communist Party for making inflammatory speeches against the state or against other communities that could lead to violence. These judgments spooked Nehru and others in his cabinet. The wounds of partition were fresh and the spectre of violence was all around. Nehru blinked and the First Amendment to the Constitution that curbed freedom of speech was passed in June 1951. This has been chronicled in Tripurdaman Singh’s Sixteen Stormy Days - The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India.But this wasn’t all. In the Code of Criminal Procedure that came into force in 1974, Indira Gandhi made sedition a cognisable offence for the first time in our history. Now, police could make an arrest on charges of sedition without a warrant. Sedition thus became a non-bailable, cognisable and non-compoundable offence in India. A triple whammy that both sides of the political divide are happy to apply to the other. And in last five years things seemed to have gotten worse. Because in India, allegiance to free speech isn’t about conviction. It’s about convenience.p.s: Contrast the 1951 buckling of the Indian government to what happened to the Sedition Act of 1798 that was passed in the US House of Representatives. Here’s an excerpt from the House History website:“In one of the first tests of freedom of speech, the House passed the Sedition Act, permitting the deportation, fine, or imprisonment of anyone deemed a threat or publishing “false, scandalous, or malicious writing” against the government of the United States. The 5th Congress (1797–1799), narrowly divided between the majority Federalists and minority Jeffersonian Republicans, voted 44 to 41 in favor of the Senate-passed bill. Federalists championed the legislation fearing impending war with France and out of the desire to hold the majority in Congress and to retain the White House, then occupied by Federalist John Adams. In an era when newspapers served as political parties' chief organs, the Republican press was particularly vicious in its attacks on Federalists and the Adams administration. “Liberty of the press and of opinion is calculated to destroy all confidence between man and man,” noted one of the bill’s supporters, John Allen of Connecticut. “It leads to the dissolution of every bond of union.” Republicans defended the First Amendment protecting free speech and press. “What will be the situation of the people?” James Madison of Virginia demanded. “Not free: because they will be compelled to make their election between competitors whose pretensions they are not permitted by act equally to examine, to discuss and to ascertain.” Signed into law by Adams on July 14, the law proved immensely unpopular with the public and the President lost re-election to Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Under the incoming Republican administration, the Sedition Act eventually expired on March 3, 1801; however, arguments made for and against it shaped subsequent debate about constitutional protections of free speech.” PS: Read more on sedition in edition #115.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Article] Sedition in India: Colonial Legacy, Misuse and Effect on Free Speech from EPW.[Framework] BCG’s Public Impact Diagnostic Tool provides another way to measure policy success. [Note] A Guide for starting a low-cost, primarily remote setup podcast. Subscribe at publicpolicy.substack.com

The Congress Party once dominated Indian politics. Today, it's on the outside looking in. Rahul Verma joins Amit Varma in episode 248 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the complex social and political factors behind this massive decline.  Also check out: 1. Political Ideology in India -- Episode 131 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). 2. Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India -- Pradeep K Chhibber and Rahul Verma. 3. Taking Stock of Our Republic -- Episode 157 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ramachandra Guha). 4. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism -- Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 5. Religion and Ideology in Indian Society — Episode 124 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Suyash Rai). 6. The BJP Before Modi -- Episode 202 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 7. The BJP's Magic Formula — Episode 45 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Prashant Jha). 8. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 9. Who Broke Our Republic? — Episode 163 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Kapil Komireddi). 10. The Life and Times of Vir Sanghvi -- Episode 236 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. The Emergency of 1975 -- Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gyan Prakash). 12. India's Lost Decade -- Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 13. The Business of Winning Elections -- Episode 247 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shivam Shankar Singh). 14. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms -- Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 15. The Baptist, the Bootlegger and the Dead Man Walking -- Amit Varma. 16. Caste in Indian Politics -- Rajni Kothari. 17. Politics In India -- Rajni Kothari. 18. Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister -- Amit Varma. 19. The Burden of Democracy -- Pratap Bhanu Mehta. 20. Myron Weiner, Saadat Hasan Manto, Shivani and Harishankar Parsai on Amazon. 21. Murdahiya -- Dr Tulsiram. 22. Raag Darbari (Hindi) (English) -- Shrilal Shukla. 23. Dynastic parties: Organization, finance and impact -- Pradeep Chhibber. 24. 24 Akbar Road -- Rashid Kidwai. 25.  Congress after Indira: Policy, Power, Political Change -- Zoya Hasan. 26. The future of the Congress party -- A Conversation between Yamini Aiyar, Zoya Hasan and Rahul Verma. 27. Why big companies squander brilliant ideas -- Tim Harford. 28. A Game Theory Problem: Who Will Bell The Congress Cat? -- Amit Varma. 29. Mahua Moitra interviewed by Barkha Dutt. 30. Democracy without Associations -- Pradeep K Chibber. 31. Are You Anchored to the Past? -- Amit Varma. This episode is sponsored by Intel.  Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! And check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

We are subjects, not citizens -- and India's state is designed to keep us that way. Josy Joseph joins Amit Varma in episode 242 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the astonishing ways in which India's security state misuses its powers. Also check out: 1. The Silent Coup: A History of India's Deep State -- Josy Joseph. 2. A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India -- Josy Joseph. 3. Investigative Journalism: Silence is an Expensive Commodity -- Josy Joseph's TedX talk. 4. Vultures of Modern India -- Josy Joseph at Manthan Samvaad 2016. 5. The Geography of Genius -- Eric Weiner. 6. Where Have All The Leaders Gone? -- Amit Varma. 7. Franz Kafka, George Orwell and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Amazon. 8. Poland -- James A Michener. 9. Curfewed Night -- Basharat Peer. 10. Our Moon Has Blood Clots -- Rahul Pandita. 11. The Prem Panicker Files -- Episode 217 of The Seen and the Unseen. 12. Afghanistan: The Bear Trap -- Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin. 13. The Looming Tower -- Lawrence Wright. 14. Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures — Episode 17 of Conversations With Tyler. 15. The Notebook Trilogy — Agota Kristof. 16. Prem Panicker on writing -- Episode 3 of The Windowpane Sessions. 17. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 18. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 19. Emergency Chronicles -- Gyan Prakash. 20. Gyan Prakash on the Emergency -- Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen. 21. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 22. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 23. India, Pakistan, Kashmir: We Won't Need To Fight A War If We Can Win The Peace -- Amit Varma. 24. Counterinsurgency Warfare — David Galula. 25. The Insurgents — Fred Kaplan. 26. Seven Pillars of Wisdom -- TE Lawrence. 27. The Generation of Rage in Kashmir — David Devadas. 28. Kashmir and Article 370 -- Episode 130 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Srinath Raghavan). 29. The Cobra Effect. 30. KP Raghuvanshi interrogated by Arnab Goswami. 31. The Streetlight Effect. Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! And check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

In this podcast, we talk to Tripurdaman Singh about his 1st book Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics: The Bhadauria Rajputs and the Transition from Mughal to British India, 1600–1900. Follow Tripurdaman: Twitter: @tripurdaman You can buy the book here: https://www.amazon.in/Imperial-Sovereignty-Local-Politics-Transition/dp/1108497438/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3MCDHL6L82G37&dchild=1&keywords=tripurdaman+singh&qid=1629998990&sprefix=tripurdaman+songh%2Caps%2C272&sr=8-2 #BhadauriaRajputs #Marathas #British ------------------------------------------------------------ Listen to the podcasts on: SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/kushal-mehra-99891819 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1rVcDV3upgVurMVW1wwoBp Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-c%C4%81rv%C4%81ka-podcast/id1445348369 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-carvaka-podcast ------------------------------------------------------------ Support The Cārvāka Podcast: Become a Member on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKPxuul6zSLAfKSsm123Vww/join Become a Member on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/carvaka UPI: kushalmehra@icici To buy The Carvaka Podcast Exclusive Merch please visit: http://kushalmehra.com/shop ------------------------------------------------------------ Follow Kushal: Twitter: https://twitter.com/kushal_mehra?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KushalMehraOfficial/? Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecarvakapodcast/?hl=en Koo: https://www.kooapp.com/profile/kushal_mehra Inquiries: https://kushalmehra.com/ Feedback: kushalmehra81@gmail.com

The liberalisation of 1991 lifted more than a quarter of a billion people in India out of poverty. And yet, we often don't recognise their importance, and have gone backwards in the last decade. Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah join Amit Varma in episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss what life was like before 1991, where we had gone wrong, what we put right and what remains to be done. Also check out: 1. The 1991 Project. 2. The quest for economic freedom in India -- Shruti Rajagopalan. 3. Ideas and Origins of the Planning Commission in India -- Shruti Rajagopalan. 4. The Art and Science of Economic Policy -- Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah). 5. The Economics and Politics of Vaccines -- Episode 223 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 6. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills -- Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 7. Other episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3. 8. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah 9. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Shruti Rajagopalan, in reverse chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. 10. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 11. Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley's Father's Scooter -- Episode 214 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley). 12. Anticipating the Unintended — Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley's newsletter. 13. The Dark Side of the Moon -- Pink Floyd. 14. Wish You Were Here -- Pink Floyd. 15. Free to Choose -- Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. 16. The Road to Serfdom -- Friedrich Hayek. 17. The Fatal Conceit --  Friedrich Hayek. 18. The Clash of Economic Ideas -- Lawrence H White. 19. Pandit's Mind -- The 1951 Time magazine cover story on Jawaharlal Nehru. 20. Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister -- Amit Varma. 21. An Autobiography -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 22. The Discovery of India -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 23. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 24. Profit = Philanthropy -- Amit Varma. 25. India Unbound -- Gurcharan Das. 26. India Transformed: 25 Years of Economic Reforms -- Edited by Rakesh Mohan. 27. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 28. Understanding Indian Healthcare -- Episode 225 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan).  29. Modi's Lost Opportunity -- Episode 119 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Salman Soz). 30. Bootleggers and Baptists-The Education of a Regulatory Economist — Bruce Yandle. 31. Pigs Don't Fly: The Economic Way of Thinking about Politics — Russell Roberts. 32. Raees: An Empty Shell of a Gangster Film — Amit Varma. 33. The White Man's Burden -- William Easterly. 34. The Tyranny of Experts -- William Easterly. 35. Planners vs. Searchers in Foreign Aid -- William Easterly. 36. We, the People -- Nani Palikhiwala. 37. India's Agriculture Crisis — Episode 140 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra & Kumar Anand). 38. DeMon, Morality and the Predatory Indian State -- Episode 85 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 39. Most of Amit Varma's writing on DeMon, collected in one Twitter thread. 40. Narendra Modi Takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma 41. Beware of the Useful Idiots -- Amit Varma. 42. Restaurant Regulations in India -- Episode 18 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhu Menon). 43. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality -- Amit Varma. 44. On Inequality -- Harry Frankfurt. 45. Breaking the Caste Barrier: Intergenerational Mobility in India -- Viktoria Hnatkovska, Amartya Lahiri and Sourabh B Paul. 46. Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Methods and Estimates Across Time, Space, and Communities -- Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin. 47. Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs -- Devesh Kapur, D Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad. 48. Taking Stock of Our Economy -- Episode 227 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ila Patnaik). 49. India's Lost Decade -- Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 50. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's books on Amazon. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader, FutureStack and The Social Capital Compound. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! And check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

Public policy may seem like a dull subject fit only for wonks, but it matters: our lives are deeply affected by what our governments do. Pranay Kotasthane joins Amit Varma in episode 233 of The Seen and the Unseen to chat about his intellectual journey, his private beach and why public policy can be so stimulating. He also answers racy questions from the Twitterverse. If you share Pranay's interest in public policy, you should check out Takshashila's Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (GCPP). Also check out: 1. Anticipating the Unintended -- Pranay Kotasthane's newsletter (with RSJ). 2. Puliyabaazi -- Pranay Kotasthane's podcast (with Saurabh Chandra). 3. Foreign Policy is a Big Deal -- Episode 170 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane & Manoj Kewalramani). 4. Radically Networked Societies -- Episode 158 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane). 5. Older episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Pranay Kotasthane: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 6. Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley's Father's Scooter -- Episode 214 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley). 7. ये लिबरल आख़िर है कौन? -- Episode 37 of Puliyabaazi (w Amit Varma). 8. Amit Varma's tweet thread soliciting questions for this episode. 9. Examples of Pranay Kotasthane's Mind Maps of books: 1, 2, 3. 10. Coggle. 11. The Lessons of History -- Will Durant. 12. Raj Comics. 13. The China Dude Is in the House -- Episode 231 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Manoj Kewalramani). 14. A Case For Societism -- Pranay Kotasthane. 15. Pranay Kotasthane's Manthan talk on societism. 16. The Indian Dream Podcast episode with Amit Varma. 17. 8 things to unlearn before learning public policy -- Pranay Kotasthane. 18. The Double 'Thank-You' Moment -- John Stossel. 19.  Opportunity Cost Neglect in Public Policy -- Emil Persson and Gustav Tinghög. 20. Whose Money is it Anyway? -- Amit Varma. 21. The 4 Ways to Spend Money -- Milton Friedman. 22. Discover Your Inner Economist -- Tyler Cowen. 23. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 24. The Art and Science of Economic Policy -- Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah). 25. Amit Varma's prescient 2017 tweet on the price caps on stents. 26. Episodes of the Seen and the Unseen on GST with Devangshu Datta, Vivek Kaul and Shruti Rajagopalan. 26. Most of Amit Varma's writing on DeMon, collected in one Twitter thread. 27. Narendra Modi Takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma 28. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on Demonetisation with Suyash Rai and Shruti Rajagopalan. 29. The Delhi Smog -- Episode 44 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 30. Bootleggers and Baptists-The Education of a Regulatory Economist -- Bruce Yandle. 31. Pigs Don't Fly: The Economic Way of Thinking about Politics -- Russell Roberts. 32. Raees: An Empty Shell of a Gangster Film -- Amit Varma. 33. Shubhra Gupta's review about which Tapsee Pannu kicked up such a fuss. 34. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills -- Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 35. Wilson's Interest Group Matrix -- Charles Cameron from The Political Analyst's Toolkit. 36. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working -- Jonathan Rauch. 37. The Great Redistribution -- Amit Varma. 38. Behave -- Robert Sapolsky. 39. Robert Sapolsky's lectures on YouTube. 40. Elite Imitation in Public Policy -- Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan & Alex Tabarrok). 41. Taxes Should Be Used for Governance, Not Politics -- Amit Varma. 42. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 43. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 44. The Emergency -- Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gyan Prakash). 45. How the BJP Wins -- Prashant Jha. 46. The BJP's Magic Formula -- Episode 45 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Prashant Jha). 47. Participatory Democracy — Episode 160 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 48. Other episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ashwin Mahesh: 1, 2. 49. Understanding India Through Its Languages -- Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). 50. The Indianness of Indian Food — Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 51. Governing the Commons -- Elinor Ostrom. 52. Public Choice Theory -- Episode 121 of The Seen and the Unseen. 53. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 54. Education in India -- Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra). 55. The Economics and Politics of Vaccines -- Episode 223 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 56. The Indian Conservative -- Episode 145 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jaithirth Rao). 57. How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time -- Hal Varian. 58. A Scientist in the Kitchen -- Episode 204 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Krish Ashok). 59. Modeling Covid-19 -- Episode 224 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gautam Menon). 60. Narratives on Exchange Rates in India -- Pranay Kotasthane. 61. Taking Stock of Our Economy -- Episode 227 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ila Patnaik). 62. The Power Broker -- Robert Caro. 63. The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs. 64. Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister -- Amit Varma (on the importance of reading). 65. Selling Solutions vs Solving Problems -- Lant Pritchett. 66. Policy Paradox -- Deborah Stone. 67. The Mahatma and the Poet -- The Tagore-Gandhi debates. 68. Factfulness -- Hans Rosling. 69. Humankind: A Hopeful History -- Rutger Bregman. 70. A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis -- Eugene Bardach. 71. Essence of Decision -- Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow. 72. Banishing Bureaucracy -- David Osborne. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader, FutureStack and The Social Capital Compound. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! And check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

His writing is self-reflective, his humour is self-deprecatory, and he's one of our finest writers on cinema. Jai Arjun Singh joins Amit Varma in episode 230 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe how he to came to love cinema -- and how that love changed shape as he did. Also check out: 1. Jabberwock -- Jai Arjun Singh's blog. 2. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron: Seriously Funny Since 1983 -- Jai Arjun Singh. 3. The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee -- Jai Arjun Singh. 4. Popcorn Essayists -- Edited by Jai Arjun Singh. 5. Seeing is believing? An essay about encounters with religious cinema -- Jai Arjun Singh. 6. Meandering thoughts on the consumer-art relationship, glorification vs depiction, etc -- Jai Arjun Singh. 7. In praise of “commercial” acting -- Jai Arjun Singh. 8. One Moment Please -- Jai Arjun Singh's column for the Hindu. 9. Jai Arjun Singh at Mint Lounge, Scroll and First Post. 10. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 11. Lessons in Investing (and Life) -- Episode 208 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Deepak Shenoy). 12. Two Girls Hanging From a Tree -- Episode 209 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Sonia Faleiro). 13. A Writer Learns to See -- Episode 215 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Annie Zaidi). 14. Leonard Maltin's TV Movies and Video Guide 1991. 15. Amit Varma's Twitter threads on the MAMI festival from 2018 and 2019. 16. A Meditation on Form -- Amit Varma. 17. The House of the Dead -- Fyodor Dostoevsky. 18. Psycho -- Alfred Hitchcock. 19. The 1980s films mentioned in this episode: Meri Jung, Mr India, Parinda, Tezaab, Eeshwar, Awaargi, Karma, Chameli Ki Shaadi, Saaheb, Teri Meherbaniya, Ghulami, Hathyar, Arjun. 20. Dogme 95 (on Wikipedia). 21. Sholay -- Ramesh Sippy.22. Jai Arjun Singh's many writings on Sholay. 23. We all live in a Cannibal Holocaust -- Amit Varma. 24. Ghost Stories -- Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee & Karan Johar. 25. Eyes Without a Face -- Georges Franju. 26. Amarcord & I Vitelloni -- Federico Fellini. 27. Moonlight -- Barry Jenkins. 28. David Dhawan and Krzysztof Kieślowski on Wikipedia. 29. Piku -- Shoojit Sirkar. 30. Jai Arjun Singh's writings on Piku. 31. Jai Arjun Singh's talk at TEDxNSIT. 32. Dead Poet's Society -- Peter Weir. 33. Louie -- Louis CK. 34. Kabir Singh, Leni Riefenstahl & The Birth of a Nation. 35. Films, Feminism, Paromita -- Episode 155 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Paromita Vohra). 36. The Kavita Krishnan Files -- Episode 228 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Kavita Krishnan). 37. How Social Media Threatens Society -- Episode 8 of Brave New World, hosted by Vasant Dhar, featuring Jonathan Haidt. 38. The Philadelphia Story -- George Cukor. 39. The Wire -- created by David Simon. 40. Dekalog -- Krzysztof Kieślowski. 41. Casey Neistat on YouTube. 42. Alan Moore's books on Amazon. 43. Biwi aur Makan -- Hrishikesh Mukherjee. 44. Ace in the Hole -- Billy Wilder. 45. The Magic Faraway Tree Collecton -- Enid Blyton. 46. Mrutyunjay -- Shivaji Sawant. 47. The Unconsoled -- Kazuo Ishiguro. 48. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phentom of Liberty, That Obscure Object of Desire -- Luis Buñuel. 49. Cinefan diary: Jean-Claude Carriere -- Jai Arjun Singh. 50. Pauline Kael on Amazon. This episode is sponsored by Wondrium. Check out their series, How to Look at and Understand Great Art. For free unlimited access for a month, click here. Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! And check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

We're well into the 21st century, but Indian society seems stuck in ages past -- especially when it comes to the state of our women. Kavita Krishnan joins Amit Varma in episode 228 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss her evolution as a feminist, and what she has learned from her activism.  Also check out: 1. Fearless Freedom -- Kavita Krishnan. 2. Kavita Krishnan's speech in the anti-rape protests of 2012. 3. Kavita Krishnan on the Tarun Tejpal verdict. 4. Kavita Krishnan's Facebook posts on stalking and marital rape. 5. Gendered Discipline in Globalising India -- Kavita Krishnan. 6. Kavita Krishnan's Twitter thread on the Mahmood Farooqui case. 7. Films, Feminism, Paromita -- Episode 155 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Paromita Vohra). 8. Women at Work -- Episode 132 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Namita Bhandare). 9. Metrics of Empowerment -- Episode 88 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Devika Kher, Nidhi Gupta and Hamsini Hariharan). 10. The #MeToo Movement -- Episode 90 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Supriya Nair & Nikita Saxena). 11. An Economist Looks at #MeToo -- Episode 92 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 12. Misogyny is the Oldest Indian Tradition -- Amit Varma. 13. Men Must Step Up Now -- Amit Varma. 14. Over 1600 Teachers Died of COVID-19 After Poll Duty for Panchayat Elections -- Manoj Singh. 15. Enid Blyton on Amazon. 16. Little Women -- Louisa May Alcott. 17. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee. 18. The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories -- Kate Chopin. 19. Max Beerbohm and James Thurber on Amazon. 20. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky. 21. House of the Dead --  Fyodor Dostoevsky. 22. Leaves From the Jungle -- Verrier Elwin. 23. Private Truths, Public Lies -- Timur Kuran. 24. Ram Ke Naam -- Documentary by Anand Patwardhan. 25. The City & the City -- China Miéville. 26. Remembering Chandu, Friend and Comrade -- Kavita Krishnan. 27. Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India -- Ania Loomba. 28. Song of Myself -- Walt Whitman. 29. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- Mary Wollstonecraft. 30. Amit Varma's episode of The Book Club on Wollstonecraft's book. 31. Who Stole Feminism? -- Chistina Hoff Sommers. 32. The Blank Slate -- Steven Pinker. 33. Feminism for the 99% -- Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya & Nancy Fraser. 34. Resisting State Injustice -- Episode 120 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jason Brennan). 35. Marxvaad Aur Ram Rajya -- Karpatri Maharaj. 36. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India -- Akshaya Mukul. 37. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism -- Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 38. A People's Constitution -- Rohit De. 39. Does India take its national symbols too seriously? -- Jan 2008 episode of We the People. 40. The Ideas of Our Constitution -- Episode 164 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhav Khosla). 41. Early Indians -- Episode 112 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tony Joseph). 42. The History of Desire in India -- Episode 161 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhavi Menon). 43. Young India -- Episode 83 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Snigdha Poonam). 44. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 45. Love jihad laws are a backlash to India's own progress -- Shruti Rajagopalan. 46. The Jackson Katz quote on passive sentence constructions. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader, FutureStack and The Social Capital Compound. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! And check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

This episode of BIC Talks with author and historian Tripurdaman Singh and lawyer Siddharth Raja contextualises and discusses the lead up to the first ever amendment to the Constitution of India in the year 1951, only a year after the Constitution was brought into effect, the subject of Tripurdaman's new book Sixteen Stormy Days - The Story of the First Amendment of the Constitution of India.  The conversation traces this momentous event and the various personalities and agendas, at odds with the original hopes and dreams of building a liberal democratic system at the heart of it. The controversial amendment termed an “obscenity by willful resolve” by some is a crucial moment characterised by some of the fiercest parliamentary debates and  in the country’s political, judicial and constitutional history which set us on a path of ambiguity as a nation.  Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Tripurdaman is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and has been the recipient of a fellowship award from the Indian Council of Historical Research.  Siddharth Raja is a seasoned corporate lawyer now in his 23rd year of practice. He focuses on private equity and venture capital transactions, and on cross-border and domestic mergers and acquisitions.

The second wave in India could have been avoided. We should not have been suffering like this. Vaccines were the answer. Ajay Shah joins Amit Varma in episode 223 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss how our thinking about vaccines was fundamentally flawed -- and what we should do now. Also discussed: why Indian healthcare is in such a mess. Also check out: 1. Indian Health Policy in Light of COVID-19 -- Ajay Shah's paper from July 14, 2020.  2. How the Vaccine Story Will Play Out -- Ajay Shah (Nov 30, 2020). 3. SARS-Cov-2 Vaccines for India -- Ajay Shah's presentation from December 29, 2020. 4. Price Controls for Vaccines? -- Ajay Shah (March 8, 2021). 5. Responding to the Second Wave -- Ajay Shah (April 5, 2021). 6. An Important Change of Course by Policy in Indian Covid-19 Vaccination -- Amrita Agarwal & Ajay Shah. 7. Vaccination in India: How Will Demand Change When Persons Above Age 18 Are Eligible? -- Renuka Sane & Ajay Shah. 8. The Best Way to Vaccinate Most Indians in the Least Time -- Shruti Rajagopalan (Sep 14, 2020). 9. Vaccinating India: What Next? -- Naushad Forbes (March 16, 2021). 10. India’s Covid Crisis Has a Familiar Culprit -- Mihir Sharma (April 13, 2021). 11. Biden Admin Remakes Vaccine Strategy -- Erin Banco (March 29, 2021). 12. NYT Covid Vaccinations Tracker. 13. Previous episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on Covid-19: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 14. In Service of the Republic -- Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 15. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah)   16. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills -- Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 17. Other episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3. 18. We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State -- Amit Varma. 19. Capital -- Rana Dasgupta. 20. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan).  21. Other episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on Education: 1, 2, 3. 22. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on Agriculture: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 23. The Geopolitics of the Bangladesh War -- Episode 113 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Srinath Raghavan).  24. Building State Capability -- Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock. 25. Taxes Should Be Used for Governance, Not Politics -- Amit Varma.  26. The Man of System -- From Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 27. The Fatal Conceit -- Friedrich Hayek. 28: How the BJP Wins -- Prashant Jha. 29. The BJP’s Magic Formula -- Episode 45 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Prashant Jha). 30. The First Assault on Our Constitution -- Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 31. Price Controls Lead to Shortages and Harm the Poor -- Amit Varma. Please subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It’s free! And check out Amit’s online course, The Art of Clear Writing.

This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration on all podcasting platforms courtesy the good folks at Ad-Auris. If you have any feedback, please send it to us.- Pranay Kotasthane & RSJIt’s the 72nd Republic Day today (as we write this). The Constitution of India is a revolutionary document. The past few years have seen some wonderful works of scholarship about our constitution. We’d like to call out a few here. The Constitution will remain a distant and daunting document as long as we don’t develop a habit of referencing it directly. Thankfully, EBC has been publishing a coat pocketbook version since 2009. It works great as a reference book. And it doesn’t hurt that it looks elegant and makes for a wonderful gift. As an aside, a dream project of mine is to convert the constitution into a knowledge graph that visually connects the cross-referencing articles in the Constitution. If any AtU reader has the technical chops to make this happen, please ping us. Madhav Khosla’s India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracyis a brilliant and erudite work that is essential to understand the radical nature of our Constitution and the interplay of ideas and debates among people who cared deeply for this nation that led to its creation.Rohit De’s A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic challenges the idea that our Constitution was the product of an elitist imagination whose impact in the lives of ordinary Indians was minimal. De uses four examples to make his case about the Constitution empowering the people of India to take on the state. Tripurdaman Singh’s Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment of Constitution of India shows how the idealism of the Constitution became a difficult burden to bear while running a government. No constitution can be eternally infallible. But we set a precedent of changing the architecture of our Constitution really early in the life of our Republic. We might never recover from that ‘original sin’.Gautam Bhatia’s The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Actsexplains in detail why the Constitution at its core aims to bring about a social revolution. Many a constitution aim to transform the polity and economy but few aim to change society itself. This is what sets the Indian Constitution apart. The classic work on this line of reasoning is Granville Austin’s The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation. This passage from Rohit De’s A People’s Constitution helps make sense of the remarkable achievement that the Indian Constitution is.“The Indian Constitution was written over a period of four years by the Constituent Assembly. Dominated by the Congress Party, India’s leading nationalist political organization, the assembly sought to include a wide range of political opinions and represented diversity by sex, religion, caste, and tribe. This achievement is striking compared to other states that were decolonized. Indians wrote the Indian Constitution, unlike the people of most former British colonies, like Kenya, Malaysia, Ghana, and Sri Lanka, whose constitutions were written by British officials at Whitehall. Indian leaders were also able to agree upon a constitution, unlike Israeli and Pakistani leaders, both of whom elected constituent assemblies at a similar time but were unable to reach agreement on a document. The Indian Constitution is the longest surviving constitution in the post-colonial world, and it continues to dominate public life in India. Despite this, its endurance has received little attention from scholars. [Rohit De, A People’s Constitution, pg 2]To explain the last point visually here’s a comparative chart plotting the number of constitutions against the year of independence for Asian states. Source: Asia’s tryst with constitutionalism, Pranay Kotasthane and Piyush Singh, PragatiIndia, of course, falls in the heavily clustered zone labelled “independence era states” - political communities that overthrew European colonialism to establish new nation-states. Zooming in this era, we find that a handful of constitutions in Asia have survived. Only three amongst them had a constituent assembly that brought together people to make their own constitutions. And even amongst the ones where one constitution has survived this far, most have been beset by politically active militaries and dictatorships. The Indian constitution is without a doubt an exception to be proud of. Source: Asia’s tryst with constitutionalism, Pranay Kotasthane and Piyush Singh, PragatiAmong the many flaws that are often pointed out about our Constitution, the one we disagree most with is about how unmoored it was from India’s past. The accusation is we didn’t try and locate the great ideas and values of the Constitution in our past. This created a sense of distance of the ordinary Indian from the ideals of the people’s Constitution. We have two problems with this line of argument. First, this alienation from our tradition (if true) was to be bridged by later scholars and interpreters of the Constitution including legislators and administrators. The members of the Constituent Assembly shouldn’t have been expected to also write a commentary on it in parallel. Second, there are multiple references to how the principles enshrined in it are consistent with the best of our historical tradition.Another common criticism is that the Constitution reproduced two-thirds of the GoI Act of 1935 and hence wasn’t transformative enough. What’s forgotten of course is that the 1935 Act itself was a result of a powerful Indian independence movement’s consistent political pressure on the British government. The charge of not being transformative enough” needs rethinking.We will leave you with two excerpts of speeches made in the Assembly that support the assertion that the Constitution is consistent with the best of the Indian historical traditions while leaving out the undesirable elements. On 17th October 1949, J.B. Kripalani made both the points we have stated above:“Sir, I want, at this solemn hour to remind the House that what we have stated in this Preamble are not legal and political principles only. They are also great moral and spiritual principles and if I may say so, they are mystic principles. In fact these were not first legal and constitutional principles, but they were really spiritual and moral principles. If we look at history, we shall find that because the lawyers and politician made their principles into legal and constitutional form that their life and vitality was lost and is being lost even today. Take democracy. What is it? It implies the equality of man, it implies fraternity. Above all it implies the great principle of non-violence. How can there be democracy where there is violence? Even the ordinary definition of democracy is that instead of breaking heads, we count heads. This non-violence then there is at the root of democracy. And I submit that the principle of non-violence, is a moral principle. It is a spiritual principle. It is a mystic principle. It is a principle which says that life is one, that you cannot divide it, that it is the same life pulsating through us all. As the Bible puts it, "we are one of another," or as Vendanta puts it, that all this is One. If we want to use democracy as only a legal, constitutional and formal device, I submit, we shall fail. As we have put democracy at the basis of your Constitution, I wish Sir, that the whole country should understand the moral, the spiritual and the mystic implication of the word "democracy". If we have not done that, we shall fail as they have failed in other countries. Democracy will be made into autocracy and it will be made into imperialism, and it will be made into fascism. But as a moral principle, it must be lived in life. If it is not lived in life, and the whole of it in all its departments, it becomes only a formal and a legal principal. We have got to see that we live this democracy in our life.” And more famously, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in his last speech at the Constituent Assembly draws upon our past: “It is not that India did not know what Democracy is. There was a time when India was studded with republics, and even where there were monarchies, they were either elected or limited. They were never absolute. It is not that India did not know Parliaments or Parliamentary Procedure. A study of the Buddhist Bhikshu Sanghas discloses that not only there were Parliaments-for the Sanghas were nothing but Parliaments – but the Sanghas knew and observed all the rules of Parliamentary Procedure known to modern times. They had rules regarding seating arrangements, rules regarding Motions, Resolutions, Quorum, Whip, Counting of Votes, Voting by Ballot, Censure Motion, Regularization, Res Judicata, etc.Although these rules of Parliamentary Procedure were applied by the Buddha to the meetings of the Sang has, he must have borrowed them from the rules of the Political Assemblies functioning in the country in his time.This democratic system India lost. Will she lose it a second time? I do not know. But-it is quite possible in a country like India – where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new – there is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship. It is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility of becoming actuality is much greater.”The above lines are followed by his famous ‘Grammar of Anarchy’ passage. He knew what he was talking about.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Video] Ambedkar’s speech at the Constituent Assembly [Document] Judgment on Shankari Prasad vs Union of India: The First Constitution Amendment Act, 1951 was challenged in the Shankari Prasad vs. Union of India case. The Supreme Court held that the Parliament, under Article 368, has the power to amend any part of the constitution including fundamental rights. [Podcast] On Puliyabaazi, Rohit De joins Saurabh and Pranay to discuss India’s tryst with constitutionalism.[Article] Democracy and the Republic - the differences between these two concepts. Get on the email list at publicpolicy.substack.com

Is speech in India actually free? - In the first episode of Season 2 of Justify, Vidhi's podcast on law and politics in India, Dr Arghya Sengupta discusses this question with Justice Jasti Chelameswar, former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and Tripurdaman Singh, author of 'Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India'. The episode looks at the historical attitude of governments towards free speech and explores whether its restriction through bans, censorship, and criminal cases is a recent phenomenon. Also discussed is India's law on hate speech and whether it is adequate. Watch out for Vidhi's legal quiz, CLATTR, at the end of the episode, and stand a chance to win an Amazon voucher. Write in your answer and feedback on the episode to justify@vidhilegalpolicy.in.

I chat with Tripurdaman Singh about his book "Sixteen Stormy days". You can buy the book here https://www.amazon.in/Sixteen-Stormy-Days-Amendment-Constitution/dp/0670092878/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1594756330&refinements=p_27%3ATripurdaman+Singh&s=books&sr=1-1 You can follow Tripurdaman on Twitter @tripurdaman You can follow me on Twitter @kushal_mehra You can support the Carvaka Podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/carvaka You can become a member of The Carvaka Podcast on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKPxuul6zSLAfKSsm123Vww/join You can follow me on Facebook @KushalMehraOfficial