Full Text: India is Getting Re-Hyphenated With Pakistan Because Under Modi We're Democratically Regressing

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20-05-2025

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Full Text: India is Getting Re-Hyphenated With Pakistan Because Under Modi We're Democratically Regressing
Karan Thapar
11 minutes ago
'My worry is not that we are looking more like Pakistan. My worry is we are looking less like India, the India of our constitutional reach,' Ramachandra Guha says.
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In an interview where he discusses the core message of an article he's written for a paper, the well-known and highly regarded historian, author and political commentator, Ramachandra Guha, says India is getting re-hyphenated with Pakistan because for the last decade it's been regressing and steadily moving away from its founding principles. Guha believes it's the responsibility of the Indian people to stand up and assert their commitment to the founding principles, the Constitution and the sensible conventions established over the last seven decades.
This is the full text of the interview, transcribed by Parvani Baroi.
Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to a special interview for The Wire. In an article that is written today for the Kolkata paper, The Telegraph, my guest believes that India is in danger of becoming re-hyphenated with Pakistan. And this is mainly because it's regressed and moved away from its founding principles. Those are serious concerns that deserve to be discussed and better understood. Joining me now to explain his thinking and his fears is the well-known historian of modern India, the author of multiple books and a widely read public commentator Ramachandra Guha.
Ram Guha, in the article you've written today for the Kolkata paper The Telegraph, you argue that India is in danger of becoming re-hyphenated with Pakistan because it has regressed and moved away from its founding principles. That's the subject I want to discuss with you. First, let's start with why you believe India is in danger of being re-hyphenated. In the first instance, it's to do with Donald Trump's comments and tweets. Can you explain?
Ramachandra Guha: Yes, Karan. To explain how Donald Trump's comments and tweets are a substantial departure from how past American presidents have viewed us, one needs a little bit of history. So during the Cold War and particularly around the time of the '65 and '71 conflicts between India and Pakistan, there was a kind of India and Pakistan being seen as very different because they were fighting over Kashmir. The Americans were supporting Pakistan energetically. We were kind of non-aligned but striking alliances from our side.
But from the early '90s it became clear that India was indeed different from Pakistan in several respects. One, that although they were an Islamic republic, we were not a Hindu state. Second, we held regular elections whereas their elections were decided by generals. Third, from the '90s we started growing economically quite substantially and in 1998 you will recall President Clinton came here and he spent 5 days in India and 5 hours in Pakistan which was a starkly visible sign that India and Pakistan were being de-hyphenated and India was being regarded as much more important economically, politically and indeed morally by the most powerful country in the world.
Now move to the presidents after Clinton – Bush and Obama. You know not only did the relationship between India and America grow substantially economically and politically, you will recall the extraordinary praise that Bush and Obama levelled particularly Obama but also Bush on Dr. Manmohan Singh as a statesman among statesmen and so on. So there was a radical de-hyphenation and now there was some talk, possibly premature talk but certainly some talk, of India instead being hyphenated with China.
Now this is a radical departure in that context. Now this morning, Karan, I read a report after my article was sent to the press in the PTI, an Indian news agency, which said Trump has said seven times that he will mediate between India and Pakistan, not just once. He has called them both great nations. He has said they are both equal friends of his. They will come to the table and negotiate under his allegedly benign supervision.
Now Trump is, we know, whimsical, erratic, vain. Nonetheless, he is the president of the most powerful and the richest country in the world with which India very much desires good relations. And hence even obviously in our eyes we should not be hyphenated with Pakistan. We are still a democracy. We are growing. Our economy is 11 times that of Pakistan. Our per capita income is twice that of Pakistan. At least where I live in South India: it may be slightly different in North and West India: minorities are relatively safe.
So it may irk us to be hyphenated. But why is it that the most powerful man in the world who runs a country with which India has had such good relations over the last three decades and for its own economic and geostrategic interests, it requires India to maintain and deepen those relationships, why is this happening? So we should introspect and ask ourselves.
Karan Thapar: Let me ask you this. Are you confident that this is not just the quirky idiosyncratic eccentric nature of Trump or is it in fact a conscious attempt to see India and Pakistan as equivalent entities?
Ramachandra Guha: Well, one does not know with Trump but the fact that the US had to mediate and you know repeatedly claimed it has Bans and Rubio too, they also said that Kashmir will be discussed you know in a neutral venue. This is a clear violation of the Shimla Agreement. But more than that, Karan, in my article I also talk about the Financial Times which is arguably the most respected western paper in the world, generally quite sympathetic to India, and the Financial Times, this hugely respected international paper, ran a big story when shortly
before the ceasefire but when the guns were blazing on either side between India and Pakistan and boldly, I quote the headline was 'Two Religious Strong Men Clash.' Who are these two religious strong men? On the one side, General Asim Munir, the head of the Pakistani army presented as a devout Muslim who aggressively represents his country's interests and the other Narendra Modi represented as a devout Hindu who acts similarly on behalf of his country.
So there was another article which I also referred to in my column by the very well-known and widely regarded international relations historian Timothy Garton Ash where he says of Narendra Modi, he speaks of Narendra Modi's obsessive enmity towards Chinese-backed Pakistan. Now give me a couple of minutes Karan to explain how these representations and characterizations of Mr. Modi and India are so different from what in not just the Financial Times but the New York Times, the Economist, CNN, even whatever Spanish newspapers would have resorted to in the past.
You know, would anyone have called Manmohan Singh, Rajiv Gandhi, Deve Gowda, Narasimha Rao or even Atal Bihari Vajpayee a religious strongman? No. Would any of them talk of their aggressive enmity towards Pakistan? I think that's what defines them. Now I was reflecting on this and particularly religious strongman part if you give me just one minute to suggest that Narendra Modi particularly since 2019 has earned himself the sobriquet religious strongman.
You know, the fact that he religiously presided over the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya as prime minister sent a sign that he believed India was a Hindu rashtra, that he has been repeatedly portrayed by his fan club supported by his party and his government in military uniform. I live in Bangalore which is not ruled by the BJP but friends of mine in BJP ruled states tell me that after the Pulwama attack and even before the conflict started there were posters everywhere of Modi in military uniform looming large and the armed forces rather small in the background, you know our proud and hugely capable armed forces.
So he has presented himself as a religious strongman and clearly the larger ecosystem, the social media ecosystem of the BJP, you know is not really concerned so much with India's economic or political rise as what the Financial Times characterizes as an obsessive enmity with Pakistan. So these things should really give us pause.
Karan Thapar: So you're saying two very important things aren't you? And I'll quickly sum them up for the audience. Not only is it Donald Trump in his tweets and his comments that is re-hyphenating India with Pakistan, but leading intellectuals like Professor Timothy Garton Ash or leading Western newspapers like the Financial Times are also in their coverage of India and Pakistan hyphenating the two. There the hyphen tends to be in terms of religious obsession. But whether it's the media, whether it's intellectuals or whether it's Donald Trump, that re=hyphenation is happening. That's the point you're making?
Ramachandra Guha: It's starting. It's starting and that should worry us. One should act quickly so that it does not proceed. It does not become commonplace and not just the world but India itself begins to recognize what economically, politically, culturally and morally has separated us
from Pakistan and should continue to separate us from Pakistan. Now this is beginning. Now people will say it's only a few isolated incidents but these are people of some significance: the most powerful and most important leader in the democratic world, Donald Trump, the most influential business newspaper in the world, the Financial Times. So we should start thinking and act so that we nip this attempt, the re-hyphenation attempt, in the bud and we self-correct so that this hyphenation is no longer possible in the future.
Karan Thapar: Let's at this point, Ram, come to the second part of your argument. You believe this potential re-hyphenation is happening because India has regressed in the past decade. So let me start by asking you what do you mean by regressed and can you give me some examples of this regression?
Ramachandra Guha: So essentially we chose a different path from Pakistan politically and constitutionally. So we positioned ourselves as a democracy which held regular free and fair elections and in which institutions like the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the press, and regulatory agencies were independent and autonomous. And the second reason we were very different was we gloried in our religious and linguistic diversity. Whereas Pakistan was not just one religion but one language which is why Bangladesh separated from Pakistan because the West Pakistanis imposed Urdu on East Pakistan.
Now in the last decade clearly we have been less than robust, less than committed in our upholding of democratic procedure. We still hold elections but the election commission generally schedules them when the ruling party wants. The media is totally compromised. The regulatory and investigative agencies are utterly partisan. Our governors in opposition-ruled states are undermining our federal structure. So our democratic credibility has been eroded in multiple ways.
I could give other examples and even what disturbed me in my view because you know I am a passionate believer in secularism, pluralism and also linguistic diversity has been this attempt to impose a kind of Hindu naturalness to how Indians should think, you know to make us believe that we are essentially a Hindu state in which others who are not Hindus live at our mercy, and again there are multiple examples. There's the press, there's the stigmatization, there are the lynchings, there's even you know as I say in my article the symbolic value of having a very brave and exemplary Muslim female officer as one of our spokespersons was quickly dissipated by one minister in Madhya Pradesh insinuating that we chose Husna Ara because she was the sister of a terrorist, whatever that might mean. After that he belatedly apologized but the government has not acted against him. The BJP has not acted against him.
Not only that, to compound matters, the deputy chief minister of Madhya Pradesh yesterday said that the Indian army has prostrated itself before Narendra Modi. So you know the Pakistani army can prostrate itself before General Munir. But what does this say about us if a senior BJP leader is claiming this? So our democratic and pluralistic credentials have been eroded over the last decade and that's quite starkly visible to a nonpartisan observer. So we should not simply keep on parroting the claims we are the mother of democracy. We are an entirely secular and
plural society when the fact is we are less plural, less secular and less democratic than we were a decade ago.
Karan Thapar: In fact, you sum this up when you point out that there has been a steady rise of authoritarianism and majoritarianism in India. That is a comparison with Pakistan because it suggests that we are increasingly and steadily becoming like Pakistan.
Ramachandra Guha: Yeah, absolutely. But I'll add one caveat. I'm a historian. So I tend to look at things in the long picture. I also don't live in Delhi. I live in South India. So I travel all across our country. So have a sense of the country as a whole. As a historian, I would say that this democratic erosion began with Indira Gandhi in the emergency. It was corrected after the emergency when there was a renewal of pluralism, democracy, federalism, the autonomy of institutions like the judiciary, the media, they thrived. And then Modi came and took us back to Indira Gandhi's era and even more.
So in an earlier program with you a couple of years ago I think I characterized him as Indira Gandhi on steroids, you know. So I think this did not begin, the erosion of our democratic institutions began in the 60s and 70s with the Congress under Indira Gandhi. It was revived afterwards partly because we had coalition governments from the early '90s and now Modi has kind of brought back this kind of authoritarian tendency with a majoritarian tinge.
The second thing I'd say and I think it's very very important to understand is to give nuance and complexity to our understanding of what is happening to India. It's also true that in several of our states run by opposition chief ministers, democratic institutions have eroded. There is a colossal personality cult of Narendra Modi that operates at the national level. But there are also dangerous personality cults operating at the provincial level of people like Stalin, Vijayan, Mamata Banerjee and so on. So it's not only the BJP. Let not this be seen as a defence of – it certainly should be seen as a chastisement of the BJP and Modi but this is not a defense of the Congress or of regional parties who in their own ways maybe in less significant ways but nonetheless have contributed to the erosion of our democratic and plural ethos.
Karan Thapar: But you do agree that the more we begin to look and appear like a Hindu Pakistan, the further we are moving from our founding principles and the more we are likely to be regressing in terms of the country we promised the world we would be.
Ramachandra Guha: Yes. But my worry is not that we are looking more like Pakistan. My worry is we are looking less like India, the India of our constitutional reach. I would put it that way. We should uphold and be true to our best and finest values which in the decades prior to the current conjuncture have sustained our democracy, nurtured our pluralism, cultivated intellectual open-mindedness and curiosity about the world and led to substantial economic growth. So we are becoming less like India.
Karan Thapar: By becoming more like Pakistan, you're becoming less like India.
Ramachandra Guha: Absolutely. And the more we become less like India, the more we regress and the more the world sees India and Pakistan as hyphenated similar equivalent countries.
Ramachandra Guha: Yes. And again let me give a larger context. So that is not just India and Pakistan or not just the BJP. You know, the fusion of authoritarianism and majoritarianism is not restricted to Pakistan. There's Myanmar and Sri Lanka with Buddhist majoritarianism. Pakistan is Sunni majoritarianism but Iran is a Shia theocratic state.
So if Indians look around and see how Iran which had an extremely articulate intelligentsia, which had promoted gender equality in the 50s and 60s, which had a scientific infrastructure, which had massive natural resources, collapsed after it became theocratic, or Sri Lanka which was a vibrant island society with very good indicators in health, education and so on. Once the Buddhist fundamentalists took over how it got entrapped in civil war and lost its way economically and socially. And Burma which is also Buddhist may be the worst of all.
So there's a broader lesson for Indians to learn: whenever religion becomes fused to the running of the state, that's bad for the country economically, socially, morally, politically – not just in Pakistan but also in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Iran, Turkey, and countless other examples.
Karan Thapar: All right. I think we've clearly established for the audience two things that were essential to establish at the outset of this interview. Firstly, why you believe there is a danger that we are becoming rehyphenated with Pakistan and what you believe are the reasons for that. And secondly, what you believe are the reasons for that re-hyphenation happening. I.e. the regression that you've spoken about, the fact that we are becoming increasingly less and less like India. We're becoming not necessarily more like Pakistan, but we are ceasing to be the country we promised the world we would be. And we promised ourselves we'd be.
Ramachandra Guha: Absolutely.
Karan Thapar: Now, at the moment, and you know this as well as I do, any suggestion of hyphenation makes the Modi government bristle. But that display of rhetorical outrage is insufficient and inadequate because it doesn't tackle the key problem that causes the hyphenation, i.e. the regression. Would you agree that that outrage doesn't tackle the problem? It's simply an expression of anger and frustration. The real problem isn't tackled.
Ramachandra Guha: Absolutely. But my column which incidentally is also published in 11 other Indian languages is addressed not to the Modi government. It's not addressed to the Congress party or to the India alliance. It's addressed to my fellow citizens. It is addressed to the people of India who care about how India is perceived outside and inside and who – it seeks to make them understand the dangers of following the path of authoritarianism and majoritarianism. So it's not really a critique of the Modi government as a wakeup call to my fellow Indians. That's how I would see it.
Karan Thapar: Absolutely. But tell me, how should we then, we the people of India, how should we respond to the regression which is the cause of the hyphenation that looms on the horizon? How should we as a people respond?
Ramachandra Guha: Well, one reason could be to look at parts of India that have not completely succumbed. Now I have been spending in the last few years a lot of time in the state of Tamil Nadu. Now, Tamil Nadu has authoritarian tendencies because Stalin is a kind of a cult figure. But on the other hand, it has very good human indicators. It has solid economic progress. And most importantly, in my wide experience of traveling in all the states in India, Tamil Nadu is the one state where Muslims and Christians feel completely secure and equal and first-class citizens with anyone else. Kerala too and Karnataka too but little less so.
Likewise in the northeast, you know, there may be areas in which this whole idea of India as a Hindu rashtra has not penetrated. Punjab certainly, you know, so where religious and linguistic – there are pockets in India which are not insubstantial. You know they're less visible in the Hindi heartland and wherever the BJP is in power including Gujarat, but they are substantial pockets of India where the social resource, the cultural behaviour, civil society and even the political climate is congenial to the nurturing of pluralism both linguistic and religious. So there are parts of India we can learn from.
Sadly, there are few parts of India where democracy is reviving, you know, where you have a really vigorous autonomous press maybe in some areas of the digital space and brave independent YouTubers. One thing I should mention in my article: A heroic role in the conflict, in the armed conflict with Pakistan was played by Mohammed Zubair who debunked fake news for weeks and he was celebrated by Indians but once the conflict ended people started remembering he was a Muslim and death threats were uttered against him.
So I think we should really think of ways in the past and in the present where we have lived up to our finest values and learned from them, nurture them, deepen them and clearly the media has a very important role here. Maybe we'll talk about the media later, but I wanted to say that the Delhi-based media has played a pernicious role not just during this conflict, Karan, but over the last decade in making Muslims a hate figure and vilifying them. If the last week people have noticed their jingoism and the warmongering, but over the last decade they have deeply polarised Indian society on religious lines and as one wit put it, the so-called national media which is in Noida in Uttar Pradesh not really in Delhi should be renamed Lashkar-Noida. I think that kind of captures their poisonous bigoted worldview very much and if they represent the mainstream media, God help us.
Karan Thapar: You're making a very important point. A lot of the regression that lies underneath the hyphenation is because of the way the media behaves, the way the media covers stories, the way the media polarizes the country. But what about social media? Is that also not responsible?
Ramachandra Guha: Yes, of course. Though there is push back on social media and clearly in the case of social media it is also – here the ruling party is more directly implicated because they have a very active troll army and IT cell which heightens, amplifies, exaggerates all this kind of polarization. So we have to step back and see where this is taking us and I think when the most influential person in the world, the American president, and reputable sections of international public opinion are referring to our prime minister as a religious strongman who's kind of equivalent to the religious strongman General Munir on the other side, that should give us pause and should act as a wakeup call.
Karan Thapar: Now since, and this is my final question, since a lot of this regression has happened over the last decade since Mr. Modi came to power, would I be right in saying that a large part of the responsibility for correcting the situation lies with the government and lies with Mr. Modi?
Ramachandra Guha: Yes, but equally I would agree but equally large part lies with the people of India because they have voted him to power three times in a row and now they should see clearly what kind of country Mr. Modi and the BJP are making. Clearly even our economy is stalled, but that I'll leave to economic experts to talk about in greater detail.
So as I said Karan earlier on, my column, my anxiety, indeed my anguish is addressed as much to the people of India, to my fellow citizens, as to those who rule us because in my view it's very unlikely that Mr. Modi or his ministers or his IT cell will recognize where this poisonous polarizing hatred is taking us.
Karan Thapar: And the last point is this. If we don't start to correct the regression, the world will be increasingly justified in hyphenating India and Pakistan and looking upon them as equivalent sort of societies. The fault is ours. We need to correct it ourselves first.
Ramachandra Guha: I very much hope we don't come to being more systematically, more regularly, more commonly being hyphenated with Pakistan because we embarked on a very different kind of journey. As I said, our journey was characterized by democracy, pluralism, and intellectual open-mindedness. It led to substantial political, social, economic progress including gender. It was not an accident that, even if it was symbolic, we had two female officers in uniform which Pakistan can never have in their remotest dreams. Of course they can't have a Hindu officer, male or female.
So we have, by staying steadfast to our values, by building a nation on these values of democracy, pluralism, gender equality and intellectual open-mindedness, we made substantial progress and why we want to abandon them – even if you want to abandon them fully, but if you start abandoning them that would start a process of decline that would hurt us and would be really sad and tragic for someone who's Indian.
Karan Thapar: Ram Guha, thank you very much for coming to this interview and explaining your thoughts and concerns so fully, so comprehensively. Take care. Stay safe.
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