One of the most educated politicians in the country, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor took the stage at #LeadingEdge2019 to share his humorous take on the perils of being an educated politician, leaving the audience in splits over numerous anecdotes and experiences.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Thank you very much.
00:08 Actually, after a rather sober interlude,
00:09 the kind of light session we were supposed to have
00:12 seems completely inappropriate,
00:14 so I will apologize in advance.
00:17 So what the organizers wanted me to talk about
00:20 was the perils of being an educated politician,
00:22 that their topic, not mine.
00:24 And talking about that, I felt the only way to do it
00:28 was as informally and I hope humorously as possible,
00:33 except that now, having just watched all of that,
00:36 perhaps we need cheering up all the more.
00:39 I did want to say, though, that the idea
00:42 is not to inflict a long speech on you.
00:44 I'll talk a little bit about my experiences in politics,
00:47 but the more interesting thing, I think,
00:48 would be to respond to your question,
00:51 see what's on your mind.
00:52 So let's have an interaction afterwards
00:54 and the time that remains,
00:56 and we're supposed to wrap up at six
00:58 when we actually were supposed to start at 5.30,
01:02 but I'll go on till about 10 past
01:03 so we can have a chance to use the time
01:06 that was intended to be there between us.
01:09 So what does the topic actually mean, I was wondering?
01:12 You know, the perils of being an educated politician.
01:15 So there's clearly a perception that there are perils,
01:19 and I suppose if one were to look at my experience
01:22 over the last 10 and a half, almost 11 years now,
01:25 in elected office, you can get a taste
01:28 of some of those perils.
01:29 I came into politics, I suppose,
01:34 in rather unusual circumstances,
01:36 in that unlike pretty much everybody else in the business,
01:40 I hadn't spent a lifetime in politics.
01:43 Almost every other Indian politician
01:45 either hails from a political family, which I don't,
01:49 or has very strong political antecedents, which I don't,
01:54 or has been a student activist, risen up the ranks,
01:58 and worked in a political party all his
02:00 or her political life, which also I don't.
02:04 So I came in really, I think, on a whim
02:07 by the Congress Party leadership
02:09 that thought that I might have something to contribute,
02:12 given the visibility and attention
02:14 that my unsuccessful run for Secretary General of the UN
02:18 had had, not to mention, of course,
02:20 that there were still some people,
02:22 it was assumed, who read my books,
02:24 and thought that I might be a different sort of voice
02:28 for what they were thinking about.
02:30 In any case, I had no idea what I was getting into.
02:34 I very cheerfully said I was happy to contest,
02:37 and then went through quite an extraordinary reception.
02:41 My own party members burned my effigy
02:45 upon my getting the nomination,
02:46 because they were supporting the person
02:50 who'd lost the two previous attempts.
02:52 He felt he deserved a third turn.
02:55 There were various sort of attempts to disown me.
03:00 There was the point made, not unreasonably,
03:04 who is this fellow to think he can represent us?
03:07 He doesn't know our place.
03:08 He's used to working in air-conditioned offices
03:11 in three-piece suits.
03:12 Can he even speak our language properly?
03:14 What's the point?
03:15 How can we have this person there, et cetera, et cetera?
03:20 It was a challenge from the very start
03:22 to actually be considered a legitimately acceptable
03:26 candidate, and that too in a seat that had been held
03:29 in the two previous occasions
03:31 by the Communist Party of India.
03:34 I thought I would refute all this in the only way possible,
03:39 which is to do everything that was asked of me by the party,
03:42 to do so attired simply in local attire,
03:48 speaking perhaps a rather rudimentary Malayalam,
03:52 but nonetheless one picked up on holidays
03:55 to my ancestral homes in Kerala,
03:57 which therefore was far from faultless,
04:01 but was not inexistent.
04:04 And then, I just got there in the hottest month of the year,
04:09 the hottest times of the day,
04:11 talking to people and explaining to them
04:13 that I hope to give them a voice.
04:15 And of course, the attacks on me
04:18 about my inadequate Malayalam
04:21 were actually the simplest to refute,
04:23 because I simply said to them in Malayalam
04:25 after listening and talking to people for a while,
04:28 that as you can see, I have enough Malayalam
04:30 to understand your needs and your aspirations,
04:33 and what's more important in Delhi,
04:35 I have the Hindi and English
04:36 to give voice to them in Parliament.
04:38 All our alternative colleagues who speak Shud Malayalam
04:41 with you here are not going to be able
04:44 to be half as effective as me in Delhi.
04:46 That argument worked,
04:47 and I ended up winning with a record majority
04:50 for the first time.
04:52 That's actually when the troubles got worse.
04:55 I found that every single thing I said
05:00 became an issue of controversy in our media.
05:05 I think some of it quite deliberately motivated malicious,
05:08 but I was a babe in the woods,
05:11 completely unprepared for this.
05:13 On my visits from the UN or on my visits to India,
05:17 from my living abroad,
05:19 but to talk about my books or my writing,
05:22 all the UN work, I'd always been treated
05:24 to an excessively friendly, respectful,
05:27 and deferential press.
05:29 So I got an overdose of the opposite
05:31 in my very first year in office.
05:34 And literally anything I said,
05:35 you probably, some of you may even remember
05:38 the various controversies whipped up over anything,
05:41 any expression I used,
05:43 if I said that Saudi Arabia could be a useful
05:45 interlocutor with us,
05:47 that was immediately created into a controversy,
05:50 alleging that I had said Saudi Arabia
05:52 should be an intermediary between us and Pakistan,
05:55 which of course is not India's foreign policy
05:58 and is not something that I'd said,
05:59 but that became a controversy.
06:01 The same thing happened,
06:02 although the most notorious one of the lot
06:04 was when I was asked by a journalist,
06:08 a BJP-leaning journalist on Twitter,
06:11 when the government announced an austerity drive,
06:14 he said, "Mr. Minister, will you travel cattle class?"
06:18 Now I had been living in the States
06:19 where cattle class is a very routine expression,
06:22 been around for 30 years.
06:24 It is nothing insulting to people,
06:26 it's an expression that actually insults the airlines
06:28 for herding us into economy class like cattle.
06:31 And since he used the expression,
06:33 I assumed everyone knew it.
06:35 So I replied, "Yes, I'll travel in cattle class
06:38 "out of solidarity with all our holy cows."
06:41 Now this may not be terribly funny,
06:44 but I issued the tweet, got on a plane,
06:48 went off on a visit to Liberia and Africa,
06:51 and I had to go to Brussels, change aircraft there,
06:56 fly to Accra, change aircraft there, fly to Liberia,
06:59 and all of these intermediate points,
07:01 I didn't have access to any social media,
07:05 anything, and it's only when I got to Liberia,
07:07 23 hours after I left Delhi,
07:11 that I was getting all these panicky calls from Delhi
07:13 saying that the proverbial dung had hit the proverbial fan,
07:17 and that there were calls for my resignation
07:21 for having insulted economy class travelers.
07:24 I was in a state of disbelief
07:27 that such a thing could actually happen
07:29 until I got reports that my own party spokespeople
07:32 were denouncing me, and in these circumstances,
07:35 obviously I had no choice but to call the party leadership
07:38 and say, "Are you serious?
07:39 "I mean, doesn't anyone understand what this is all about?"
07:43 And it took finally,
07:44 after four days of front page controversy,
07:47 the prime minister no less to say to journalists,
07:50 "Baying for my blood, for God's sake, it was only a joke."
07:55 I mean, this went on for several months,
07:56 and one thing after another, it was very clear
07:59 that my Agni Pariksha in my first term in office
08:03 was to discover how unwelcome intruders were
08:07 into the closed circle of Indian politics.
08:11 And many, many controversies later
08:13 that I won't bore you with,
08:14 I actually did step down as a minister,
08:19 and that turned out in many ways to be a blessing
08:21 'cause I'd been an extremely active minister
08:23 in the foreign ministry.
08:24 I think in all fairness, I was traveling over 20 days
08:30 every month in order for us to be able to show
08:34 the Indian flag in countries
08:36 where no minister had traveled before.
08:37 I became the first foreign ministry person
08:41 from any country to get to Haiti after the earthquake
08:44 'cause I happened to be on a tour
08:45 in Latin America for the government.
08:47 When the earthquake happened, we had soldiers there,
08:49 so I volunteered to go, was able to pay respects
08:52 to the dead, to commiserate the survivors.
08:56 It was a great experience, but all that sort of thing
08:59 was taking a severe toll back home
09:01 'cause not only was I being attacked just for being me,
09:05 but in the meantime, the talk was rumbling
09:07 in the constituency, what's the point of having an MP
09:09 who's never here?
09:11 So having resigned, I was able to devote myself
09:14 to my constituency, and that's where perhaps
09:19 both the good and the bad happened.
09:21 The good is that I became, simply by doing it well
09:26 and doing it conscientiously, a rather successful
09:29 constituency MP, I was able to deliver results,
09:32 a number of pending things that hadn't been accomplished
09:35 before by my distinguished predecessors.
09:38 But the bad thing, of course, and this is where
09:40 the other peril of being an educated politician came,
09:43 was that there was absolutely no intellectual satisfaction
09:48 in the bulk of the things one is required to do.
09:52 People don't understand, frankly, how hard MPs
09:55 have to work, at least Kerala MPs, where the voters
09:58 are knowledgeable, they know their rights,
10:01 and they're very demanding.
10:03 And what I found was that 95% of what people come
10:08 and ask an MP to do for them are things that,
10:11 in any Western democracy, no MP or senator
10:14 or congressman would do 'cause they'd be considered
10:16 unethical, people come to you saying, get my son a job,
10:21 you know, arrange a transfer for my daughter,
10:24 my son is posted in Nagaland and Kashmir and so on,
10:28 we want him in Kerala, et cetera, et cetera,
10:32 or we've taken this loan, we can't afford to pay it back,
10:35 talk to the bank and get us either delayed terms
10:37 or reduce the interest or cancel the interest.
10:40 I mean, it's all these personal favors,
10:42 one after the other, and MPs are judged by their ability
10:47 to deliver these personal favors to people.
10:49 And obviously that's not what I thought I was getting
10:51 into politics for, but I realized that if I was going
10:55 to be in this unfamiliar profession, I would have to play it
10:59 by the rules that have been established
11:01 by decades of predecessors, so I forgot all the ethical
11:06 principles of the Western democracies,
11:10 and I started trying to do all of these, hit or miss a fare.
11:13 Sometimes my request would reach a bureaucrat or official
11:16 who, for some reason, still thought well of me,
11:18 and he would make an effort to fulfill my request
11:21 so my constituent would get the job or the transfer
11:23 or whatever, and sometimes, quite rightly,
11:26 it would be ignored, because after all,
11:28 why should, perhaps, an undeserving or a less deserving
11:31 candidate be picked merely because an influential MP
11:36 has pushed their name?
11:37 And these are amongst the dilemmas that I imagine
11:41 the officials receiving my requests were faced with.
11:44 Some decided one way, some decided the other.
11:47 But this is the kind of stuff that needs to be done.
11:49 I remember one case, somebody came with a totally
11:52 fraudulent request, and I simply said no, I cannot do this,
11:55 and when the person left the room, my staff turned on me
11:59 in horror, saying no, Kerala politician says no.
12:03 You simply have to say yes to anything people ask.
12:06 Do it with as much sincerity as you can muster,
12:08 but you cannot say no, and the story that was told to me
12:10 was of a Kerala chief minister whose constituent came
12:13 to him demanding that he write a letter
12:15 to President Bill Clinton, saying that he
12:18 must see the constituent.
12:20 Now, if I had been the recipient of such a request,
12:23 I might have said, this is stupid, I'm not going to do it.
12:26 Bill Clinton's going to think I'm an idiot
12:28 for writing such a letter.
12:29 But the chief minister of Kerala,
12:31 who's a very famously populist politician,
12:33 he knew that what Bill Clinton thought of him
12:36 mattered far, far less than what his voter would think of him.
12:40 So he wrote the letter.
12:42 And I'm sure it never reached Bill Clinton,
12:44 but he had consolidated the loyalty and the allegiance
12:48 of that particular voter.
12:50 So that was-- and this particular politician
12:52 was also notorious for--
12:55 you could reach him at 2 AM to get somebody out of jail.
12:57 You could chase him into his bedroom to hand him a petition.
13:01 And that's the kind of standard of democracy
13:04 that Kerala politicians have got their voters accustomed to.
13:09 What were the other perils of an educated politician?
13:11 I think they became even more apparent--
13:13 I came back into government, as you all know--
13:16 discovered that being a minister of state
13:20 has considerable limitations.
13:21 As I found myself tweeting one day,
13:26 being an MOS is rather like standing in a cemetery.
13:30 There are lots of people under you, but nobody's listening.
13:33 And that essentially summed up my experience
13:37 of ministerial office.
13:38 I realized that there's very little
13:39 you can do in situations where really all the authorities
13:43 are concentrated in the cabinet minister.
13:45 In the case of the foreign ministry,
13:47 it was different because, at least at the beginning,
13:49 during my one year there, allocations of responsibility
13:53 were pretty clear.
13:54 And so I was the de facto minister
13:57 for Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, the Hajj,
14:00 passports, and visas.
14:01 All of that came under me, and the files stopped with me.
14:04 Whereas I think after I left, even that ended,
14:09 and the ministers of state still had to send that back up
14:12 to the minister.
14:13 And this, again, shows the limitations of our system.
14:16 If you come in with a track record
14:18 and experience in administration or diplomacy or whatever,
14:21 and you think you can just transfer that seamlessly
14:24 to a governmental environment where the rules are different,
14:27 you've got another thing coming.
14:29 But then, as I said, there were other lessons to be learned.
14:33 We got into opposition in 2014.
14:36 I survived my election only because of that constituency
14:41 work that I told you I was able to do.
14:43 For example, there had been a national highway bypass
14:46 that was meant to be built between Trivandrum
14:48 and the Tamil Nadu border, where marker stones had
14:52 been laid on people's land 40 years previously.
14:55 But for one reason or the other, the project
14:58 had not been able to be built.
15:00 And these people were stuck because no one would
15:02 buy their land, since people said,
15:04 your government's going to take over the land any minute now.
15:06 And they came to me saying, can you either
15:09 get the damn project canceled and get these stones removed,
15:11 or can you get the road built?
15:13 And I thought the latter was a better idea.
15:15 So I hassled a number of my colleagues in the UPA government,
15:22 got the road cleared, got it included
15:24 in the government's budget.
15:26 And then when that was done, ensured
15:29 that the first checks to buy the land where
15:32 the stones had been put down actually
15:34 changed hands before the 2014 election.
15:37 Otherwise, I was quite sure that the victors would
15:40 claim all credit for having unblocked this log
15:44 jam of the preceding 40 years.
15:46 But anyway, so I did that.
15:47 And that's the kind of thing that helped
15:48 me win the votes of people.
15:52 In a very tough election year, I was
15:55 able to survive with a massively reduced majority,
15:58 come into Parliament.
15:59 And then, of course, we were so depleted in numbers
16:02 that the opportunity to speak in Parliament
16:05 and challenge the government became very important.
16:07 And there, too, you could see some of the conundrums
16:12 that educated politicians faced.
16:14 One was undoubtedly the fact that our system means that--
16:21 and this is a system we've essentially
16:23 copied from the British.
16:24 And I do consider it a peculiar British perversion
16:28 to elect a legislature in order to form an executive.
16:32 To my mind, that completely betrays
16:33 the entire principle of separation of powers.
16:37 Because, say, unlike in the US, here,
16:39 once you form the government with a majority
16:42 in the Parliament, or in the Lok Sabha at any rate,
16:45 you essentially don't care anymore
16:47 about whether what you are proposing makes sense,
16:49 whether the laws you're writing are comprehensive and accurate.
16:53 Because whatever you propose, you
16:54 have a brute majority that acts as a rubber stamp for you.
16:57 And that I found immensely frustrating.
16:59 Because we would have these debates in which the opposition
17:03 would make very sensible and commonsensical suggestions.
17:06 It wasn't just a question of policy preferences.
17:09 But I'll give you one minor example.
17:11 There was a bill which may have affected some of you, which
17:14 actually had been initiated in the UPA days,
17:17 but hadn't been submitted to Parliament, which
17:19 the BJP brought.
17:20 It was a bill that said that every bank, every firm--
17:26 company, firm, factory, whatever--
17:27 above a certain number of employees
17:29 had to provide in writing to all their employees
17:33 a statement of their rights as employees in that firm.
17:40 And we all thought that was a good idea.
17:42 There was no opposition to it.
17:44 But I suggested that since so many people working,
17:48 say, in factories in UP or Bihar or Risha
17:51 might actually not be terribly literate,
17:53 not be able to understand the legal language,
17:56 why not say that you should give it to them in writing
17:58 and explain it orally?
17:59 You can call all the factory workers on the floor
18:01 and explain, we're giving you this paper.
18:03 This is what your rights are.
18:04 Here you are.
18:05 And while I was making the suggestion,
18:07 I could see a majority of the BJP members
18:09 nodding their heads in agreement,
18:11 because it was clearly a commonsense suggestion.
18:13 It wasn't violative or a disagreement of their policy.
18:16 But sure enough, when the time came for the vote,
18:19 needless to say, my amendment was shouted down on the grounds
18:22 that the BJP had produced a bill,
18:24 and that bill was going to go through whatever
18:26 people said in Parliament.
18:28 So that, too, becomes part of a frustration
18:32 for the average thinking politician.
18:35 The other problem is that, in fact,
18:37 unlike, again, some Western democracies,
18:39 we don't really write the laws.
18:41 The laws are written by bureaucrats in the government.
18:45 They're discussed in the cabinet and brought in.
18:48 And except those bills which actually
18:50 go through standing committees, where
18:52 you can see a very detailed discussion by politicians
18:55 on those committees of the provisions of the bill,
18:58 the actual discussion on the floor of the House
19:00 tends to have really no impact on the bill.
19:03 And that's, again, terribly unfortunate.
19:05 And finally, when it comes to things like the vote,
19:08 thanks to the anti-defection law,
19:11 no MP is able to vote his or her conscience.
19:15 Let's say that a bill is brought for a vote.
19:18 In our system, all parties seem to have the approach
19:22 that once they decide how the vote should be,
19:25 it's de facto a whip, with the result
19:28 that there is no issue on which an MP is
19:32 free to differ from the party line
19:36 and not vote as the party would wish.
19:38 Because if they were to do that, they
19:41 attract, under the provisions of the Anti-Defection Act,
19:44 not only expulsion from their party,
19:46 but expulsion from Parliament itself.
19:48 And after all the trouble and expense
19:49 they've gone through to get elected to Parliament,
19:52 very, very few issues are going to prompt someone to stand up
19:55 and risk losing his or her seat in order
19:58 to take a position of principle on a stand
20:01 that the party has viewed differently.
20:04 That's another one of the perils of being
20:07 an educated politician.
20:08 I was going on a bit too long, but I
20:11 wanted to give you a sense of the range of all
20:14 of these things.
20:17 We do tend to frown on innovation.
20:21 So that, for example, when I started tweeting,
20:24 that's something that the political class
20:26 looked at quite askance.
20:27 Actually, the story is a little more interesting.
20:29 When I first started tweeting, I was unfortunately
20:34 one of the very, very few public figures.
20:36 So doing, in fact, I still remember a little headline
20:38 when I reached 10,000 followers.
20:40 And a number of very senior politicians--
20:45 I won't name them, but people you've all
20:47 heard of, very prominent people-- said to me, hey,
20:50 how do you get 10,000 followers?
20:52 Any politician would kill for an audience of 10,000.
20:55 Tell us what to do.
20:56 And I was trying to explain Twitter and so on to them.
20:59 But meanwhile, in those days, the media
21:01 saw Twitter as a threat.
21:03 They thought, why should we allow politicians to bypass us
21:06 and go straight to the public?
21:07 We need to bring this down.
21:09 And so as I said, every one of my tweets was attacked.
21:12 And after the first two or three controversies,
21:14 particularly after Cattle Class, at that point,
21:18 all these people who'd asked me for help on Twitter
21:20 kept far, far away.
21:22 And there was this widespread perception
21:26 that even something called Twitter
21:30 couldn't possibly be the right thing
21:32 for a serious politician to do.
21:34 When I tried to explain that even Google and Yahoo are
21:37 fairly silly words when you think about it,
21:39 but no politician would think of doing without them,
21:42 so why not Twitter because it's a way of reaching the public,
21:46 there was stunned incomprehension.
21:48 I gave an interview, which you can Google because it's
21:51 on the record, in late 2009 to Harinder Vaveja of Telka,
21:55 saying that I was convinced that within 10 years,
21:58 every major politician in India would be on Twitter.
22:01 And as you all know, I didn't need to wait 10 years.
22:03 Just five years later, Narendra Modi, as prime minister,
22:06 was instructing every one of his cabinet
22:08 to open a Twitter account.
22:10 Because you need to multiply your voice
22:13 to the public bypassing established channels.
22:16 The media realized the wisdom of this early enough,
22:18 and they too piled on because for them, too,
22:20 it became a way of amplifying their reach,
22:22 promoting their stories, and indeed getting, shall we say,
22:31 their share of what the politicians are doing.
22:33 I remember the late Arun Jaitley telling me
22:35 that he no longer felt he had any need
22:37 to call a press conference because if he wrote a blog,
22:41 which he became rather famous or notorious for doing,
22:45 both in opposition and in government, if he wrote a blog,
22:48 it would be picked up by every media organization,
22:50 and his staff didn't have to make 75 phone calls
22:53 to convene a conference.
22:55 Everyone would see it anyway.
22:56 And that then became an approach of mutual interest
23:00 to both the media and the politicians.
23:04 The other thing, finally, that we all
23:06 suffer from in our political establishment
23:09 is a complete lack of sense of humor.
23:13 I'm not sure that it's--
23:14 I'm sure that in private, these are the same people who
23:17 are cracking dirty jokes and so on
23:18 or exchanging wicked humor on WhatsApp messages
23:22 to each other.
23:23 But somehow, there is a solemnity
23:25 to public discourse, which is quite unworthy of Mahatma
23:29 Gandhi, who was, as you know, famously and impishly
23:32 mischievous in his comments.
23:34 You remember when he was asked by a British journalist,
23:38 Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?
23:41 And he replied, I think it would be a very good idea.
23:45 Or when he was upbraided for striding up
23:49 the steps of Buckingham Palace in his dhoti,
23:51 in his loincloth, to go and meet the King Emperor.
23:54 He smilingly replied, oh, I think
23:56 His Majesty had on enough clothes for the two of us.
24:00 I mean, that kind of thing-- have you heard of an Indian
24:02 politician saying things like that anymore?
24:05 It just doesn't happen.
24:07 I scoured the works of Nehru for my biography on him,
24:10 and it's his birthday today.
24:12 A wonderful man, the greatest intellect
24:14 to have ever been Prime Minister of India, and possibly
24:17 one of the top five best political writers
24:20 in the English language in the modern era.
24:23 But if you look at his works, his speeches,
24:25 his writings for humor, there's very, very little of it.
24:28 I remember the one comment that I think
24:30 was really sharp and witty was when he said in America,
24:36 sort of with undisguised culture shock in 1949,
24:39 he said one must never visit America for the first time,
24:43 which I thought was rather clever.
24:45 But in private, I'm told he was a very amusing dinner
24:47 companion, charming, entertaining,
24:49 would mimic people, was just a lot of fun,
24:52 got along with all sorts of people.
24:54 But in public, we have this expectation
24:56 that our politicians must be deadly serious.
24:59 And I'm afraid that's a test I fail too often.
25:04 So it's time to now turn to what's on your mind,
25:08 just to say that I tried to give you
25:10 a little bit of a taste of the different things that
25:13 might constitute the perils of an educated politician.
25:16 But one that I'm very happy to run the risk of
25:19 is you're asking questions that I
25:21 might find difficult to answer.
25:23 The floor is yours.
25:24 Thank you.
25:25 Yes, young lady.
25:26 There's a hand up there in the middle of the room.
25:28 [APPLAUSE]
25:32 Two questions.
25:33 OK.
25:34 And hopefully, the first one is difficult.
25:36 What's your favorite role?
25:37 Author or politician?
25:39 I'm sorry.
25:39 I didn't hear that.
25:40 What's your favorite role?
25:42 Author or politician?
25:45 I'm having real problems.
25:47 Can you hear me?
25:48 Your role as an author or politician?
25:51 Oh, I see.
25:51 That's much clearer.
25:52 Thank you.
25:53 Sorry.
25:53 For some reason, I just couldn't hear you the first time.
25:57 Look, I mean, I'm a human being who
25:59 has a number of reactions to the world I see around me,
26:02 some of which I manifest through my writing, my comments,
26:05 my columns, and so on, and some of which
26:07 I manifest through my work, whether it
26:09 was at the United Nations, where I worked for refugees,
26:13 I worked in resolving a number of international problems,
26:16 I was in charge of the peacekeeping
26:19 mess we had during the Yugoslav Civil War.
26:22 So I've always felt it important to work
26:26 in both the world of conclusions and the world of decisions,
26:30 the world of reflection and the world of action,
26:33 the world of thoughts and observations,
26:35 and the world of policy and engagement.
26:38 I just found it impossible to give one up for the other.
26:42 So one last comment is I'm a lawyer,
26:45 and I heard your comment that laws in this country
26:48 are made by bureaucrats without lawyers' help.
26:52 Except those that go through standing committees.
26:54 And provided the standing committee's advice
26:56 is actually taken into account, which it may not be.
27:00 Don't you think we need to change that?
27:01 Of course we do.
27:02 I mean, I honestly think that our system itself--
27:05 some of you may know that for over 25 years,
27:07 I've been writing passionately about why
27:09 the parliamentary system was completely the wrong choice
27:12 for our country.
27:13 And it just doesn't reflect the way in which Indians vote,
27:15 Indians behave.
27:16 We actually vote for individuals,
27:18 not for party programs.
27:19 Our parties themselves are really
27:22 identikit combinations of people with no real great coherent
27:27 differences.
27:27 I mean, the British invented this system
27:30 to reflect their reality in a tiny island state,
27:33 where even today, after so many decades of population growth,
27:36 a parliamentary constituency is 1 lakh people.
27:39 It's just not-- you can actually interrelate with it.
27:42 You can truly represent them.
27:43 And even then, their system gives the parliamentarian
27:46 complete freedom.
27:48 The famous principles enunciated by Edmund Burke
27:51 in his speech to the electors of Bristol,
27:53 that once you elect me, I'm not obliged to you
27:56 or to the party.
27:57 I'm only obliged to use my best judgment
27:59 to take the stands that I believe are right for you.
28:01 And if you don't agree with me, vote me out.
28:03 That is the principle.
28:04 We don't follow that either.
28:05 So we are now stuck in a position
28:07 where we have the worst of all possible worlds, in my view.
28:10 I have a lot of respect for the US system.
28:13 And my American friends say, you're crazy,
28:15 because our system is stuck in gridlock.
28:17 And I said, that's because you guys only have two parties.
28:20 We'll never have gridlock with one president occupying
28:25 the White House there, Lok Kalyan Marg here,
28:30 from one party and the parliament dominated
28:32 by another party.
28:33 Because in fact, in practice, people
28:36 have put 303 BJP MPs in, largely because they
28:40 wanted Narendra Modi.
28:41 If they could vote for Narendra Modi separately,
28:44 and then vote for their local MPs,
28:45 they'd actually vote for somebody
28:46 whom they knew and understood and could relate to
28:49 and could actually represent their interests properly.
28:52 And that would represent, even today,
28:54 over 40 different parties in parliament.
28:56 So the person elected as the chief executive
28:59 of the country, quorum president,
29:01 would have to create issue-based coalitions.
29:04 And these people would be elected to legislate,
29:07 not to form the executive.
29:09 Right now, no lawmaker is actually
29:11 interested in making laws.
29:12 They seek election in the hope of becoming
29:14 members of the government.
29:16 That, I think, is a very, very flawed system.
29:19 Sir?
29:20 Mr. Tharoor, your talk was delightful, as usual.
29:23 Thank you, sir.
29:24 We live in a post-truth world.
29:27 What is the role of an educated politician
29:29 in a post-truth world?
29:30 Or is there a role at all?
29:31 I don't buy this post-truth business.
29:33 Honestly, post-truth is a very sort of post-modernist way
29:38 of saying lies.
29:39 Right, I mean, post-truth means, essentially, that it's untruth.
29:43 And once you go beyond truth, the only field left
29:46 is that of dishonesty and lying, mendacity.
29:48 And that's not something that I think we
29:50 should encourage or whatever.
29:51 So to my mind, if somebody says nonsense or spins completely
29:58 fake stories or puts out messages which, as we all know,
30:02 even in our own politics, we've seen too much of,
30:05 which can politely be called as fake news,
30:08 we should call it out.
30:09 We should condemn it.
30:10 We should say this is wrong.
30:11 I mean, if we start understanding or believing
30:16 that there is a certain reality, which
30:18 is what ordinary people experience,
30:20 and a different reality, which is what governments
30:22 and politicians project, then we are in for the high jump
30:26 as a society and as a nation.
30:27 I think we should reject all notions of post-truth.
30:30 We should stand up with integrity, with conviction,
30:33 with education, with knowledge, with principles and values,
30:36 and say this is what we're here for.
30:38 And this is what we're trying to stand up and do
30:41 for the country.
30:42 And if you don't like it, vote for someone else.
30:44 But at least you know what you're voting for.
30:46 Instead, we have all of this reliance
30:49 on the submissiveness of the media
30:54 and the forgetfulness of the public.
30:57 So Mr. Modi will stand up and say, give me 50 days,
31:01 otherwise burn me alive.
31:02 And no one's going to burn him alive.
31:04 And that was when he made demonetization-- front page
31:07 headline--
31:08 when it had failed comprehensively after 50 days,
31:11 when the Reserve Bank of India had become known
31:13 as the reverse Bank of India for the number of notifications
31:16 it issued changing the previous notifications.
31:18 When all that happened, did anybody, even in the media,
31:21 stand up and say, sorry, Mr. Modi, 50 days are up.
31:24 Here's the power.
31:25 No, because the fact is that you can say anything and get away
31:29 with it in an atmosphere where you're not challenged very
31:31 specifically and strongly.
31:32 And that is something that, it seems to me,
31:35 we really do have to worry about.
31:38 So the only answer to post-truth is the truth itself.
31:42 The only answer to unprincipled dishonesty
31:44 is principles and integrity.
31:48 Good evening, sir.
31:50 Indian politics is largely commanded
31:54 by the mass-based leaders.
31:56 So you could connect very well with the classes.
32:00 But did you find it difficult to connect with the masses?
32:03 Well, as you can see, I won again a third time,
32:06 this time again by a lack of votes.
32:07 So clearly, I'm doing something right
32:09 in connecting with the masses in my constituency.
32:12 Thank you.
32:13 Good evening, sir.
32:14 At the back, on your right-hand side.
32:16 Yeah, whoever's got the mic, go ahead.
32:19 So I would like to ask you three questions.
32:22 How easy is it for you to work with bureaucracy, for you
32:28 as an educated MP and the other MPs?
32:30 And my next two questions are on a very lighter note.
32:34 Like the American correspondence dinner,
32:36 where we see the educated politicians roasting
32:41 each other-- so can we see that in India?
32:43 And third, on a very lighter note,
32:45 where I saw your Amazon--
32:47 Just hold the mic a little closer to you.
32:49 I'm missing that.
32:50 Sorry?
32:51 Hold the mic a little closer to you.
32:52 Sorry.
32:53 Yeah.
32:54 So my second question was like the American correspondence
32:57 dinner, where we see the educated politicians roasting
33:00 each other.
33:01 So can we see that in India in the near future?
33:04 And sir, since I'm a fan of yours, last question,
33:07 has your Caesar salad arrived as yet?
33:11 That's a reference to the fact that I
33:13 took the risk of agreeing to do a stand-up comedy act, which
33:17 was recorded for Amazon Prime.
33:21 I actually cracked jokes for 24 minutes.
33:24 And that too, to a live audience in a Noida nightclub.
33:27 And I would say 80%, 90% of that audience was under 30.
33:31 So it took some nerves.
33:33 But having done it, and it went very well,
33:36 I'm pleased that after 24 minutes,
33:38 they're broadcasting about eight minutes.
33:40 I think tomorrow, 15th night, I think, on Amazon Prime.
33:45 And it's some degree of risk-taking
33:48 and some degree of not, because ultimately, everyone
33:50 knows it's meant to be humor.
33:52 I mean, you're not trying to use humor in a political context.
33:55 You're standing up and doing stand-up comedy.
33:57 It's got to be funny, or at least attempt to be funny.
34:00 And I've tried to do that there.
34:01 But coming back to the only thing,
34:02 first on working with the bureaucracy, yes,
34:04 it is much easier, because I come from the same stock,
34:07 as it were.
34:07 I went to St. Stephen's College.
34:09 Many of my classmates were bureaucrats.
34:11 Now, unfortunately, everybody has retired.
34:13 We've become long in the tooth.
34:15 But when I first came into politics in my early 50s,
34:18 I had the luxury that about 17, 18 of my contemporaries
34:22 from Delhi University were secretaries
34:24 of the government of India.
34:25 And I was able to get a lot of favors done for my constituency
34:28 that way as well.
34:29 The chairman of the railway board,
34:30 I'm so grateful to him, because he got me train stops
34:34 that people had been agitating for 27 years.
34:36 But he'd been my senior in college.
34:38 So dealing with the bureaucracy when
34:40 you come from a similar sort of background, when
34:42 you could have been a bureaucrat yourself,
34:45 is much easier for educated politicians,
34:48 no question about that.
34:50 And Mr. Moody, by the way, as you know,
34:51 has now started appointing retired bureaucrats
34:55 to the Rajya Sabha and getting them into ministerial office.
34:59 And we've seen that with Hardeep Puri, who
35:01 spoke to you today.
35:02 We've seen it with Jaya Shankar in the last government
35:05 with Alphonse.
35:06 There have been a number of people, or all IAS, IFS, IPS
35:09 as well, RK Singh, Surya Viya Singh, et cetera,
35:12 who have served in ministerial office,
35:14 because Mr. Moody trusts bureaucrats more than he
35:16 trusts politicians to deliver on his commitment.
35:20 So there is something to be said, again,
35:23 for looking at how the system is supposed to function.
35:25 We're supposed to have a clear watertight distinction
35:28 between the permanent civil service on the one hand
35:30 and the elected political class on the other.
35:33 But the Rajya Sabha has now become, under Mr. Moody,
35:36 a mechanism for bypassing that distinction.
35:40 And I don't blame him.
35:41 Ability is important, and his party doesn't have much of it.
35:44 So he can bring it in from the bureaucratic classes.
35:47 But it is a question about how our politics works.
35:51 On the second thing about the American White House
35:55 Correspondents Association dinner,
35:57 you will never see that in India.
35:59 I mean, you remember the howls of outrage
36:01 when AIB tried to do a roast.
36:05 Movie stars roasting other movie stars,
36:06 and that became controversial.
36:08 Can you imagine, politicians, the things we'd say
36:10 and the things we've done?
36:11 Even in my 24 minutes stand-up comedy act,
36:15 I cracked a few political jokes.
36:17 All of them have been left out of the eight-minute broadcast,
36:19 because even Amazon is scared that anyone--
36:23 and these are just jokes that people--
36:24 but is scared that joking about politics
36:27 will not be taken well in the political establishment.
36:29 So that is very much the mood in this country.
36:32 I'm afraid it's not going to happen.
36:34 I think I'll have one last question.
36:35 I think somebody has the mic.
36:37 Oh, this side.
36:40 Hello.
36:40 Yeah.
36:41 Good evening.
36:42 Oh, sorry.
36:42 There's a young girl as well.
36:44 I think in terms of gender, I better go for her.
36:46 Yes, go ahead.
36:47 Thank you.
36:49 You have been a--
36:50 A little closer, please.
36:51 Higher.
36:51 You have been a very highly visible politician in the era
36:56 that we are in.
36:58 There was a time when there have been personal attacks on you.
37:02 I would like to--
37:03 We're going on.
37:04 Yeah, ongoing.
37:06 I would like to know from you, what does it
37:08 take for you to sail through those tough times?
37:12 And my second question is, what will it take for Congress
37:15 to come back?
37:17 Oh, boy.
37:19 The second question is actually easier to answer.
37:21 It'll take you guys to vote for us, and we'll come back.
37:25 No, let me come back to the first one,
37:27 because it really--
37:29 it was extremely hard, because I had nothing
37:32 in my professional life had prepared me
37:35 for the level of abuse, of criticism,
37:38 of false accusations, of character assassination,
37:41 everything that has taken place.
37:45 Two bits of advice helped me serve in good stead.
37:47 One was actually from Mr. Natwar Singh,
37:51 who of course subsequently himself left the Congress.
37:54 But Natwar Singh told me of how, when
37:56 he left the Foreign Service to become a politician,
38:00 at Mrs. Indira Gandhi's request, and she
38:03 attended his swearing in, he was wearing a suit, a Western suit.
38:07 So he very apologetically said to her,
38:09 madam, I'm going to get some bungalows stitched.
38:12 And she said, no, Natwar, in politics,
38:15 you better just grow a thicker skin.
38:17 And that, I thought, was a very good piece of advice.
38:20 You need to be able to take a lot more than you would have
38:24 to in normal civilian life.
38:26 You need to be prepared for a lot more slings and arrows
38:28 on your skin.
38:29 The second piece of advice, paradoxically,
38:32 came from Kofi Annan, who himself
38:35 was the victim of a lot of unfair attacks
38:38 on the oil for food scheme and so on
38:39 when he was at the United Nations.
38:41 And he told me once something that I actually
38:43 didn't understand when he told me.
38:45 He said, my father has taught me an old Ghanaian proverb,
38:49 when the sharks bite you, do not bleed.
38:51 And I said, but if the sharks bite you, of course,
38:54 you'll bleed.
38:54 He said, think about it.
38:55 One day you'll understand the meaning.
38:57 And it took me several years to actually be
39:00 bitten by the sharks in India for me
39:02 to understand the importance of not bleeding.
39:05 Because what the sharks want is to see that blood in the water.
39:09 And if you don't give them that satisfaction,
39:11 they might eventually stop biting because they're not
39:13 getting that blood anymore.
39:15 And there's all the other principles we can talk about.
39:17 Somebody was saying, oh, what grace under pressure, et cetera.
39:20 Yeah, grace under pressure is one of these classic things
39:23 that my generation was always brought up.
39:25 Stiff upper lip, don't show your emotions,
39:28 be strong to the outside world, all of that.
39:31 But all that apart, a very simple message,
39:36 when the sharks bite you, do not bleed,
39:38 is not a bad message to have.
39:40 Ultimately, deny the unfair attackers
39:43 the satisfaction of savoring your own discomfort, misery,
39:47 unhappiness, and so on.
39:49 And therefore, I simply reacted to all of this
39:51 by continuing doing my job and, in fact,
39:53 doing more than my job, making speeches, writing books,
39:57 putting my point of view across.
39:59 And I thought that was the best way to respond.
40:01 Because if I allowed them to define me
40:04 and I allowed them to crush me, then
40:06 I was being untrue to myself, which is
40:08 something I didn't want to be.
40:10 Thank you all very much.
40:11 You've been a great audience.
40:13 Take care.
40:13 Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Shashi Tharoor.
40:16 OK, so before I let you go, I have one last question
40:19 that I want you to answer.
40:20 You've given us so much food for action and reflection.
40:24 Leave us with the word of the day.
40:27 Well, I actually just did this a few days ago
40:29 on social media, which is a kid asked me precisely
40:31 this question, a school kid.
40:33 And I said, listen, there's only one word I want to give you.
40:36 And it's not a long word.
40:37 It's not a new word.
40:38 It's read.
40:40 Because I didn't acquire a vocabulary
40:42 by mugging up dictionaries.
40:43 I just read widely and extensively.
40:46 I grew up in India without television,
40:48 without computers, mobile phones, Nintendo, PlayStation.
40:51 Books were my education, my entertainment, my escape.
40:55 And frankly, if you read widely enough,
40:57 you will acquire a great vocabulary.
40:58 And if you come across the same word
41:01 in three different places, three different contexts and usages,
41:04 you'll understand very quickly what it means,
41:05 how it's meant to be used.
41:07 And that's essentially how I've built up my vocabulary.
41:10 And everybody in this room and their children at home
41:13 can do exactly the same thing if they
41:15 will take the time to read.
41:16 Well, then I have four words.
41:17 I promise to read.
41:19 Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Shashi Tharoor once again.
41:21 Thank you.
41:22 Thank you so much, sir.
41:22 Have a great rest of the evening.
41:24 Thank you so much for joining us.
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