Thread by @ganesan312

This thread is a brief extract of Rahul’s online interactions with Professor Ashutosh Varshney, faculty, and students...

Rarely one comes across an impromptu, spontaneous interaction that contains such a brilliant, concise, unadulterated truth, full of sense and nothing else.
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Q:
You argued ‘politics in India have become a fight for India not just a fight for power’.
Biden before elections in 2020 argued ‘it was not about a change in power in Washington it was about soul of America’.
Is your claim similar to Biden’s claim or substantially different?
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Rahul:

To me, India is many different diverse viewpoints, many different languages, different cultures, different histories, different ideas. Modern India to me is essentially an ongoing negotiation between those ideas, those cultures.
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What Gandhiji did, what our founding fathers did is, they created the architecture for that negotiation. The centrepiece of that architecture is, of course, one man, one vote and the constitution. Then from that idea of one man, one vote in the constitution arose many…
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independent Institutions which guarantee the negotiation. It's very obvious to me that those Institutions are what allow the negotiations between our identities, between our languages between our cultures between our states to occur.
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What I see is a determined attack on those Institutions and a capture of those institutions. There are elements of that taking place in the United States. But I am nobody to comment on the US. I don't understand the United States, as well as my American friends there would.
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But I get the sense that the American institutions are showing much more resilience than the Indian ones. The American system is actually countering this onslaught better than our system.
To me, if the negotiations between States break down then the idea of India breaks down.
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Before 2014 there was an assault on Institutions by the RSS, by similar forces, the concentration of capital you control but it was subversive, it was being silently done.
It was done in Madhya Pradesh, it was done in States that they ran, it was done through their schools…
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by syphoning off public funds. But it was not out in the open. What happened is in 2014 it is out in the open. It is legitimised. It is across the board.
To me, that's why it is an attack on India. See, I represent a part of that negotiation as do all other political players.
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Congress party represents 20% of the population and other opposition parties together represent a much bigger chunk than the Prime Minister and the BJP.
But we are not given that room for negotiation. We are not given that room for conversation. That is what has changed.
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As a politician, I require institutional support. I simply cannot operate without it.
It is a fantasy if somebody thinks that I can operate or democracy can operate without independent institutions that we don't have anymore.
That is why I classify it as an assault on India.
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This is only a small part of Rahul’s interactions with Prof. Ashutosh Varshney, faculty, students.

This effort to bring out excerpts is made, as such truths need wide circulation.
(Ps: Some errors are possible in this kind of exercise)

Your comments, opinion are welcome.
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