As power changes seats and the world wrestles with new players, Anish Gawande ruminates on education, policy, and India’s location on the global political landscape.

Shikhar: There’s a growing feeling among students that India’s education system is under strain. From what many of us see at DU, things feel like they’re slipping, and friends at Mumbai University say the same. It often feels like the larger educational infrastructure is slowly breaking down. As someone who’s been vocal about youth concerns and has also studied abroad, how do you look at India’s education system today in comparison with foreign education systems? Where do you think the real gaps lie?

Anish: To start with, I think it’s important to acknowledge that there is a systematic assault on public education that is taking place across the country, whether that’s in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, or Kolkata. Our central universities, which used to be the pride and prestige of our country, have crumbled. We are witnessing politically motivated appointments to professorial positions, an absolute lack of funding in any sense for research, and, more importantly, a complete dismissal of the social sciences and the humanities as valuable disciplines to pursue.

So, in some ways, I think it’s very important to acknowledge that we’re in a moment of crisis. Public education is very important to me. My grandfather used to be a professor of Sanskrit at Ruia College in Mumbai before he went on to become principal of Government Law College and then the vice-chancellor of Mumbai University at a time when the university still had some stature. Even then, it was important to acknowledge that the vice-chancellorship of a central university came with unprecedented independence.

It was important that when you were the head of a university, you were accountable to nobody, including the political elite that may have put you there in the first place. The chancellor may be the governor, but he was a ceremonial chancellor. And therefore, there was a level of independence afforded to the vice-chancellors, to university administrators, and to those in charge of these universities to develop these universities in a true sense.

What you’re seeing today, unfortunately, is not only a political overturning of these long-standing principles, but also a lack of freedom given to the political appointees who have been put into power in these universities. It’s not just that a different ideology is now in power in the country, but also that those who profess that ideology and are heading some of our public universities are not given the ability to revamp or rehaul these universities, because they are faced with political pressure, including from those who are ideologically aligned with them. What this means is a double-edged sword. One, the quality of education suffers because ideology and political ideology are being preferred over some semblance of academic merit in the selection of teaching staff. But more importantly, it also means that administrative order has collapsed completely, which is why you see paper leaks becoming the new normal across the country, and protests over the paper leaks, whether that’s the SSC paper leak or the massive paper leaks that happened in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, going entirely unpunished.

This is because you simply do not have today an infrastructure where those who are in charge of administering the universities have the power to administer those universities. Finally, I think an important distinction needs to be drawn between Mumbai University and Delhi University. Delhi University, despite all of its flaws, still has student elections and student politics. Since the 1990s, Mumbai University has been systematically depoliticised to ensure that these concerns do not make their way into the national consciousness, and indeed into the mainstream political frame.

That has had two consequences. One is that students have nobody to go to except the administration, which means that they have no voice except one that requires them to bow down and bend in requests that the administration may or may not consider. More importantly, it means that the political pipeline that existed to ensure that student leaders were then becoming leaders in their own right, in civic corporations, assemblies, and even in parliament, no longer has that political pathway, which also means that you don’t have student leaders in positions of power who can reform this university system. We thus find ourselves in this catch-22 situation where our public university system is crumbling, and a private university infrastructure has emerged to take its place.

We all know that these private universities do not have a diverse student body, which means that they cannot offer the same kind of learning that happens in a DU, which becomes in many ways a temple of Indian democracy. This is what Nehru envisioned as a temple of Indian democracy—the IITs, IIMs, DU, Mumbai University; the spaces where people from around the country meet each other from different class backgrounds and disciplines. They meet each other,  get a cigarette at their local shop, and then go party on their college campus. I mean, these are spaces that are not just for learning, but also for national integration. It’s a shame that the party in power today, in its attempt to promote national integration, has destroyed those very temples of democracy that allowed for that national integration to take place in the very first place. I think it’s a very worrying moment. How we counter it is a much longer question and a much longer answer. 

Aayudh: I think you read my mind at the end, because I was going to ask you whether it might have something to do with the push for privatisation of higher education, as we’ve seen in the last five years, perhaps. But that, I think, allows us to move on to a broader question. Two years ago, Palki Sharma had argued in favour of the motion that Modi’s India is on the right path at an Oxford Union Society debate. How would you believe that claim has aged today, especially in terms of both foreign relations and welfare at home, keeping in mind that we are a welfare state? 

Anish: I’ll answer that in two parts. The first, which is very important, is that governance is about continuity. Therefore, while we must acknowledge the significant democratic backsliding that has taken place, including the crumbling of institutions, under the present BJP-led government, this is neither an isolated moment nor, certainly, one that began in 2014. We must also acknowledge that the progress being made by the government today is not progress that happens in isolation either. The schemes that are introduced—for example, direct benefit transfers—require the experiments carried out in Nandurbar with DBTs back under the UPA regime. They require the backbone of Aadhaar that was introduced in the previous government as well. The economic policy and foreign policy that you see today also build upon the economic and foreign policy of the last few decades. Inasmuch as that policy is developed over the course of decades and as a process of continuity, I think in some ways India as a country, despite all of these challenges, regardless of whether it’s Modi’s India or otherwise, remains in many ways on the right path.

I say this with caution and trepidation: Even though we’ve had significant concerns around the independence of the judiciary, about how we seem to be increasingly alienated by our neighbours from Bangladesh to Nepal to Sri Lanka, and a precarity in the economic realm that has led to youth unemployment reaching record highs, we have still seen a growth level that has remained fairly positive, a foreign policy that has remained fairly comprehensive in terms of its outlook and independent in terms of its ability to respond to the world. We have witnessed, in many ways, India stand up and respond to global crises that are unfolding at a record pace today with a level of maturity that has always characterised our foreign policy. However, I’m worried because in many ways we’re also bowing down where we’ve never bowed down before. If you talk of Russia and Ukraine, territorial sovereignty has been the founding principle of Indian foreign policy. It’s precisely because we have a hostile neighbourhood that we have reiterated time and again that territorial sovereignty cannot be compromised at the international stage. Therefore, when we do not take a strong stance for Ukraine, we make it very easy for the international community to not take a stance for India when there are incursions into Arunachal Pradesh by China. These are difficult positions to adopt that I think the government needs to be cautious of. This is precisely why the non-alignment movement was born, right? The Nehruvian idea, which he shared with leaders of the global south, of a non-aligned world, was, of course, idealistic. The Bandung Conference was a dream of a different kind of globalisation. But it was also a practical and strategic idea. It allowed you to have a moral scaffolding that, in many ways, permitted a kind of mobility and a nuanced flexibility in foreign policy that seems to be lacking today. It’s precisely why, in the face of this lack of flexibility, we’ve seen India falter when it comes to questions of Palestine. We’ve seen India falter when it comes to questions of Ukraine. We’ve seen India falter when it comes to questions around Venezuela as well, right? At the same time, I think it’s very difficult to ignore that domestic policy has far-reaching foreign policy repercussions. You cannot be spreading disinformation and misinformation about minorities in India and not expect countries around the world to then judge you in a particular light and have their foreign policy reflect that.

You cannot take the kinds of gambles that you did with Sheikh Hasina and the support for her regime without acknowledging that Bangladesh has perhaps the largest contiguous land border with India and therefore the largest potential to wreak havoc upon this country when you engage with a new government in that country. The fact that we haven’t been able to go beyond mere platitudes about Hindus in Bangladesh and using them for domestic elections in India is a testament to the fact that we have forgotten what our foreign policy has looked like and why we cannot let a domestic narrative veer too far a certain way because it might impact our foreign policy. We are seeing a kind of turning point on the foreign policy front, at least in India, which requires us to rethink. It requires us to have a newer set of principles to engage with the world as it stands today.

For example, when we had Operation Sindoor, the opposition, including my party, was the first to support the government. In fact, we went and broke ranks with the India Alliance and said that, “When Operation Sindoor is underway, we cannot have a special session of parliament. We must stand with the government because when India is under attack, there are no political parties.” Unfortunately, that strategic rhetoric was not used effectively by the government to claim that a ceasefire was what they were after. Instead, a belligerent rhetoric of teaching the enemy a lesson was propagated by news channels, which claimed we’d conquered Sindh and Multan, and was broadcast live to the world in a way that made us a laughingstock. Additionally, it allowed the US to take credit for a ceasefire that arguably India should have taken credit for from the very beginning. The reason we have always pursued a principle of de-escalation even after the first shot has been fired is that, at the end of the day, when you’re dealing with two nuclear powers, the solution will always be a ceasefire. The person who takes credit for it first is going to be hailed as the grandmaster of that ceasefire, which has been the United States, after a tweet from Donald Trump. Therefore, I think strategic foreign policy is something that’s lacking.

Economic policy is something that’s faltering in terms of foreign investments. I think we’ve forgotten that domestic consumption is the only way we can drive the engine of an economy as large as India. When the world is retrenching, when the rupee is devaluing, you cannot expect foreign funds to invest in India because the returns are simply not good enough to justify investments. You cannot only depend upon manufacturing. I think “Make in India” has unfortunately not been the resounding success that it was meant to be. You’re witnessing the impact of that currently across the country. You are witnessing a services sector that has not been able to bridge that gap between the manufacturing sector and the broader economy and pull up the jobs that it needs to.

I don’t think we know what we’re going to do when AI starts replacing jobs. I don’t think we know what we’re going to do when lakhs, if not crores of young people, will have been skilled through syllabi that are so out of touch with the demands of the job market that they’ve created a peculiar situation where the number of people who want jobs has never been higher than it ever has been before and the number of employers who are saying they can’t find effective candidates has never been higher than it has ever been before either.

So this mismatch, which is imperative to solve if you want to find some way of ensuring that our population, whose median age is 29, gets employed, has not been resolved 

Aayudh: India at independence, including Gandhi and Nehru, had its Jewish sympathies. But at the same time, Gandhi acknowledged Palestine as a case of settler colonialism. Under Nehru’s leadership, India voted against the UN Resolution 181. But now under Modi’s India, the channel of domestic relations and foreign policy regarding Israel-Palestine seems to have shifted decisively in favour of Israel. How would you reflect on this evolution that has taken place in an India that has suffered a partition, understands the weight and the devastation of colonial rule, and is still grappling with trying to define and chart the contours of what it means to be a post-colonial subject? 

Anish: Listen, Palestine is not a strategic consideration. It is a moral consideration. It is a moral failure when India does not stand up for Palestine on the world stage, because it has not just been our foreign policy, but our moral policy to stand with oppressed people across the world. This is precisely what Swami Vivekananda and what Rabindranath Tagore said. This is precisely what the founding fathers of the Indian Republic said when they were fighting for independence for our country. I think it is imperative, not just for India as a country in terms of its government, but for the Indian people to stand together with Palestine at this time. At the same time, there is no denying that India has also had long-standing relations with Israel.

As somebody who studied the Holocaust quite rigorously, read the poetry of somebody like Chava Rosenfarb, spent time in the Łódź Ghetto in Poland and escapes but barely the violence and brutality inflicted by the Nazi regime, I think it’s important not to fall into the trap of anti-Semitism either. I think there are ways in which that kind of anti-Semitism can find utterance, particularly when it comes to a moment when we feel angry, helpless, and the easiest way to respond to the kinds of violent acts, not just of speech, but of a physical nature, is this kind of hateful retort. I think it’s important to remember the emotional thrust of the Jewish struggle that also animates some of this discourse. 

When it comes to Indian foreign policy, India has been relatively principled in its support for Palestine on the international stage. We’ve committed time and again to Palestinian rehabilitation and recovery. We’ve committed time and again to multiple UN resolutions, barring a few, which are aberrations that should be addressed, and have stood in support of a two-state solution, which has been an acknowledged foreign policy over decades. We have also condemned the actions of Israel from time to time when necessary. That being said, unfortunately, the domestic political discourse around Palestine has been terrifying. It’s been framed in contours of Islamophobia that are bizarre. I don’t think the question of Palestine is about whether Muslims are being killed, because Christians are also being killed in Palestine, and so are all kinds of other ethnic and religious minorities.

The question is not about whether or not it is important for India to support what’s happening in Palestine because of defence ties with Israel. The question is whether children are being killed. When hundreds of thousands of people are being killed mercilessly in a one-sided genocide that is placing the burden of morality entirely upon the oppressed, then it is our moral duty to stand up and support the oppressed. I think it’s shocking because, honestly, I see all of these Twitter accounts supporting Israel, and then Israeli accounts going back and calling them racist slurs. It’s a bizarre situation where you have a regime in Israel that is deeply racist, which is being opposed by principled Jewish people across the world, which is being opposed by those within Israel itself, but is being supported by a Rahool N Kanal for no reason whatsoever. I think we need to interrogate what has led to that level of hate becoming normal. We also have to interrogate what we do with that level of hate. Quite honestly, the Foreign Service is doing its job relatively decently, but the people of India have certainly dropped the ball when it comes to showing any spine on the question of Palestine. I think you’re going to find that becoming a major flashpoint in the months and years to come.

Shikhar: India is often framed as having moved beyond the colonial past, yet students continue to face linguistic, cultural, and global capital hierarchies. From your perspective, how does this phenomenon shape the political consciousness of the students today? What risks do you see when these structures go unnoticed?

In many ways, one of the essays that stood out to me most, when I read it almost a decade ago, was Tuck and Yang’s Decolonization is not a metaphor. They brilliantly argue in that essay that when you do not consider the material impetus of decolonisation, when you don’t consider the indigenous scholars, the giving back of land to the marginalised, then decolonisation remains a hollow metaphor. It becomes a term that you use, but that has no meaning.

In some ways, that has been the critique of decolonisation in India. In some ways, the Nehruvian state that you saw after independence was one built upon a Fabian socialism that was deeply rooted in Enlightenment rationality. The project that Nehru embarked upon considered the temples of democracy, like the IITs and the IIMs, the space research program, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Bhakra Nangal Dam, and the river linking projects, to be the modern creatures that would not only animate public discourse but also transform an illiterate country that was plagued by superstition. That was in many ways grappling not just with a colonial legacy, but also the pre-colonial legacy that was marked by feudalism. The imagination then was that this kind of enlightenment rationality would transform the citizen subject into one who would take forward this idea of India, which has always been an idea ceaselessly under construction. Unfortunately, the last three decades have shown us that perhaps rationality isn’t the answer, because the IITs and the IIMs, or the people who graduate from the IITs and IIMs, are the ones who are spewing the most casteist or the most Islamophobic rhetoric. The most educated in the STEM fields are the ones who are becoming most hateful. Clearly, then, it is possible to embrace scientific progress without embracing a spirit of humanism that is required for us to build communities with each other, which is precisely why you’re seeing these fissures across language, region, and religion.

I don’t think these fissures are necessarily bad. I think they’ve animated political and social discourse in this country for centuries. I think they’ve been remarkably generative in some ways; the conflicts between these communities have also been remarkably generative. They’ve thrown up important and difficult questions around what secularism means, what it means to live alongside each other. I think, though, that what we now need to establish is a new politics and a new political imagination; a politics of care. At the end of the day, the ideals that we hold deeply valuable, such as freedom of speech and belief in democratic institutions, are predicated upon the idea of an orderly society. That idea of order necessarily being beneficial to the most marginalised is an idea that has been dismissed almost wholly and completely in the last few decades. So now I think the political project is much greater than throwing out one party in power or speaking out against the BJP or the Congress, or even the mere conception of these two political parties. It is about going back to see what we can do to revive a spirit of togetherness that is required if we are to move ahead. 

In some ways, India is a peculiar society, even in terms of Indian secularism. We always talk about how French secularism is very different. However, Indian secularism is a beast in its own right. Indian secularism has always been predicated upon the belief that we’re a country divided by religions, but united by festivals. We’ve always been a country that has celebrated each other’s festivals. If you go back into the archives in a city like Mumbai, you have Muharram being one of the biggest festivals of the city that everyone participated in—not just Hindus, not just Muslims, not just Shias. If you look at Ganesh Chaturthi now, it does reflect in some ways the spirit of togetherness, where people across religions celebrate the festival in the city. How do we go back to those inflexion points? How do we go back to those drivers of community to understand how to bridge these divisions between language, region, and religion? How do we go back to materiality as being foundational to understanding these divides? I come from Maharashtra. Over the last few months and years, the notion of Marathi Asmita and the questions of who should speak Marathi and who should be forced to speak Marathi have animated public discourse. Of course, one is against violence of all kinds, and one is against any imposition of a language against someone’s will. But the thrust of that Marathi language imposition is a class order that has marginalised those who migrated to Mumbai decades ago.

You’re seeing this situation where people from across Maharashtra who migrated to Mumbai from the 1800s until fairly recently, are now confronting the fact that a newer generation of migrants who come from UP and Bihar, and who can afford to live 20 to a room much like these previous migrants did when they moved for the first time a century or two ago, while working for mills, is displacing the jobs and the communities created by older migrants, and can provide labour at a far cheaper rate than the labour that somebody who has a family and children who live in the same city can. This is what we have to confront, not just when it comes to the violent instantiation, which is language imposition—all this kind of beating up of people who don’t speak Marathi—but also when it comes to questions around the gig worker economy. Just because somebody is willing to work at a terribly low price point, is it justifiable for that person to work at that price point? Just because people are willing to live 20 to a room, is it okay for the state to allow those people to live 20 to a room? How do we reanimate the conversations we used to have around affordable housing, rental or otherwise? In a city like Delhi, rental housing has become unaffordable. At one point, Delhi was known for affordable rental housing, where young people could live in PGs and Barsatis. But the Barsatis of the city have been replaced by builder floors. So where do young people live anymore? You’ve pushed young people in Delhi all the way to the margins, to Noida, to Greater Noida, to Gurgaon, to the back of beyond, to Faridabad, to Ghaziabad. You’ve ensured that the centre of the city, which used to be the intellectual heartland of the city, has become devoid of young people because they simply can’t afford to live there anymore.

The institutions that were built painstakingly, like the India International Centre, the India Habitat Centre, the Kamani Auditorium, and these vibrant spaces that once were the centre of intellectual and cultural dialogue, are now filled with older people because the younger people can’t afford to live here anymore. How do you understand this kind of alienation that is now increasingly commonplace amongst young people, or come to terms with the fact that when you deal with these divides, you have to understand them from a slightly more complex angle than 9 p.m. primetime television debates that make it almost impossible to find a solution? I think we’ve now reached a point where people are talking for the sake of talking. You’re creating these divides for the sake of creating these divides. Parties are very happy to create these divides because when you create a divide that doesn’t require you to have nuance, you get votes in a far easier manner.

You can’t leave it up to the politicians anymore. You now have to have young people, particularly those who understand the long-term implications of these divides, come to the forefront and say, “not in my name”, right? And only then will you see these divides not disappear, but be negotiated differently. Perhaps that’s when you’ll have true decolonisation taking place, whatever that might mean in a country like India.

Shikhar: I am sure you would have been expecting this question since you mentioned affordable rental housing. Mamdani’s victory in New York sparked global excitement around youth participation in politics, and many online even referred to you as the “Indian Mamdani”. Do you think moments like this can create ripple effects on India’s shores as well? What do you think holds Indian youth back from active political participation, especially when politics is still widely seen as a space dominated by sexagenarians? 

Anish: You know, I’ve said this before. I’ll say this again: unfortunately, I would have loved to be India’s Zohran Mamdani. But India has already had Zohran Mamdanis in the past, right? A city like Mumbai has had Yusuf Meherally as its mayor, a Muslim socialist much like Zohran Mamdani, who advocated for fair labour laws and the protection of labour rights, and coined “Quit India” and “Simon Go Back”. You had Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, of course, was the architect of our constitution, that many forget was also the reason we got eight-hour working days, and ensured that the rights of those who were engaged in labour were protected.

We’ve also forgotten that it took many, many decades for us to arrive at a point where the promises that Zoran Mamdani is making in the United States today are not considered atrocious in a country like India. If Zoran Mamdani ran for elections in India, he’d probably be a centrist, not on the left, because for us, child care has always been an election promise anyway. We believe in direct benefit transfers to women, not as something that you’re divided on across political lines, but as a given and as a normal; we don’t think of affordable public transport as some kind of socialist propaganda that needs to be dismissed. We believe it’s a right. The rights-based approach that we have cultivated so painstakingly in India today is absent in the United States. The US works in a very different way. You’re supposed to pull up your socks. If you can’t afford a house, then you die on the streets. If you can’t afford good food, then you eat bad food. In this country, we don’t believe that. We believe that you can create Amma Canteens under Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu. We can create the Shiv Bhojan Thalis in Mumbai. We can make affordable messes in public universities a demand, not a request. It is imperative to remember that, because a rights-based approach is what we have forgotten to embrace as young people in this country, since we’ve been so detached from the history of politics in this country. I think we’ve been continuously taught that we don’t belong on the political table. We don’t belong within elections or within the corridors of power. It’s time to take that power back. I don’t necessarily see this as something that we won’t be able to achieve. If nothing else, it’s easier today to be a young person in politics than it ever was before. It’s easier today to contest an election with fewer sources than it ever was before. So I see a moment of great optimism. Your median age in India is 29, which means half the population is under the age of 30. This means that if the young of this country can coalesce themselves into a voting bloc, they will become a significant voting bloc. And when you do become a voting bloc, you know that political parties across ideologies have to listen to you. It’s what’s happened with women today. It’s what’s happened with caste minorities today. It’s what’s been prevented from happening with queer communities. We have to recognise the power of that voting bloc and political participation, and ensure that we are not begging for a seat at the table, but demanding it. Shifting that lens will fundamentally allow young people to take the lead. I think that today, young people are contesting elections in much greater numbers than we ever saw before. You should have younger people demand tickets more effectively. Also, young people need to start contesting at local body election levels more creatively and constructively than ever before. You need to be winning at the panchayat level, the Zilla Parishad level, and the municipal corporation level. Being an MP or an MLA is not as effective. Change is wrought from the ground up, and if we do not realise that, if we don’t have a ladder that allows younger people to climb in politics, I don’t think we’re going to be able to really radically transform that system. I think that ladder is missing. Those ladders used to be student elections at universities. Those ladders used to be mentorship by political leaders. Those ladders used to be the youth wings of political parties.

But as you’ve seen in DU, your youth wings are busier beating up professors than they are participating in effective political dialogue on campus. The time now is to reflect upon what those ladders can look like and to genuinely create platforms for younger people to think about politics, engage with politics, and understand how an election works, what filing a nomination looks like, what door-to-door campaigning looks like, what the caste and class dynamics of a constituency are, what political rhetoric and messaging look like, what the different functions are in a political campaign that require you to bring to the forefront certain issues. Additionally, idealistic politics will not work entirely. I think you need to have a politics that is also geared towards winning. We need to start really strategising about how we’re going to start winning.

Aayudh: Queer identity has always been political. However, within spaces of cultural discourse, for a lot of people, this means being forced into an assertion of political alignment before they have a chance to explore their identities. How would you reflect on this premature appellation by ideology for fear of being accused of apoliticism as an increasing trend in online queer spaces?

Anish: That is a difficult question. When queerness is under attack from a certain ideology, it becomes almost natural for those who have come out to presume that everyone coming out after them must also oppose that ideology in order to defend queerness as a whole. That’s a natural response. It’s an almost paternalistic instinct, which says, “you don’t know better, but you might as well learn this quickly and figure out who’s on your side and who’s not, in this grander fight.” Is it necessarily a bad thing? I don’t know. Is it something that can be deeply alienating? I definitely think so. I think it’s not so much that you are politicised or that political conversations take place in queer spaces. That’s always been the case. That will continue to be the case. The question is, how can queerness evolve new ways for us to have these conversations without them seeming like barriers to entry points into any kind of participation, right? How can we acknowledge that somebody might have a different opinion? How can we still show some level of care in hearing that opinion and engaging with that opinion? I think in many ways, we forget the kinds of privilege that allow queer folks to express themselves in ways that other queer folks might be hesitant to. What I can say as a cis gay man who comes with caste and class privilege is very different from something that someone who is Dalit and trans can say, right? A Dalit trans person is not going to be able to say the things that I can say. I cannot then say that they are not progressive enough or not “sticking to the party line”, as it were, of this queer ideology that seems to animate discussions in queer circles, simply because they’re not coming out and being as vociferously critical of the government, or of a certain statement or certain kind of ideology. So I think it’s very important to understand that people come to ideology in very many different ways. We would have to give them the space to understand why they care about something, not just tell them what to care about.

For me, personally, queerness has been a valuable lens to understand the struggles of others, the fight against caste discrimination and Islamophobia, and to reaffirm my solidarity with those struggles. In many ways, for me, queerness is a belief that you must stand up against oppression of all kinds, whether that is based on one’s caste, class, religion, sexuality, or gender, because at the end of the day, that is what a queer politics looks like. But that’s not necessarily everyone’s politics, right? And I think we have to allow them to embrace that politics. And we have to allow them to enter that politics, not from a space of judgment or cancel culture, but from a space of intrigue, and from a space of inquisitiveness. I think we’ve shut down the spaces for inquisitiveness. I don’t think we know how to be curious anymore. I don’t think we know how to be excited by an idea anymore. We’re so cemented in what we believe in that we don’t want to be challenged.

Even on the left, we’re very secure in what we believe in, and we’re very insecure of anything that shakes our belief in that security. I think queerness also has had a role to play in these spaces, to disrupt, to challenge, to shake preconceived notions around what queerness means, how it’s perceived, and who’s really supporting queer rights. To conclude, I must mention that often the narratives that we create around queerness are strategic in nature. Queer folks are not yet a voting bloc. Queer folks are “a minuscule minority”, in the words of the Supreme Court. Queer folks also don’t live in one region, or one constituency, and therefore the geographic spread of queerness makes it very difficult for queerness to become a politically valiant force, which means that when queerness presents its demands in front of the state, whether that’s in front of politicians or the judiciary, it has to be very strategic and tactical about how those demands are presented. When we spoke about Section 377 and got 377 read down, the argument was that this is a kind of Victorian morality that was imposed upon India, and India before the British was a great place for queer people. That’s a tactical strategy, is it not? It’s not something that’s true. It’s not that before the Brits arrived, if you’re a Dalit queer woman, you would be able to be with somebody across caste lines who was also a woman. Who queerness is accessible to, who could avail of queerness, has always been challenged. But in that moment, it was important to assert that kind of queerness to be able to become legible to the state.

Today, we saw that kind of queerness fail when it came to marriage equality. Certain demands are so threatening to the foundations of the patriarchy in this country that you can’t sugarcoat them, in which case you have to maybe now adopt a different narrative: one of solidarity, one where a consolidated list of demands is placed in front of the state by a coalition of identities. How can we bring queer people and those who care about the environment, disability rights, mental health, and oppression on the grounds of caste, religion and region together? How do you create this more inclusive platform through which you argue for a bouquet of rights? I don’t know if we’ve arrived at that yet, but I know that we’ve arrived at the end of this conversation. But I certainly hope that we’ll be able to arrive at such a platform, because I don’t think there’s an alternative left anymore. 

Aayudh: Thank you, Anish, for interviewing with DU Beat. We have asked difficult questions, but what we may take away from this interview is that it is far more important to question, agitate, and subvert than to answer, categorise, and define. That is the only lesson we might learn from a nation so principally and historically endowed with plurality, and so difficult to definitely characterise, as India.

With,

Shikhar Pathak, Editor-In-Chief, DU Beat

[email protected]

Aayudh Pramanik, Print Editor, DU Beat

[email protected]

Image Credits: The Hindu