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Although, in my judgment, ultimately vacuous promises. But that's the way of bypassing or undercutting the standard democratic procedures. So that's why people who go for these populist leaders are disenchanted with the rather slow, cumbersome, but necessary liberal process procedures of democracy.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Slow encumbrance. Now, it depends on what nation you live in, because the term slow can mean different things, right? I mean, for example, we will be focusing in detail on India this hour. There's a vast population of Indians for whom democracy perhaps hasn't really changed their quality of life in a meaningful way ever.

BARDHAN: So they think that the populist leaders are going to get things now which they have been missing for all these years. But I think that's a false promise. But that's what they're seduced by.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So tell me a little bit more about your thesis that you have about inequality versus insecurity as drivers of populism, and in different places and for different reasons in various nations.

BARDHAN: All over the world, inequality has been rising. And in some countries, it's reached grotesque levels. So there's all this reaction to this rising inequality. In fact, the occupation Wall Street movement was entirely focused on inequality. Countries like Chile and various countries, other countries in Latin America, inequality has produced strong reaction. But I personally, and this is one of the main themes in the book, I personally think while inequality is extremely important to workers, the way the workers are moving toward these populist demagogues, most often right-wing extreme demagogues. It is not just inequality because, you know, inequality is a leftwing issue.

The question is why aren't people turning right instead of left? So that in order to understand that question, you have to grapple with cultural issues and also general insecurity. In my book, I talk about both economic insecurity, like in job losses, income losses, but also I talk about cultural insecurity, for example, immigration. Immigrants, rightly or wrongly, pose as a cultural threat to many native populations. Similarly, religious groups quite often become the threats to each other or one another. And so these are cultural insecurities.

And I want to emphasize both because quite often one of the reasons the working classes are turning right rather than the left is that the left or the liberals are not emphasizing these cultural issues. They are, for example, in the United States, it's things about abortion or gay rights or gun rights, etc. A lot of workers, socially conservative workers, even though on economic issues they may be in line with the left liberals, on minimum wage, on health plans, etc. But the cultural issues are quite important.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, in fact, I would say in the United States, frequently the elite political left oftentimes just dismisses the cultural issues outright and says, well, it's just sexism or racism or xenophobia, so therefore not worth taking seriously or engaging with. But we do want to focus on India.

CHAKRABARTI: But let me bring into the conversation now Ashutosh Varshney. He's the director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University. ... This hour is really about the rise of populism in what I've been calling the world's largest democracy. But as you well know, in Professor Bardhan's book, he writes that India used to be the world's largest democracy, but he would rather now describe it as an electoral autocracy. Would you agree or disagree with that?

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: I have made the claim thus far that India is seizing to be a liberal democracy, but it is an electoral democracy. That was the claim thus far, but Modi's suggesting that it's heading towards electoral autocracy, but it's not there. So if I have a difference with Pranab, it's on degree rather than direction. ... For example, the next election in India is not competitive and opposition party leaders are put in jail ... then we are heading towards an electoral autocracy.

CHAKRABARTI: So right now, it's the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi that's in power and has been for several years in India. But Professor Varshney, take a minute, though, and walk us back through India's modern history, because obviously you could say that it was a very vibrant popular uprising that led to the overthrow of British colonialism. I don't know if you'd call that populism, but then thereafter, would the Congress parties' rule with Indira Gandhi, was that a form of Indian populism?

VARSHNEY: The anti-colonial movements may or may not be populist. India's was not because it led to an institutional design of a constitution which had liberal oversight over politicians. So, for example, the judiciary was independent. For example, the press was independent.

For example, civil society associations, independent civil society associations could be formed and could freely exercise their choices. So all of that is very consistent with the liberal democratic polity, which India had. The first burst of populism at the national level was left wing populism, actually not right-wing populism, which led to Mrs. Gandhi 1975 to 1977 when she suspended the Constitution, even while claiming that she represented the popular will.

And her claim was more or less like the Latin American left populism, which is banish poverty. And the real people of India are the poor people who are a majority of Indians. And there, the abolition of poverty is the enemy of that. ... And so her attacks on the elites of India, for the sake of the poor people of India, on behalf of the poor people of India, was the left-wing populism. She also attacked the judiciary, attacked the bureaucracy, attacked the press. Now the attack is on the right-wing side.

CHAKRABARTI: Youre back with On Point. This is Episode 2 of our special series The Power of Populism.

And today were talking about populism in the worlds largest democracy: India.

India is a particularly interesting example of the power of populism - its very existence as an independent nation was brought about by a kind of charismatic populism led by Mahatma Gandhi that overthrew British colonial rule. Then came populism via Indias Congress Party. And more recently another, distinctly different version, under current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

MODI: Indias undergoing a profound social and economic change. A billion of its citizens are already politically empowered.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Modi speaking before a joint session of the United States Congress in 2016.

Arvind Panagariya was part of the Modi government at that time. He was an early member of Modis cabinet, from 2015 to 2017.

PANAGARIYA: I sat on numerous, numerous meetings with the Prime Minister, and when I needed to have discussions with him alone, one on one, then I would go and have one on one discussions with him.

CHAKRABARTI: Panagariya says he was an unusual choice for Modis cabinet, because:

PANAGARIYA: The general intellectual environment in India is very anti-BJP.

CHAKRABARTI: And, Panagariya is an intellectual. Hes a renowned economist, an expert on free trade, whos worked for the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. But, perhaps crucially, Panagariya is not an intellectual living in India. Hes lived in the United States for 40 years and is a professor at Columbia University.

CHAKRABARTI: In Modis cabinet, Panagariya served as vice chair of the National Institution for Transforming India. Its mission: craft economic policies to speed Indias development from the ground up.

PANAGARIYA: We had to put policies in different areas. We also produced a three year action agenda for the country.

MODI: My to-do list is long, and ambitious.

CHAKRABARTI: Heres Modi, again, at that Joint Session of the US Congress in 2016.

MODI: A vibrant rural economy with a robust farm sector. A roof over each head, and electricity for all households. ... Have broadband for a billion. And connect our villages to the digital world.

CHAKRABARTI: Modi had reason to believe in the possibility of transformational growth in India. Because hed done it in the Indian state of Gujarat, where Modi was the head of state government for 13 years, from 2001 to 2014. In that period, Gujarats economy grew dramatically, and Arvind Panagariya - who was still in the U.S. at the time, took notice.

PANAGARIYA: I was studying the Gujarat economy ... it was completely bogus.

CHAKRABARTI: Expert opinion of Gujarats economic performance under Modi is deeply divided. Some analysts point to the states stagnant position on various human welfare indices. Almost half of Gujarati children under five remained malnourished, the states spending on health care declined, female literacy, infant mortality were unchanged.

Panagariya points to a different data set: Gujarats GDP grew 10% under Modi. The World Bank named it the number one Indian state for ease of doing business." Modi ushered in tax breaks that attracted billions of investment dollars.

And thats why, when Modi became Indias Prime Minister in 2014, Arvind Panagariya accepted the cabinet invitation. He supported Modis economic ambitions for India, even if he had reservations about Modis politics, specifically the Prime Ministers personal history with right-wing Hindu nationalist groups.

PANAGARIYA: On the one hand, economic economist in me was very much with him. The press was not. And I did many interviews. And one of the interviews, you know, is a long one full page in the economic times.

Where after everything last question the reporter asked us was, Are you impressed with Modi? And I was hesitant to say yes. So what I did was to say yes with his economic policies. Because I did not want to give an implicit nod to his political as I understood at the time.

That time was the aftermath of murders, looting, rapes, and riots that seized Gujarat in 2002, under Narendra Modis rule.

BBC Report from 2002: This is exactly what authorities hoped would never happen. The streets have become a battleground. The grief and anger at yesterdays murders has boiled over into violence, looting, and religious hatred.

CHAKRABARTI: On February 27, 2002, 59 Hindu pilgrims were trapped on a train and killed in a horrific fire at Godhra station in Gujarat. The cause of the fire was disputed. At the time, Muslims were blamed.

The next day, Modi, leading the Gujarat state government, said, People were mercilessly massacred in a railway carriage by wicked people.

Modi called for peace and self-discipline." But he also called the fire a crime that cannot be forgiven.

Riots exploded in Gujarati cities.

BBC Report: On the worst day of the violence when murder and looting were taking place all across the city, we saw policemenjust standing by, watching what was happening, but doing nothing to try to stop it.

One official parliamentary report found that more than a thousand people were killed in the riots, almost 80% of them Muslim. Other reports put the number closer to 2000. A secret British diplomatic assessment referred to the riots as a pogrom akin to organized ethnic cleansing. Human rights organizations found evidence of the mass rape and murder of Muslim women and children.

Modi was accused of condoning the attacks and failing to control the violence. The United States even revoked Modis diplomatic visa in 2005.

Modi consistently maintained his innocence, as he did in this interview with the BBCs Jill McGivering in late 2002.

McGivering: Some people have been accusing you of not doing enough to stop this, of not protecting Muslims even now.

Modi: These are also false propaganda made by our opponents, and you are also a captive of this false propaganda.

McGivering: And the independent reports that have already been published about what has happened

Modi: They have no right to talk about the internal matter of any government. If they have done, they have done wrong.

McGivering: Some would say it is a human right, there is a general international interest.

Modi: Please, please dont try to preach us the human rights. We know what the human rights are. You Britishers should not preach us the human rights.

McGivering: When you look back over the last months, youve been the leader of this state during a very difficult period. Do you think theres anything you should have done differently?

Modi: Yes. One area where I was very, very weak. And that was how to handle the media.

Dozens of investigations, and years later, former cabinet member Arvind Panagariya says the Gujarat riots continue to hound Modis reputation.

PANAGARIYA: So the issue keeps boiling. At least that's if I look at the policies, I see no discrimination whatsoever. This is not an issue. Discrimination against Muslims, you would see in the police, but that has nothing to do with the BJP itself.

CHAKRABARTI: Panagariya says for him, questions about Modis role were conclusively settled in 2012, when the Indian Supreme Courts Special Investigative Team issued a 500-page report stating it could find no evidence against Modi and cleared him of responsibility for the riots.

Panagariya: I kept reading the bloody thing is a very long report for three or four days. And I was absolutely astonished. After that, my conscience is clear. I mean, I would not have actually gone to work for him in 2015 when I went in if I had not read that report.

CHAKRABARTI: Moreover, Panagariya believes that while Indias huge Muslim community, and the nations intellectual elite remain concerned over Modis crackdown on various elements of Indian civil society, its the Prime Ministers economic policies that animate his popular support among a broad swath of Indias enormous electorate.

PANAGARIYA: You know, corporate profit tax rates in India have been extremely high, going to about 35% or so. And so that is not sort of being more or less replaced by a uniform 25% tax rate.

But in general, I think, you know, one of the big things he has done to win the popular support, I mean, what keeps what you know, that same all the votes of the people is that he has done a lot of the rejigging of the social expenditure schemes and in particular, you know, he has evolved, established or developed a fantastic, you know, publicly funded digital infrastructure.

CHAKRABARTI: Finally, we asked Panagariya what he thinks about Modi being compared to other populist leaders around the world, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Recip Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, or even former President Donald Trump.

PANAGARIYA: What I listed mostly that's not what we economists' kind of see because, you know, we basically see growth ultimately as the essential feature, which the prime minister sees as well. But Modi is a much more holistic prime minister. The other thing about him is that he has the ability to get things done on scale and at speed.

His policy is that, you know, I have to get this benefit to the 100% of the beneficiaries. So he believes in this. He used to use the word in our meetings to saturate, saturate. So, for example, electricity. Every household must get. So he will cajole all the chief ministers, you know. Well, you got nearly ten 10% households left virally giving these out, complete them, get 100%.

He is an incredibly articulate speaker. And in his speeches when it comes to people, he would never come across as talking them down.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Arvind Panagariya. He is a professor of Indian political economy at Columbia University. He served in the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a cabinet minister from 2015-2017.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Professor Varshney, what I'd like to do for the next minute or two is connect Professor Bardhan's thesis more directly to what we're seeing in India, because remember, he was talking about insecurity and its various causes. Immigration, cultural tribalism, religious groups, etc. And how you had said the distinguishing difference between the populism in India under Modi versus the Congress Party earlier is the Hindu nationalist piece.

So what I think we need help understanding is Hindus form 80% of India's 1.4 billion strong population. There are 960 million Hindus in India. But help us understand why many of them, even though the vast majority in a sense do feel culturally insecure. Because, I mean, do we have to look back to partition? Because do many Hindus feel that in a sense they lost their country and never fully regained it in 1947?

VARSHNEY: Yeah, let me put it to you this way. Partition is certainly very important in the evolution of Hindu consciousness. And precisely because at the time of partition, India didn't turn towards a Hindu majoritarian state.

But a state and a constitution that gave each religious group, including the Muslims, who farmed, some of whom formed, 67% of whom formed the state of Pakistan, an independent state of Pakistan carved out of British India. So for some of those Hindus, not all some of those Hindus, the idea that India, even after the formation of Pakistan, became a country of religious equality as opposed to a country which gave Hindus primacy, as Muslims had in Pakistan, has certainly played a role in the evolution of consciousness of some Hindus.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I mean, one of those Hindu nationalists even was the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi.

VARSHNEY: That's correct. And if you read his defense in the court, he says he could not understand why Mahatma Gandhi, the father of India, even after the formation of Pakistan, would say Muslims are fellow brothers.

.. In a way, you can say that the alternative political possibilities which were present in the form of let's say, a Communist Party and its politics are some of the lower caste, politics, etc. I think caste has to be brought in now. So Hindu, the so-called Hindu majority, 80% of India is very deeply divided among themselves into multiple castes.

And so it was typically the upper caste feeling in some parts of India, not all, that Hindus were denied primacy even after 1947. Upper castes don't add up to more than 16 to 18% of India at best. There is no consensus taken since 1931. At best, 20. But I think it's 16 to 18%. A substantial chunk of them thought that that Hindu primacy should have been the idea. The ruling doctrine of India. In fact, the killer of Mahatma Gandhi himself came from Brahmin caste. ... But I'm not saying all Brahmins felt this way.

But some upper caste felt this way. And then by the time it was late 1960s and 1970s, lower cost parties started emerging. And in south India, they had it much earlier. And before them, the issue was not Hindu versus Muslim. The issue was upper caste versus lower caste. Which impeded the formation of a united Hindu community.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So internal divisions, caste-based divisions, I see.

VARSHNEY: Which can feed into insecurities of various kind. In a Hindu majority country, Hindus are divided and Hindus cannot rule.

BARDHAN: Can I add something to this? I agree with that. But also, I want to add, there has also been a sense of manufactured victimhood in many middle class, lower middle class. Even the middle caste sometimes say that the Muslim fertility rate being much higher. Very soon they are going to outnumbers, which is, of course, ridiculous. And fertility rates are, on average, higher in Muslim. But compare the Muslim fertility rate in Kerala is much lower than the Hindu fertility or Hindu woman's fertility rate in the Uttar Pradesh.

So essentially because Kerala, the Muslim woman is more educated than the average Hindu woman in Uttar Pradesh. So it's the mother's education, which is the primary determinant of fertility, not religion. But this victimhood that they're going to outnumber us, very similar to the great replacement theory of the right rightwing in Europe as well as the United States. So I would add that to that, the false sense that the Muslims someday are going to outnumber this huge majority of Hindus.

CHAKRABARTI: So, Professor Bardhan, then I'm glad you mentioned some echoes that between India and the United States. Because I am hearing them strongly as well. Right now Prime Minister Modi is wildly popular in India. I mean, looking at some recent polling numbers and he's got about 78 to 80% approval rate. So has he somehow combined the two forms of the inequality and insecurity concerns? Because, you know, as you both mentioned earlier, he says he has economic development programs that should reach all the way down to the level of the poorest Indian, the poorest farmer.

BARDHAN: And under his regime, inequality, household inequality and corporate concentration have increased enormously. We have data for that.

CHAKRABARTI: But he says that. And promises were made here in the United States as well, and not necessarily.

BARDHAN: This is what populists do. They hype seductive promises, ultimately vague, vacuous promises. But let me mention something else. Now, it is kind of assumed that the overwhelming majority of Hindus are with him.

But if you look at the popularity figures, more than 70%, but if you look at the last so-called landslide election of 2019, what percentage of the voters voted for BJP and therefore Modi? 37%. So 63% of the voters did not vote for Modi, and a majority, a large chunk of the 63% to be Hindus. So it is not true that he dominates the empire of the Hindu heart. That is the term that is used. No, the majority of Hindus did not vote for him.

VARSHNEY: I'm glad [he] has mentioned the 2019 election where Modi got more seats than his party ever did, however, and also more votes than it would. But it still boils down to 37 point something percent. ... Of India's vote. Now, in a parliamentary system that can generate, 37% can generate 60% seats. It can. And that's Canadian. That's British. In America, you will have to go 50% plus one.

Because only 2% are left typically in the presidential context. All in all, virtually all context, unless you have an independent candidate emerging who is big. As Ross Perot was, and then Clinton came in with 43% of vote. Now, if you break it down, it is very revealing. If you break it down, more than 70% of upper class voted for Modi. About an estimated 45% of middle class voted for Modi and an estimated 33% of Dalits at the bottom of the social hierarchy voted for Modi. It says two things. One, that upper caste are still his mainstay.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting.

VARSHNEY: Proportionately speaking. However, it also says that somehow he's managed to convince the middle class, that's a huge number. And Dalits, the bottom is roughly the same in terms of numbers as the upper caste state. So somehow he's convinced the middle class, and roughly half of their vote is getting 45% less, 5% less than half and one third of Dalit vote is getting.

Now, this is an entirely new development. The idea that Dalits could vote for a party that was called an upper caste led party and which is still very upper caste in its form and in its personnel. So whether this will change in to 2024, we don't know. But one key element here is this 37% will not generate more than 60% seats if the opposition gets united. The 63% vote that is split right now: How is it going to be organized by the opposition parties?

CHAKRABARTI: So, you know, one of the things that we're trying to understand throughout the course of this series is, you know, what happens when a populist leader turns towards an anti-democratic thread. And one of the things we learned in yesterday's episode was that there are some commonalities. The creation of, you know, enemies, the sense of victimhood, as you were talking about, Professor, and the attacks on the judiciary, the attacks on the media. So specifically regarding that, in India, we heard something similar that oftentimes the free press is an enemy number one.

RAKSHA KUMAR: I think every journalist in India is concerned about deteriorating press freedoms.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is Raksha Kumar. She's a freelance journalist based in Mumbai, and she says that Prime Minister Modi is not the first Indian leader to try to control the press, but that his relationship with the media today is shaped by those Gujarat riots that we talked about that happened back in 2002.

KUMAR: The English language media really took him head on and they asked him all the tough questions. And he famously walked out of interviews when he was asked about the violence that was perpetuated in his state under his watch. He, in fact, admitted to the BBC when he said, you know, the one mistake I made when violence was raging in my state was that I did not control the media. So in a way, he came to power in New Delhi as the prime minister, you know, knowing full well that he really needed to control the media.

CHAKRABARTI: And by the way, he is doing that now because in January of this year, the BBC released a new documentary on the Gujarat riots and the Modi government banned the video from broadcast or social media in India. And then several weeks later, Indian tax officials staged a three-day raid of BBC offices in Mumbai and Delhi. Now, Kumar says journalists are facing what she calls a crisis of credibility, that Modi has succeeded in vilifying journalism. And therefore the reporting has less of an impact on people.

KUMAR: I don't know of any serious journalist around me who hasn't felt the difference personally. The top concern for us right now is we really don't have information. What I mean by that is that official sources do not talk to us that aren't enough. You know, there isn't enough government data available in the public domain. So this is very much along the lines of, you know, the way China functions. If journalism is supposed to document the current happenings, then we actually aren't doing it, simply because we don't have enough information.

CHAKRABARTI: So how does she think Modi's approach has shaped the public's relationship with India's news media?

KUMAR: If you look at populism in India. The populist governments, whether it is, you know, in the past and drag on the government or the Modi government, they lied on the fact that they have popular consent to rule. And so any pillar really, of democracy that is not democratically elected. For instance, the media is looked at with suspicion.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Raksha Kumar, freelance journalist covering human rights issues in India.

... I want to close with two questions. First to you, Professor Bardhan. You know, we talked about Prime Minister Modi's approval rating earlier, general approval rating, 78%. And in our first episode of our show, we heard that, you know, populists frequently claim to represent all the people, but only actually represent a small percentage. I mean, is that true in India? I mean, is Modi an anti-democratic, populist leader? If his approval rating is actually so high.

BARDHAN: Well, there are many histories full of examples of dictators whose popular ratings are quite high in terms of popular acclamation. In under these leaders, quite often even elections I don't go elections is not very important. But at the same time, elections are the most important part of democracy. Democracy. Essence of democracy, in my judgment, depends on those human rights, liberal rights and so on. But anyway, the issue is that quite often these leaders turned elections into essentially referenda on their charisma rather than on performance and the rhetoric.

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The power of populism: Populism in the world's largest democracy - WBUR News