'In Indian politics you have to find a place for Hindus'

On his years in India working for the BBC:

One achievement I hope (I) can justifiably take was that for many years we enjoyed the confidence of the Indian people and that was huge responsibility and in a way also a huge joy to all of us.

On being at a lit fest:

Actually here I am in a literary lecture. But I am not actually really a very literary man. I regard myself primarily as a journalist and I think that is a very honourable profession. All my books have been about journalism...

I remember once coming back from a lit fest in Galle, Sri Lanka. I was in the front of a vehicle and behind me were a lot of literary international glitterati/stars. And when we got to Colombo airport I said to (novelist) Kiran Desai: 'Kiran, you know I feel quite out of place with all you people. Not been to all the countries you have been to. I haven't met all the famous people you have met and were talking about. And I haven't read a lot of the books you were talking about.' Kiran said to me: 'Well, don't worry, we haven't read half the books which we are talking about'...

On the title of his most well-known book on our nation No Full Stops in India, which he said he did not choose and has been a burden to him because nobody can remember the names of his other books:

I had a wonderful problem with the title in Pakistan. I was doing a railway film, the great railway journey from Karachi to the Khyber. As I was walking down the carriages talking to passengers I came across a guy who recognised me.

He said: 'You are Max Tully?'

So I said: 'Well no, I am Mark Tully'.

He said: 'I am reading your book'.

I said: 'That's great, I am delighted'.

He said: 'You have no reason to be delighted.'

And I said: 'Why not?'

He said: 'It is a pirated copy'. He ended by saying 'Now you have to do (a book called) No Punctuation Marks in Pakistan.'

What no full stops mean to him:

It means really the aspects of Indian culture, as I see them, which have influenced me most. I have written about these aspects in all my other books, as well and it is what I feel India should stand for. Here are some ideas for you:

1. One is you never write finis
2. There is inevitably an uncertainty of certainties. You should always be suspicious of certainties... A great friend of mine said you have made the uncertainty of certainty a certainty.
3. The limits of rationality.
4. The understanding that there are other ways of perceiving.
5. We learn from our motions, emotions. We learn from all sorts of things, which we cannot describe rationally and we cannot put into words. I always quote the example of music, because music is something so wonderful.
   But can you ever actually describe it? The wonder of it. You can describe it poetry, perhaps, you can describe and write down how you feel. But nothing can you actually, really put down, exactly, in words on what music means to you, what music does for you.

His learnings from India:

I have learnt from India several things and I described them in (his latest book) India's Unending Journey.

I have learned to value humility.

To avoid thinking in black and white.

To be suspicious of certainty.

To travel the middle road.

And to acknowledge that there are many ways to god.

And I discovered in India that god can act in strange ways too.

I remember an incident where I came to a full stop on a railway journey at Mughalsarai Junction -- and I refuse to change the name of Mughalsarai Junction.

We arrived at Mughalsarai Junction in the middle of a very complicated journey to Patna. It was the first change. And I went upto the enquiry desk and said: 'Where is the train to Varanasi?' (which was the next stage). And the man said: 'We don't know. The train is indefinitely delayed'.

So I said to him in Hindi, 'Ki iska matlab yeh hai ki train gayab ho gaya?! (Does that mean the train has gone missing?!)

He said: 'Ha gayab ho gaya (Yes, it has gone missing)'.

Then I exploded, as we outsiders tend to sometimes do when faced with Indian bureaucracy. So I said: 'What do you mean? What will I do now!'

He said to me: 'Calm down. This is India. And nothing ever turns out to be disastrous, because we believe in god.'

So I said: 'For god's sake, what the hell are you talking about?'

He said to me: 'Ek aur gaadee hai. Woh gaadee tha. Ab hum nahin janta hai ki woh gaade kahan gaye. Toh aap issee gaadi mein ja sakte hai (There is one more train. There was that other train. But I don't know where it went. You can go in this train)'.

So I set off in that train and reached Varanasi.

On Nakli America and Asli Bharat:

No Full Stops was a book that criticised the colonial hangover of the elite in India, the Brown Sahibs... In that book there was a call to India to look to its traditional wisdom, to take pride in that wisdom...

Television commentator Karan Thapar told me: 'Your book is taking us back to a golden era which never existed'...

I put it very succinctly. I said to him, 'Karan that is not what I want at all. But let's look to the future: Do you want to have a nakli America or an asli Bharat... Everything I have written about has been phrased in that contrast between the Asli Bharat and the Nakli America...

America is a short term (or reference) for what I call the Western way of life... I believe India needs to find its own way ahead.

When I talk about Asli Bharat I am not talking about the BJP or the RSS way as that Asli Bharat (it is important to clarify).

The best economics for India:

There has been a swing, in my lifetime, from socialism to an extreme form of market capitalism...

Socialism went wrong because we assumed certain certainties. We didn't notice what was going wrong. We didn't notice that we needed to get things balanced.

Therefore, governments got too powerful, governments interfered in too much, trade unions got too powerful, socialism became discredited.

Market capitalism has led to an enormous financial crisis in 2008... Looks as though it may lead to another crisis, quite likely, not too long away. And has simply not delivered for large sections of the population, which is, of course, hugely important in a country like India.

... If we had been looking for balance and realised the dangers of swinging too far the other way from socialism, then this might not have happened.

Indeed, I could say that Nehru's mixed economy might be the way ahead for India if it had not been derailed by unbalanced socialism brought in by his daughter Indira Gandhi.

India now you might consider is a balanced economy -- we have a market economy and social welfare measures too.

In some ways that is true... (But) the basic problem with socialism in this country or the socialist element in the economy, is that too much of it is just simple, old-fashioned controls, implemented by bureaucrats, and misused by politicians...

If we want bring socialism and a market economy together, we need to find a middle way.

We have to be very careful of what we are introducing into the mix, in particular we have to be very careful about the amount bureaucratic and government controls which we are now bringing in with the socialist element.

The present situation in India:

What is happening in India? We can safely say it is unbalanced.

Basically, India is going helter-skelter straight down the road trying to ape the sort of life lived in Western countries... Martin Wolf (the respected Financial Times columnist) said it is infeasible for India to imitate the path of the developed world, the West...

A friend of mine, Ramgopal Agarwala, a distinguished economist (in his) book he said: 'Old roads used by the West or by East Asia are now dead ends. India will have to design its own road guided by its social, economic and political realities'.'

Politics and religion in India:

There has been a swing from what I would describe as the arid secularism of the Congress to the extreme religious view of Hindutva.

Why do I call Congress secularism arid? Because Congress people frequently try to argue that they were aware of the place of religion. Actually, secularism as a word tends to automatically mean a dislike or distaste for religion, or, at the very least, wanting to keep religion entirely in a private sector.

Even if that was a desirable ideal, particularly in a multi-religious, deeply religious country like India, I don't believe that can ever work.

Of course, now we have the spectacle of Rahul Gandhi temple going... and the Congress (saying it) is a party of Hindus, but not Hindutva, trying in a way to catch up.

In some ways I applaud it, because, in some ways, I feel it is a recognition of a reality.

In Indian polity, in Indian politics, you have to find a place for Hindus.

At the same time, I think it is awfully easy to dismiss it as a tamasha... trying to give an impression of believing something perhaps you don't.

Hinduism:

The real essence, the real Hinduism -- (that) should be part of our politics, part of our religion and should be shown to the world as the way to do things -- is the Hinduism of (Dr Sarvapelli) Radhakrishnan, our... the second President of India who said (that) there has never been a uniform stable, unalterable Hinduism, neither in belief or in practice.

'Hinduism is a movement, not a position, a process, not a result, a great tradition, not a fixed revelation.'

(British academic who held the same Oxford chair as Dr Radhakrishnan) R C Zaehner said 'Hinduism has a genius for absorption and adaption. For the dogmatic certainty that has racked the religions of Semitic origin... they (Hindus) feel nothing but shocked incomprehension.'

Of course, what is happening, what is the problem with Hindutva, it is basically a form of Hinduism which has dogmatic certainties.

This is not surprising because after all it is based on a movement which tried to imitate the Semitic tradition in order to combat the strength of that tradition, in the form of Christian missionary activity.

(In a discussion after his talk, in reference to the BJP's embracing Hindutva, a political construct, Tully said: "Hindutva doesn't have the huge public support that the BJP thinks it has. What right do the RSS or VHP have to speak for all Hindus?")

The future of India:

There is a need to find the genius of this country... The way we, and the whole world, is progressing is fatally to a dead end.

Unless we recover the principles -- the tradition of seeking balance, of being open-minded, of understanding that whatever position we are in we need to examine it, because there are no full stops to any position to which we might own.

If you look at history, it is a history of change and of progress. It is not a history, as we sometimes see it presented nowadays, of saying this is the end of history...

So perhaps I could just end with one quotation which actually comes from the introduction to No Full Stops in India. It is a quotation from the great 20th century British philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

He said: 'Those societies which retain, in changing circumstances, a lively sense of their own identity and continuity (which are without hatred of their own experience which makes them desire to efface it) are to be counted fortunate not because they possess what others lack, but because they have already mobilised what none is without and all in fact rely on.'

And one more very short quotation from (the well-known civil society activist) Aruna Roy, who I heard this morning, which I think sums it all up. She just said: 'Everything today is modern culture. Today has no diversity. Our diversity is the law of nature.'

Diversity, in my view, is the underlying continuity which has given India an identity.