Pratap Bhanu Mehta on Liberalism, Nihilism, and the Collapse of Sincerity

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and today my guest is Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who is the Laurance Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and former president and chief executive of the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi. He is the author of various books and edited volumes, has served on various government committees, and is a columnist for the Indian Express.

We talked about the return of nihilism in political life, the hollowing of professional identities, the politics of vishwas, Adam Smith on concentrated power, what it takes to build lasting institutions, the assumptions behind nonalignment, and much more.

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.

Pratap, welcome back to the podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you here in the studio, in person, as opposed to doing this online during COVID times. I’m thrilled that you’re here.

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: It’s such a privilege to be here and to think together actually, [chuckles] in a sense, more than just talk.

RAJAGOPALAN: I will think with a little bit of lag compared to you, I have a feeling. I’ve been reading a lot of your older columns again recently, in general, both to prepare for this conversation and also to make sense of the world, which is in so much flux right now.

Across all your writing, even if I go as far back as the financial crisis, when you talk about how we should think about repairing globalization, especially to make it a little bit more of a level playing field across different stakeholders in the world. Whether it’s arguments about the war in Ukraine and Gaza, whether it’s what’s happening now with the entire WTO liberal order being upended, the sense I got from the arc of your columns is that you’ve moved away from very specific critiques of globalization, and the failures of the old liberal order.

Your deeper worry is the broader norms like the erosion of restraint, the erosion of legitimacy, of leadership, of a kind of moral authority in the international order. Is this the correct way to read you across the decades and the columns? Perhaps, you can help us make sense of where are we right now? What is this new world we’re entering, and what is the frame through which we can enter it?

The Challenges Facing Liberalism

MEHTA: First of all, thank you for reading things so closely. I’m not sure they merit as much close attention, but I think you have characterized the arc correctly. One way of describing that arc, which might be an entry point into the current moment, is, as you know, 15, 20 years ago, we used to discuss things like institutions, incentives, questions of distributive justice—questions of what’s the basic architecture of a global economic order.

I think all of those questions and the way we framed that did not reckon with one historical possibility, which I think we are having to face up to now, and liberalism has probably had to face up [to] in its past as well. 

What do you do if there are, in society, forces that have a degree of ruthlessness and a willingness to, as it were, burn the house down rather than merely disagree or let the other side win?

I was going back to an old essay by Leo Strauss on German nihilism. His characterization of nihilism—and you can add it to it—nihilism for him was a condition where a political party, a political dispensation is willing to call for radical change without the foggiest idea of what that new change is. But more importantly, in the process willing to jeopardize the gains and potentialities of the current order.

If you add on to that—I think the word you used or something similar—which is this complete lack of disinhibition in doing it, right? Disinhibition in the sense that a certain valorization of violence and a propensity to engage in it both internationally and domestically. I think the construction of your opponents as existential enemies. Once you have done that, then of course everything becomes permissible.

I think [there’s] deep skepticism that our institutions, as they are currently configured, can actually do the democratic job of producing regimes of truth that are widely accepted. 

This is not just a critique from the right. I think there are sections of the left. I think liberals have lost [the] courage of their own convictions in some ways, right? You have that deep skepticism about truth itself. Skepticism about authority would have been an absolutely wonderful thing.

I think this amalgam of dispositions is an existential condition which I don’t think liberals know quite how to respond to. It’s not the kind of condition that will be easily addressed just by recourse to the very comfortable, bland things we used to talk about. Tinkering of institutional design incentives. Those things do matter. I think for a world that we reconstruct after this, those things will continue to matter. 

But at this moment, diagnosing why we are in this condition—historians used to say that if you want to understand the prelude to World War I, don’t read the social scientist. Read Robert Musil, [chuckles] The Man Without Qualities, that depiction of nihilism. 

Cultures have been through this. I think that’s our bigger challenge. To that extent, it’s not that I’ve given up on those convictions or actually changed my mind about those institutions. But the battle on which we’ll have to fight is of a very qualitatively different nature.

The Erosion of Moral Authority

RAJAGOPALAN: When I was writing my dissertation, my dissertation adviser, Peter Boettke, used to say that as economists, we never rely on saying bad people do bad things, and good people do good things. “When bad people do bad things, bad things happen. When good people do good things, good outcomes happen.” 

Yet, that’s what the nihilistic framework seems to suggest. Either accidentally or through some emergent process, we have landed on a particular set of actors who either lack moral authority or leadership or just a long-term view of how to build the world.

I think the counterweight to that seems to me to also be that liberals and elites have also lost that moral authority. In earlier cycles of this, when terrible people came and tried to do terrible things, there was another group that was ready to absorb the burden of that. Because of their moral authority or leadership, they were willing to be heard, or people were willing to hear them. Now that seems to be lost. What explains this erosion on all sides?

MEHTA: It’s wonderful you’re going to begin with Peter Boettke. As you know, my dissertation was on Adam Smith. One of the great virtues of the Scottish Enlightenment was that it never fell into the simplistic trap that good people do good things and bad people do bad things. 

In fact, the dynamics of history are always more complicated. Sometimes bad people actually end up producing policies that are beneficial in the long run. History is very paradoxical. They all believed in progress, but [in] a very skeptical way, right?

I think that’s absolutely right. I think that sensibility is very important to understanding politics, actually. Politics is not just about drawing these lines between good people and bad people. Politics has to firmly keep its eye on consequences, I think, again, as any serious student of politics from Max Weber onward has told you.

I agree. I don’t think the issue is who are the good people and who are the bad people. You can certainly map on weaknesses, mistakes, terrible moral judgments on a wide range of the political spectrum. It’s very hard to argue at this point that there are political dispensations that are immune from that kind of moral abdication.

I think the question is even deeper and more troubling: Do we even have a sense of what the standards of right and wrong are, independently of who actually lives up to them and, in a sense, who betrays them? That’s, I think, the nihilism I was hinting at. There is such a radical instrumentalization of almost every value.

The challenge of dealing with good people and bad people is easier if you can make the argument that, look, if you want to critique something, by all means critique it. But critique it in good faith and then live up to the principles on the basis of which you are critiquing. Don’t use critique merely as a pretext to beat down on somebody else.

I think the disinhibition we are experiencing at the moment—take the issue of war, for example. It’s very hard to argue that there is only a particular political dispensation, whether it’s the right, the centrists. In some cases, the left’s abdication has been as extraordinary. How can we in democracies not ask tough questions about our own moral complicity?

Sometimes people accuse others of acting out of self-interest. Yet, the most secure classes in both the democracies we care about exemplify traits that Montesquieu described as, “Security often breeds timidity, a lack of conviction and courage.” I think that landscape is actually all over the place. My worry is that our sense of where the red lines are is eroding. That sense is much harder to reconstruct once that breaks down.

Nationalism, Feminism, and the Arc of History

RAJAGOPALAN: Here, I have difficulty between matching what’s happening in the micro sense and the macro sense. I feel like if I just look at the data on how much violence we commit against each other as individuals, against women, how we treat children, how we treat animals. Do we care about the simplest of things, like conservation of extinct species? Or the big rise in vegetarianism and against this industrial complex that’s cruel.

On all of those margins, we have made progress. People are actually kinder to each other in a very literal sense of not being violent. They are kinder to each other within the household. Those norms have all changed, and they’ve largely stabilized. But that doesn’t emerge into a macro order of where we know what is right and wrong at that level. We seem to know what’s right and wrong at the lower level, and in fact, we’re sticking with it quite well. What causes this?

MEHTA: That’s a wonderful observation, but if you take the long arc of history, there’s nothing anomalous about this, even if you look at debates in late 19th century. There’s one kind of long-term story about what Norbert Elias would have called this civilizing process, where lots of different forms of violence are tamed and actually no longer found acceptable. We don’t do duels anymore [chuckles], as if we are settling disputes, right? We don’t do an eye for an eye. 

There’s a whole range of things. In many ways, a lot of the phenomenon that you describe, a certain kind of revulsion against certain forms of violence. I certainly think, for example, the discourse on animal rights, the turn toward vegetarianism. If you place it in that long arc of societies trying to curtail and eclipse violence, these are of a piece. I think the norm toward a certain kind of moral egalitarianism—you’re also right—is a long-term trend that is going to be hard to reverse.

In some senses, I think, if you look at the 20th century, there are only two ideologies that have unequivocally triumphed: One is nationalism and the other is feminism. Feminism is the frame of reference to which every other ideology has to adapt. Yes, sometimes there are pockets of resistance. 

It’s really an extraordinary achievement if you actually think about it. Part of the answer is actually the tension between these two ideologies.

If you think of what produces or licenses a certain kind of moral disinhibition, the claim that nationalism is the one ideology that allows you to do that much more easily is a very powerful win. It’s true that nationalism and the modern nation-state form have enabled liberal democracy, at least as we understand it. It created the idea of the people, popular sovereignty. 

Yet, it is also the one ideology that is the biggest competitor of religion. It’s the only modern ideology that can consecrate death. It’s an absolutely astonishing psychological fact about nationalism. It is the one ideology that can colonize our sense of meaning. Even our sense of economic meaning comes in national categories. GDP growth rate for my country, [chuckles] as it were. It is so pervasive in some ways in its ability to actually create meaning, and through its ability to create that meaning, license instrumentality in its cause. Once you say, “This is for the nation,” it’s extraordinary how many barriers you can break.

If you look at the current moment, I think one of the things that is actually very striking is almost every form of authoritarianism is having to rely on nationalism to give it that cloak and cover. Not just to create an electoral majority, not just in purely instrumental terms, but also, in moral terms to say that, “Look, this is the highest god we’d worship. Once you worship this god, you are allowed to take all of these necessary—what we think are necessary—steps.”

I think that tension—If you use them as two archetypes, feminism is representing progress, equality, a certain softening of public mores, dismantling of patriarchy, that modern impulse toward liberation. And nationalism has that modern ability to mobilize collective power, in all its most murderous forms. That’s the tension [chuckles] I think we are experiencing.

Globalization and the Crisis of Community

RAJAGOPALAN: If I had to connect this to how some of the other scholars have made sense of it, to me, it seems like—and I’m drawing the very simple version of the story here—we had globalization with its extraordinary success, but one of the outcomes of globalization was people were less connected to their local communities. They were less connected to their local identities. Local identities, as Ambedkar pointed out, can sometimes be very problematic because of those hierarchies and sometimes be wonderful to give you a sense of reciprocity and really who you are in the world.

If I look at, say, what Raghuram Rajan had to say about what happens to community when we are thinking about the broader global economic order, that erosion has led to people floundering for new identities. 

Nationalism seems to be quite convenient. It’s still rooted in localism because if you belong to a particular country, then of course that gets subsumed in it. At the same time, you get to keep all the other good things. You don’t have to do this around religious lines or gender lines or caste lines or ethnic lines or state lines. You still get to pretend to be modern and liberal, while having a single point of identification, which can then unleash these consequences. 

Is that just too simple a frame, or is that a good way of thinking about what’s going on? Because nationalism has not always had this kind of power.

MEHTA: I am a little skeptical of the story. I actually agree with the underlying premise, that there is an experience of a social lack, in terms of community, in terms of actual relationships. In fact, that is actually being radicalized. All kinds of evidence, not just Robert Putnam’s bowling alone stuff, but if you think of what’s happening to family structures. There is a sense in which the sociological atomism of society is quite deep and persuasive.

I think the question is whether that has something to do with globalization or, to use that old word, capitalism. Because remember, this is a debate that begins in the late 18th century. In fact, somebody like Edmund Burke—I think it’s the last moment where conservatives have this illusion that you can actually hold on to stable, fixed institutions in the social realm and yet give markets free rein. That’s been the biggest tension and challenge for conservative thought.

The reason, in part, I’m skeptical about the globalization story is the best literature on this crisis of relationships, of crisis of communities, is actually not the literature that’s being produced now. 

It was the literature that was produced in the 1970s. I think Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch were probably the most prescient and deepest diagnosticians of this phenomenon. It’s the ’70s, which was, given that ’50s and ’60s was the high tide of what we now think of as, at least in the Western world, the nostalgia for the ’50s and ’60s as forms of industrial production, forms of national identity and community.

The deeper question might be, is it to do with globalization, or is it to do with the fact that capitalism requires both commodification but also such extraordinary mobility that it is just very difficult? I’m sure at personal level, at least almost everybody in the younger generation, we know just this whole idea of what it might even mean to create strong relationships in a world where everybody’s constantly mobile. [chuckles]  

I actually think its roots are deeper. The turn to nationalism at the beginning of the 20th century, again, was, in part, a response to that. This idea that Kultur, in the German sense—some idea of culture could be an antidote to atomization. Actually, Matthew Arnold is already talking about, in the late 19th century, where he thinks of culture as an antidote, both against mass democracy and what he thinks is the leveling down. It’s also, again, a kind of revolt against atomization.

I think this inherent tension between the scale effects, the productivity effects—which  are genuinely enchanting. The reason this is a difficult problem is, again, it’s not as simple as this is good and that is bad—

RAJAGOPALAN: The benefits are so extraordinary, yes.

MEHTA: —It’s how do we find win-win solutions that actually mitigate some of the tensions between these?

Sincerity, Context, and Intelligibility in a Digital Age

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Here, I just want to zoom back a little bit. I’m going to be a little clumsy in how I phrase this because I want to reference a number of different works of yours. To look at not just the economic component of what you talked about, but also the cultural component. 

If I go back and look at your 2003 piece, “Passion and Constraints,” you look at Rawlsian public reason against what’s happening in India, Indian electoral law. You find the Rawlsian framework useful but also insufficient.

Then, if I look at your 2012 column, “Public Reason, Indian Style,” and I’ve gone back to revisit that column multiple times. Actually, that column, I recommend all the listeners go back and read, because it’s very prescient. You talk about what’s going on with media and media capture and the problems of social media and the 140-character limit and what that does to us. Everything you warned us about in that column has, in some sense, come to pass, right?

In your more recent columns, you’ve argued that sincerity is not just an inner mental  state, but it’s also about social legibility, or legibility of at least how we interact socially. Or social practice. You mentioned MacIntyre. You also wrote a recent column on MacIntyre where you argue that we’ve lost a shared moral vocabulary.

Now, I don’t know if I’m jumbling too many things together, but to me, this again seems like a very clear arc on how you’ve progressed. To me, it seems like you’ve gone from a Rawlsian framework where we look at institutions and test them and where they’re sufficient, and then move closer and closer, in some sense, toward Smith, where we’re now talking about “The Collapse of Sincerity,” a shared moral language.

Without sincerity and a shared moral vocabulary, how can we even think of what is right or wrong, or who has moral authority or who doesn’t have moral authority? Is this a good way to both think of your own thinking, or I’m jumbling too many things together?

[laughter]

MEHTA: I just think you’re being very, very generous in characterizing what was in those columns. I think here’s how I’d put it. I have to say, I’ve grown even fonder of Rawls actually. Despite what I’m writing, I think I discover even more depth in him now than I probably did 10, 15 years ago. I always loved both Rawls and Smith and thought you needed to engage with both.

I think what has changed or one way of telling the story is thinking about the sociological preconditions. I think one of the columns that you referred to, “The Collapse of Sincerity,” if one just takes that as a reference point—the puzzle behind that column was actually a very simple one. I’m sure any of you have engaged in public writing, public discourse, which everybody does these days. That’s what social media has done. It has empowered everybody to be a public figure in some ways.

One of those very simple experiences you have is you will almost always be misinterpreted. Now, you can make a philosophical argument about, “All acts of interpretations are misinterpretations.” But, you know what I mean, in a much more colloquial sense.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

MEHTA: There used to be all of these arguments in the philosophical language going back to Paul Grice and so forth, which is, what are the conditions under which we even actually understand each other as engaging in acts of communication and meaning? One of the conditions used to be you actually attribute sincerity to somebody.

Now, one of the things globalization has done with communication, in particular, is that it has completely collapsed all contexts. Without any context, the basic requirements of what it means to do intelligible communication, how is this word actually being used? What is its function? Who the target is? It’s much harder to make these kinds of judgments. I often say that in, at least in a sociological sense Derrida has won out, that all signs have become indeterminate. [laughs]

If you praise somebody, in a very different context, somebody is asking, “Oh, but why hasn’t this column praised so-and-so?” You’re reading silences. It was actually just an observation of almost a phenomenological kind of experience of why communication across contexts is actually becoming so, so much harder.

Once you find it difficult to attribute sincerity to any act of communication, and you find it difficult to reconstruct the context, which gives that communication intelligibility, then the only function left for communication is either pure expression or, in a sense, fighting words. Knowledge is made increasingly for cutting, not for understanding, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

MEHTA: At one level, I think our challenge with this new information order is even a deeper one. I still like to think that it is much more of an institutional and sociological condition. It’s maybe the kind of thing that people experienced when the printing revolution came, where structures that allowed you to attribute context, the trustworthiness of authorities and credibility—you went through a phase where all of that collapsed. There will be, hopefully, through time, some reconstitution of norms.

Another example—for liberals, this is absolutely central—is the complete collapse of the distinction between the public and private. What we implicitly ended up doing was taking norms that were appropriate to private conversation and taking them to the public sphere. 

By and large, even if it was not OK, one of the advantages of a private sphere was that you could actually say things without those being your public identity. There was an opportunity for self-correction.

You observe that among students in a very trivial sense. People talk a lot about political correctness and censorship. The worry is not that there is actually an authority censoring you or that in classrooms there is a monocultural ideology or the professors won’t let you speak. The worry simply is that even a private conversation can be put on Meta or X, “Oh, so-and-so said this,” and you are then stamped for life. In fact, your only option then is to double down on that. [laughter]

A lot of these institutional norms that liberalism had supposed about the intelligibility of communication, context, thickening our understanding of each other, the distinction between public and private. The modern information order has made those distinctions much, much more difficult to hold on to.

I’d still like to defend the Rawlsian impulse in some ways, which is the fundamental question of society: How do we reconcile the terms of social cooperation with institutional conditions that acknowledge us as free and equal? I think that still remains the central question. But now, doing this across these extraordinarily disparate contexts all at once, I think, has made our challenge harder.

Professional Identities as Sources of Moral Meaning

RAJAGOPALAN: If I look at your earlier work, the way I think about it is you were really thinking about institutions from the point of view of design, capacity. And therefore, what are the reforms—sometimes major reforms, sometimes minor tinkering—that will get us to the appropriate institution design, institutional capacity, and thereby, incentives and outcomes?

This, you did at the level of the constitution for all major central institutions in India, because that was where most of your work was rooted. And also local governments and things like that. Now again, when I read your more recent work, the thread I see is that’s not enough. It may be necessary, but it’s nowhere close to enough because in all this institutional capacity, tinkering, reform discussion, we lost track of what are the broader ideological forces that both bind us and animate us and mobilize us.

We perhaps need to first understand that ideological sense, or what it means to be a citizen or what it means to be governed by a particular institution before we actually start fixing the institution. 

One, again, is this a good way of thinking about how you’re approaching these questions? Not to say you’ve abandoned the institutional agenda, but something else needs to precede that agenda to make it sensible again.

MEHTA: I think you’re exactly right. Look, post–1989, even if you didn’t subscribe to the literal thesis, I think we all acted—not all—many acted as if we were in a kind of end-of-history world, right? There is a broad consensus on evolving meta-norms of conduct, particularly around the pacification of violence, the delegitimization of large wars, the delegitimization of civil strife, a whole range of political phenomena.

The main issue for democracies was how do you make them amelioratively better over time? You took it for granted that almost all the actors in democracy were operating within certain bounds of conduct. They just did not have the will to ruthlessness that you’re seeing [in] many actors now. It was a tremendous time to think about institutions. [chuckles] What are the incentives for judges? What are the rules of parliamentary procedure that might actually make deliberation more effective?

Now, two things happened since. One [is that], as you have characterized, the attack on institutional life came not from where we thought it would come, which is, “Institutions will internally get dysfunctional. Incentives will change.” The answer to that will just be better institutional design. The attack came from quarters which basically said, “We actually don’t care what the institutional design is. Moreover, if we can’t win, we are willing to burn the house down with it.”

The second thing that I think happened—and this is just a piece of intellectual biography. When we did the institutions work, and particularly some work with Devesh Kapur, one of the projects we had in mind, which never got going—partly just turned out to be difficult to do—was a project on the creation of professional identities.

Many years ago, when I used to teach modern political thought, what I was very struck by in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—there was extensive discussion of the professions. Not just in terms of service delivery norms, but for people like Durkheim—actually to some extent even Max Weber—professions were going to be the central morality of modernity. Because they would give modern subjects a very specific identity.

If I say I’m a lawyer, I’m an officer of the court. If I’m an officer of the court, how do I understand that phrase and internalize that phrase that disciplines me, commits me to certain moral norms, and commits me to defending certain kinds of institutions, right?

They were also interested in the professions because for them, professions were an interesting class. The professions could be a bulwark, both against the state and the market. Not that professions are not embedded in the market. Obviously, professionals work for a fee and they are involved in market relations. But the basic idea was that [for] the professions, the source of their legitimacy is modern forms of knowledge. With capital, it’s capital creating more capital, in some senses. With [the] state, there’s coercive power and the power that comes from legitimation en masse, publics, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

MEHTA: If you could, through these sociological experiences of the professions, create a large class of middle-class professionals across a range of professions. Who made their institutions their professional identity, and therefore, were willing to protect those institutions, and through protecting them, decentralizing power.

If universities protect their autonomy. If courts of law protect their autonomy. Lawyers historically were at the forefront of thinking of a constitutional culture. You achieve a lot of things simultaneously. You achieve a decentering of power. You actually give people a source of meaning because it has become your moral identity. It’s also the nice confluence of something that has become your moral and institutional identity, also allowing you to sustain a living.

I was actually very struck by the fact that maybe the post–1940s, 1950s, if you look at old journals, American Political Science Review and stuff, lots of articles on the professions—and then, that kind of drops out. Or rather, it becomes much more a narrower question of very technical questions about professional ethics.

There’s some work in the ’70s, I think, a wonderful book by Abbott. It was partly on the psychology profession, but the theoretical frameworks there were quite interesting.

There was this kind of missing middle, as it were, of what actually made institutions work. It came home to us. I know it’s something you are concerned with. I can speak of India, but I suspect there are parallels in the United States. One of the most disappointing things, as you know, over the last 10 years has been the abdication of the judiciary.

The disappointment has not just been the abdication of judges and the absolutely scandalous performance of the Indian Supreme Court. It has been the abdication of the senior bar, which we always thought was one of the most powerful groups in Indian society. Who could possibly touch them, that they would forget rising to the cause of liberty? They have reached a point where they’re not even willing to do the sort of quotidian things that lawyers used to do, which is accept cases of people who are being targeted. Ram Jethmalani used to very proudly say, “I will defend anyone.”

What is it about those professional identities that have become hollowed out? I think the crisis of healthcare. One of the things I’ve been really struck by—I’m not a health economist and so will be agnostic on what organizational forms healthcare should take. But the number of medical professionals in this country who we increasingly meet, but at one level, we’ll say, “Look, there’s been a lot of progress in a number of fields.” The sense of satisfaction they’re deriving from their professions, because of the institutional conditions under which they work, so should doctors be shareholders?

What does that do to professional identity and that hope Durkheim had? That actually the basis of your legitimacy is your knowledge. The basis of your legitimacy is not that you’re just another property holder. In fact, signaling that was extremely important. I think, again, that sociological story about what made institutions function.

Tocqueville, when he talks about lawyers in America, he says, “This is going to be the aristocracy American democracy needs.” I doubt lawyers think of themselves [as] an aristocracy in that sense, an aristocracy as in something that is actually a professional identity that commits them to defending certain kinds of institutions.

Formal Inclusion and Continued Inequality

RAJAGOPALAN: Is this just a byproduct of democratizing education, professional services too much too quickly? I don’t want to lean toward that explanation because for me, at a principle level, it is, we need to lower barriers to entry to make sure that anyone can be anything. At the same time, you use the word aristocracy. I like that better than the word elite, because it has this intergenerational element, as if we are custodians of a particular set of shared values and norms that we will make sure gets passed on.

That seems to have just completely disappeared. I’m not surprised it’s disappeared. It’s difficult to have that kind of guild or shared sense of norms if anyone can be allowed to enter. And at the same time, we need that for these professional services, not just to provide identity and satisfaction and a sort of greater purpose, but also to produce the next layer of knowledge and make it more accessible. Is this a fundamental tension and tradeoff, or can this actually be resolved?

MEHTA: I agree with you both normatively and also, I think, empirically. I’m not entirely convinced that you can be in premature democratization. [chuckles] I think it’s become very fashionable. It’s an easy explanation in some ways. I completely agree with you that, in fact, if you did not democratize, the profession would have been undermined in another way. Why should anybody go along with an arrangement that actually closes off avenues and opportunities to them?

I think what happened in India—I think I can speak to that context a bit more. I have one or two things about the legal profession in the U.S. that might be worth thinking about. I think in India, what happened is we’ve got the worst of both worlds. We did democratize, but democratized under conditions of institutional design that were designed to produce maximum inequality within that framework of inclusion.

I think the Indian legal profession is a perfectly good example. I don’t think the problem with [the] Indian legal profession was that we got large numbers of lawyers getting educated. In fact, that could have created a middle class of lawyers on the front lines of defending democracy. The problem we got with the Indian legal profession is that it is extraordinarily stratified and polarized.

A lot of this has to do with very quotidian incentives. It is still very hard for a first- generational lawyer to break into litigation and profession. Practices, particularly at the level of the Supreme Court, are extremely concentrated. Judicial norms, where judges [are] deferring to senior lawyers and enhancing their power. There’s a whole range of things we talk and talk about.

What you’ve got is an extraordinarily dual structure within what was supposedly a framework of inclusion—elite lawyers at the top and a mass who are being formally included but not substantively included. 

I think the same is true of Indian higher education. We wanted inclusion on the cheap. Inclusion on the cheap was “We’ll just give everybody admission.” Absolutely the right thing to do, but not asking the subsequent question: If you’re going to make this work, what else do you actually have to put in place? I think the reservations were expanded Post–Mandal. I remember this conversation where Indian universities were asked to expand their seats in capacity 25 percent in a year. No education system in the world can do that, and without any extra money. Without any sort of—

RAJAGOPALAN: Of course, the quality would get compromised in a meaningful way then.

MEHTA: You increased formal inclusion. You did not increase the commitment you made about how much you will spend as a proportion of GDP. Again, we know spending is not always the answer.

RAJAGOPALAN: But capacity building. It’s a proxy for that.

MEHTA: The capacity, right. What we got was we got formal democratic inclusion under conditions of extraordinary inequality. The same is true, by the way, of the Indian business sector. As you know, extremely concentrated capital at the top. We formally liberalized. We formally have done all the ease-of-doing-business stuff, and yet, the structures of our institutional life produce this incredible inequality within this broad frame of inclusion.

You end up having, the disadvantage of both worlds. You’ve not reaped the political gains of inclusion as much as you might have, and you still experience the pathologies of extraordinary inequality within the paradigm of these institutions.

Concentration of Power and the Distortion of the State

RAJAGOPALAN: This concentration of power point. Initially, I wanted to talk to you about that just in the context of economics, but I think you’ve given me something broader to think about. This is the 250th year of The Wealth of Nations. You wrote a wonderful column about it. Of course, your dissertation was on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and we’ve talked about this before on the podcast. You boil it down to capture by special interests and concentration of power.

Now this concentration of power is usually in terms of capital when we’re talking in the business setting, but everything else that you’ve just discussed. Now it becomes that every regulation is a rent-seeking opportunity. Every subsidy is a transfer. Every welfare entitlement, even when it is completely justified, becomes a vote-bank concentration of power, which is at a different level than just business.

The logic of Smith points to the fact that the answer has to be a more limited state. As long as the state has this power to redistribute, the state has the power to grant favors and draft regulation in a particular way, you’re always going to get some attempts at capture, successful or unsuccessful. 

Is there a tension within your own Smithian analysis that if you have a large state that has the capacity to bring about all the other social changes we want, then that large state is automatically at tension because it’s going to create these opportunities? If we have that state retreat, then it creates avacuum.

My question is not so much, should we go back to a night watchman state, but more, what is the Smithian answer to this question, or is there no Smithian answer? Smith just gives us a good diagnosis.

MEHTA: No, I actually think there is a Smithian answer. I think it has more layers than what are normally attributed to it. The basic premise of Smith—and I think this should be a mantra for all liberals—is a presumptive suspicion against concentrations of power anywhere and everywhere. [chuckles] 

In fact, I think if you ask the question, what defines a liberal sensibility? It is actually that, including, by the way, concentration of power in a single interpretation of the demos. [chuckles] Fragmented power—that is a sensibility, I think, consistently.

You’re right. Of course, if the state is empowered to do certain things legally, and if the ambit of that empowerment expands, you will get all kinds of rent-seeking. I think Smith also had a parallel argument. This one’s slightly tricky because Smith is writing before the Industrial Revolution. I think the Industrial Revolution poses a challenge to Smith, not in terms of his principles, but in terms of how we think of power institutionally.

The second complement to thinking hard about what the state should and should not do, is Smith also thinks about the concentration of social power. You can reverse the equation as well. On the one hand, you can say, if you have a limited state, there will be less rent-seeking. You can also reverse the equation by saying, if you have specially empowered groups in society who have a lot of power, because they own a lot of capital or something, they will also get the state to produce rents for them.

That’s what he thinks was partly happening with mercantilism. He was consistent. He said, “Look, it’s always easy for small groups of capital to organize. The collective action problems are much lower.” 

If you look at our contemporary crisis, we talk a lot about the rent-seeking that might come from this combination of democratic populism and an expanded ambit for the state, whether it’s cash transfers or the expansion of a welfare state.

Honestly, in the Indian context, it completely pales in comparison with what big capital has been able to extract.

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

MEHTA: The other question [Smith] wanted you to ask was not what powers the state have, but what is the distribution of social power that actually ensures that the state does not get captured by one particular set of interests or forces? Of course, that will vary by context. I think it’s been true of liberals mostly. I think it’s even true of Rawls. Rawls’s model, if you want to call it an economic model, was property-owning democracy, but where it is very widely distributed.

That was for this political reason: The minute you get certain kinds of concentration of power and capital, they will distort the state one way or the other. You need a social force to counteract another social force.

The Politics of Vishwas

RAJAGOPALAN: On the social force to counteract another social force, this is where I want to think about your arguments about citizenship. In The Burden of Democracy, you had argued that caste-based or caste-organized inequality prevents these horizontal bonds. When we talked last about The Theory of Moral Sentiments, you talked about how—and you’ve written about this many times—poverty actually excludes people from the circle of sympathy, as Smith discussed it.

This is really important in the Indian context because when we interact caste and poverty relations, the number of people who are excluded from this circle of sympathy becomes larger and larger.

If I had to connect that then to your recent column you had written wonderfully about vishwas, which has become this national tagline almost. You wrote about how the vertical faith, or vishwas, almost blind faith in political leadership or a particular leader has substituted or replaced this horizontal trust that we have between citizens. That horizontal trust is very difficult to form if there are people outside the circle of sympathy. 

One, is this a good way to think about where we are and why that’s going on? Then I have a few follow-up questions on where we go from there.

MEHTA: This is a tremendously challenging question. [chuckles] I’ll try not to be too long on this, but—

RAJAGOPALAN: No, no, take as much time as you need.

MEHTA: No, no, I know.

RAJAGOPALAN: I know I’m trying to connect so many dots in your work.

MEHTA: In fact, you’re making connections I hadn’t seen. I think a couple of distinctions. As you rightly said, India had this twin problem, which is appalling rates of poverty and the existence of one of the most appalling social institutions in the form of caste, particularly for Dalits. Even now, it’s just hard to imagine actually what that condition is, despite all the progress we have made.

They produced both a form of invisibility in the policy process, which I think still exists. In a sense, the poor are almost always fending for themselves at the end of the day. They also created a particular dynamic of the politics of exclusion and inclusion. 

Now, we can have a long conversation of where we went wrong in addressing these twin exclusions. The politics of vishwas, I think, had two sources. One, that phrase was actually, I think, first used by my CPR colleague, Neelanjan Sircar. I think he had done some empirical work on this politics of vishwas and the politics of faith. 

It seems to me that it has three different sources in contemporary politics, and they’re aligned in a fortuitous way to reinforce each other. Let’s, first of all, not forget that the biggest proponents of sole leadership, cult of leadership, are actually elites. That’s also true of the United States. 

If you want to put the more charitable gloss on that elite support, it came from a place of saying, “All these things that you liberals cared about—checks and balances, democracy, balance of power, separation of powers—these have become a hindrance in democracy being able to do things together.” 

People don’t openly say it. But somewhere, if you scratch, the argument basically comes out, “Actually, these institutions are the problem.”

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. And they say it here in the United States often—

MEHTA: There’s an equivalent here as well. Again, as a descriptive level, you can see there is something to it. There is a form of institutional complexity, the jostling of regulatory norms that takes place once institutions proliferate. The sense that that actually made it very difficult to do things. You can’t build railroads anymore. You can’t build energy plants as quickly. 

There’s an elite buy-in to the proposition that if somebody can just cut through this Gordian knot—just the very thing that Tocqueville said was the strength of democracy, which is forms protect us. This was an argument that these forms of government disable us in some ways. That is one source of the politics of vishwas.

The second source is that [for] liberals, progressives, modernists, the ideal trajectory for the Indian state would have been that it creates the conditions for high growth, and it translates those conditions into resources that can actually empower and build human capital for all its citizens. 

In fact, there’s a phrase from a Chinese colleague, Qin Hui, I really like. It’s a nice objective for liberal democracies. He says what we need simultaneously is a liberal critique of oligarchy and a social democratic critique of populism. It’s the best summary of the political agenda. By social democratic, he means an economy that allows people to participate. 

Very clearly, as you have documented so brilliantly, both historically and analytically, there’s a long story for why the Indian state fails on that front. What that creates is a vicious circle where it’s very difficult for any political formation of leader to credibly promise the kind of welfare state we actually need.

Today, if a politician stood up and said, “I’m going to transform Indian education in the next 10 years—” Arvind Kejriwal briefly tried it in Delhi, and it’s the exception, almost, that’s proving the rule. There are some minor experiments going on elsewhere. There’s a bit of a turnaround in Uttar Pradesh, people are arguing. To do it on a scale that is visible and has impact, most of us probably disbelieve that proposition.

The default then is to say, “Look, that is not going to happen. What’s the second best?” The second best is this patchwork of competitive favors from the state, some of which can have genuinely welfare-enhancing benefits. To the extent that a political party can credibly deliver that—one of the advantages of these things is that there’s a very simple metric of success. That’s the nice thing about cash transfers. That’s the nice thing about a one-off targeted scheme. Does everybody get a gas cylinder or something? Our politics is now caught in that equilibrium, irrespective of which political party is in power.

If you look at [the] state government level, what strikes me most is how most of them are doing the same thing. One chief minister once joked to me. He said, “Look, the winning formula these days is every government needs to do two-and-a-half schemes well.” Which two and a half you can quibble about [laughter] and then have a party structure that can mobilize support about it. Vishwas has been converted into this claim of something tangibly—

The third aspect of this politics of vishwas is, of course, what we began the conversation with—around nationalism, India’s place in the world. In India’s specific context, of course, it has to do with the sense over the years that Hindus had become a victimized majority. That’s the core of what drives this politics. 

A political dispensation or political leadership who can embody that belief, create a whole political structure around that belief—that was a different kind of vishwas. The thing about that vishwas is, I have literally heard very distinguished business leaders in India say that their support for the government is not instrumental. That if it turns out that this tradeoff and this government does not give as much on growth as they had hoped, even then, so long as it delivers on the third dimension, they would continue to support. What this government has done is braided the three forms of vishwas together in a single narrative. 

One more thing about caste, if I may.

On Caste and the Limits of Identity Politics

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, please.

MEHTA: It’s a complicated issue. In relation to politics and the politics of vishwas, one of the problems with centrist and liberal politics as it came to be practiced in India, but possibly in the United States, is we all became very great believers in “demography is destiny” when it comes to politics. It’s true that caste did matter to how people vote, and understandably so. But we took too literally the proposition that people vote their caste, they don’t cast their votes.

Now, one of the striking things that has happened over the last 15, 20 years—and this is both a good news story and a bad news story—is that what we thought of caste as natural political formations begins to break down. In part, it begins to break down because there is greater internal differentiation among these groups. In class terms, that’s what 20, 25 years of liberalization creates the conditions for.

It also internally begins to break down, in part because, as you would expect in a democracy, when more and more people come to exercise political agency, and if there are large numbers of people involved, you will get a diversity of strategic and tactical perspectives. 

If you wanted to now do social engineering based on demographic characteristics, you can no longer do it simply on the old models. I’m not saying there’s no room for it, and God knows every political party is still doing it, but its logic is very different.

One of the advantages of the right—the BJP has been good at it, I think the right probably in the United States has been good at it—is they were the genuine postmodernists. That social identity can be constructed through the hard work of politics. I don’t think the left and center have any equivalent project. It’s either appealing to just individual interest— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Or elites.

MEHTA: Or elites or some general institutional argument about democracy [or the] importance of proceduralism. 

The idea that what political and social movements do is reconstitute political identities. You can take what was an identity of an excluded group, bring it into the fold of Hindu nationalism—albeit with problems. Twenty-five years ago people used to think this was an impossibility. In fact, the mantra of Indian politics was, “Caste will cut Hindu nationalism.” That’s it. We can go home safely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Today, the mantra is, “Language will cut it.” But we don’t know if that’ll hold either.

MEHTA: In fact, I’m pretty sure that will not hold, actually, on the Hindu national design dimension. It will probably help on the federalism dimension. I think that sense that we are not treating our citizens as democratic agents who are constantly renegotiating their identities and assessing their choices has been pretty fatal for non-right politics. I think we were way too fatalistic about society and social trends.

The Question of Social Trust

RAJAGOPALAN: On that second part, which is about us as citizens, or at least embedding a sense of agency and identity in citizens. Now, when I think about Indians, especially those who were left outside of that circle of sympathy, we’ve had a structural transformation. Now we know that Indians can trade with strangers. Earlier, Indians did not trade across particular caste lines or ethnic lines, or in a very, very narrow way. Now we have centuries of evidence that Indians know how to trade.

Can we actually sustain a modern commercial order, which is entangled with a modern democratic order in this post-liberalized India, where you need a broader sense of social cooperation and trust? We don’t trust outside of caste networks or ethnic or language networks very easily, other than [for] commercial trade. 

How do we embed that sense of social trust and cooperation in citizens, especially in light of the fact that this vishwas hierarchy has already nudged or crowded that out a fair bit?

MEHTA: The question of social trust is complicated. Again, there’s partially a good news story. Despite the problems of the Indian economy and the horrendous forms of social exclusion that still exist, there is arguably much more interchange now than there was 25, 30 years ago. I think the norms of how you can treat people are changing in all kinds of subtle and small ways, quite visibly so. I don’t think it’s a question of romanticizing the modern Indian story.

I’m less skeptical that India is not capable of deeper market and commercial relations, and that the obstacle to that is caste. In fact, one of the things you could argue, and may be worth thinking about, is just like we treat institutions as endogenous, can we think of caste choices as also endogenous? 

I’ve come to think of institutions or think of the question of how endogenous they are much more. I think we need to do a little bit more on the caste front as well. Given the structures of finance you had, given the lack of formal institutions, all those things, many of what seem like in-network choices are perfectly rational choices.

I’m not saying institutions by themselves are going to dissolve caste in its entirety, or they’re going to address all the deep ethical questions about equality and reciprocity. But they can certainly mitigate a lot of these sharp edges and barriers. People trading with each other. People talking to each other. 

By the way, we’ve seen it even in politics as well. I’ve had chief ministers whose diagnosis of their own political careers was that they would argue that people would vote their caste under conditions where the state could not send any signal about making a sufficiently big impact in a five-year term to create a large coalition.

In fact, as you know, for 20, 30 years, Indian state government elections were basically anti-incumbent elections. It really didn’t matter who came, who went, even [which was] the best-performing government. 

As this chief minister put it, “How many roads would I build in a year? Maybe 300 kilometers if I was not corrupt.” It doesn’t matter to most people.

Once the amount of state resources went up as a result of liberalization, and scale effects began to change—

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

MEHTA: We can fault this government for many things, but one of the remarkable things of continuity between UPA and this is how much politicians want to advertise infrastructure. Once scale effects begin to change, people’s perception of what governments can do—[and] what they therefore can vote for—also begins to change. 

I think we have to treat caste both as something that explains some of the problems in the Indian state, but also do the reverse operation. It’s being sustained through effects of the ways in which we’ve configured other institutions, and in particular, not let caste become the lazy explanation. We’ve gone from colonialism is the explanation of everything to caste is the explanation of everything. That’s, I think, the good news story, which opens up the possibility. 

The trust story is an interesting one because it’s trust at many different levels. I often argue—and maybe this is a debatable proposition. You could argue in the 1950s and ’60s, the conditions for a Nehruvian secularism technically were even less propitious than they are now.

The population was much more disempowered, more illiterate. All the kinds of things that we associate as making of democratic citizenship [were] absent. It’s not entirely clear that most of the population agreed with Nehru, but there was an ability to generate a presumptive trust. Broadly speaking, well-intentioned in the right—maybe there was too much trust. [chuckles] Maybe they should have asked harder questions.

Now, one of the interesting things, particularly when you’re talking about politics—and I must confess, I find this a hard question to answer. What makes for politicians that elicit that presumptive trust? We often focus too much on, “Well, what are their ideas? What’s their ideology? What’s their program?”

RAJAGOPALAN: It doesn’t even matter. [laughter]

MEHTA: In fact, if that was the case, all of us would be first-class politicians. If most of us went into the political arena, the people would rightly be suspicious of us. One of the elements of the success of Mr. Modi—It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you are on and whatever changes might happen in the next four to five years. You have to admit that just in sheer political terms, he was a once-in-a-generation politician.

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

MEHTA: The sense of being able to produce an identification. Actually, Trump has that in some quarters. Significantly. 

One of the questions I’ve now puzzled over—it’s not obvious to me what our answer to this question is—what makes for a political class that can generate this presumptive trust? Then, hoping that a political class can do that, can actually direct that trust to constructive purposes? To me, I think for a democracy, that form of trust is probably the most important one. Because that gives the state the right authority and headroom to be able to do the things that would—

I think one of the disappointments about Mr. Modi—there is the deep worry about communalism, but just on his own terms—is that he had this extraordinary headroom in terms of that presumptive trust. In a number of areas, [he] has not capitalized it in a way that his supporters had hoped.

Trust-Building and Barriers to Desegregation 

RAJAGOPALAN: I’ll tell you where I would push back on the trust question. The way we thought about market transactions and social transactions is once you have trust in the market sense and the structural transformation, some of these other identities that we rely on to foster that within-network trust can start getting weaker.  Which means then you are less reliant on the pathologies of that particular identity. 

We seem to have carried on with both for the last 30-odd years. We have people from every caste participating in the structural transformation, which, as you pointed out, is the wonderful news. Yet, we don’t have the breakdown of marriage  endogamy as one would expect coming out of that structural transformation. Even everyday indignities of where you’re allowed to live, where can I get housing, what kind of a family will accept me either as a paying guest or accept our child to study with them, or get tutored by them, or eventually to marry into a particular family—those things have not moved much.

The amount of segregation we have in our urban landscape is not that different from what we had before. It’s almost like everyone goes out to this third space of a market order, where everyone mingles, and then we go back to our separate corners, which are largely within network. I don’t know if that’s only about social trust, but there's something there about trust, which seems to be a factor.

MEHTA: No, the phenomenon you’re describing is spot-on; Indian cities are among the most segregated. My colleague, Partha Mukhopadhyay, has asked this question—“Are Indian Cities Urban?”—in the sense of what we associate with urban and urbanity.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, we’re just a collection of ghettos, almost.

MEHTA: There are two or three different things, I think, here. One, and again, I’m less confident of answers on this one. Not to exonerate what’s happening in India, but segregation has proven to be so difficult to address globally. It is truly astonishing in some ways. 

Lots of different hypotheses: the bland social science hypothesis that the threshold of collective action has to be so high for desegregation effects to kick in, and those are very hard to achieve through policy instruments, through the old-fashioned ones, which is just the sheer persistence of racism or casteism in the deepest sense possible. It’s probably true that there is a mix of both. 

Yes, absolutely, I think we still don’t understand the deepest dynamics of segregation. The second thing—what I think in the Indian condition I would argue—that the basic social preconditions for the “social endosmosis that Ambedkar talked about, that phrase from Dewey he used a lot. I like that phrase, endosmosis. Everybody, in a sense, freely mingling with each other. Those conditions, I never thought they would come just from market interactions. In fact, quite the contrary.

What the market does is produce two effects on society. One effect is a question of individual reciprocity. Market transaction is just that. It is an atomized act of individual reciprocity. You have something to sell. I have something to buy. We exchange. The reciprocity impact part of it is morally important. It’s a very important form of reciprocity, but that’s all there is to it.

The second thing that we thought the deepening of market relations would do is weaken the relationship between occupation and caste. Because three mechanisms made caste such a stranglehold. One was endogamy, the most persistent. The second was the association of caste and occupation, which completely fused economic and social power in deep ways. The thought was that if these can be dissociated, even if caste does not disappear, it either mitigates its effects or it has to take a newer form. The third was the monopoly over education. The three basic mechanisms. 

Now, if you think about the three basic mechanisms, we’ve barely progressed on all three. We barely progressed on education. Again, the formal data looks good:100 percent school enrollment, finally, 75 years after independence.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s different from learning.

MEHTA: Not just different from learning. India is one of the few countries, or few democracies, where the experiment that most democracies have done with shared public education—I mean, American democracy was built by its public education system. That was the crucible of citizenship.

We did not create that public education system. Again, this is not about just the ownership structure, public versus private, but the idea that the school is actually a public institution and a crucible of citizenship.

Even as a pedagogical philosophy, [this] does not exist. For those of us who’ve lived in England and America, for all the problems of [their] schools, this aspect was extraordinarily pronounced. 

Yes, we have education, but those effects have not kicked in. Actually, those are also important for endogamy because the social space is going to come through education. It’s not going to come through market relations, or maybe even office relations, which don’t exist. [chuckles]

One of the reasons endogamy—There’s a joke going around in India that India will, like in everything, skip every stage. We will not go through this stage of really dismantling endogamy, but marriage as an institution might disappear. [laughs] At least in urban circles, that’s been talked about quite openly.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’ve heard the other version, which is actually, endogamy we’re going to now also see in queer relationships. Apparently, in queer dating websites and things like that, people have caste preferences.

MEHTA: Again, if you think deeply about the conditions that would even allow endogamy to be dissolved, none of this is a guarantee. None of those social institutions exist in a serious form. The caste and occupation dissociation is also much slower. I know our common friend, Chandra Bhan Prasad, has been assiduously documenting that dissociation. He’s much more optimistic about that dissociation and its effects. You’d say in aggregate—

RAJAGOPALAN: The scale at which it needs to be done hasn’t happened.

MEHTA: We can talk all about the expansion of the Indian welfare state, but the fact of the matter is, 40 percent to 45 percent of the country still lives at levels of precarity, where those norms of social identification matter a lot. It’s not even an option to actually say—

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s the safety net.

MEHTA: —“I’m going to reject kinship.”

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

MEHTA: That’s what I meant by the endoginative cult. The basic things that Dr. Ambedkar very clearly identified, we’ve fallen short on that. 

[There’s] one last thing I’d say about caste, which I think is important in this context and particularly in relation to the question you raised about segregation. One of the unintended consequences of the reservation debate in India, to my mind, was that the question of ethics became completely sidelined in favor of a pure politics of distribution.

Now distribution itself has an ethical dimension, but ethics meaning a very simple proposition, which is how do we relate to each other? How do we treat each other? On a spectrum, at the very least, not inflict the worst kinds of indignities on each other? 

Once the debate switched to the distributive question, two consequences happened. One, I do strongly think that for a lot of urban Indians, the specificity of the Dalit experience has been eclipsed. It’s all become all backward caste, Dalits, all as if this was just one big historical blob. Once you begin to say 90 percent of the country was oppressed. India’s the only country where 90 percent was oppressed, and 80 percent of them were oppressors in their own way. That complete eclipsing of that ethical question and its supplanting by pure, raw politics of distribution—you see it reflected, unfortunately, even in institutions of higher education.

You have granted access, but you’ve not asked the question, “What are the pedagogical practices [and] ethical relations that should govern this modern campus?” It frankly let the upper caste off. “We’ve given reservation. What else is there?”

RAJAGOPALAN: What more do you want?

MEHTA: That’s the milder version. The worst version is, “Look what a disaster this is.” That’s the unacceptable version. That whole ethical debate around caste got sidelined in this political articulation.

Institutions of Higher Learning

RAJAGOPALAN: The last question I have, and feel free if you want to keep this abstract, is you have a very long track record of building institutions. You built CPR. You were instrumental in building Ashoka University. 

Your experience both shows what it means to be an institutional builder long term, but also what are the kinds of constraints that are faced in modern India and across the world, perhaps, in developing independent institutions that need to survive over a long period of time to really fulfill their purpose. 

You don’t need to get into organizational details, but what are the necessary conditions for institutional building going forward from where we are today, not the glorious past when these things were possible? Is there a purpose for these institutions beyond truth-seeking? If so, what is that purpose?

MEHTA: First of all, I would not take the credit for building Ashoka. I was there for a brief time, and I think at a crucial time in its history. Looking back, I think my own story about CPR is—I think it now looks like more of a story of how we failed to build it. [chuckles]

That is a segue into the general lessons. One general thought—I know it’s an obvious one, but sometimes the most obvious things are missing from our societies. [This is] particularly true of institutions of higher education.

There is an extraordinary conceit in an institution of higher education. The conceit is not just that we are going to shape minds and be this place where young people discover themselves and flourish, but the time horizons on which they operate. Many of the world’s greatest universities are hundreds of years old. In fact, often they’ve survived lots of political discontinuity. They have been a kind of bulwark against that.

RAJAGOPALAN: Political, religious, ethnic mass mobilization, so many things.

MEHTA: India also had amazing institutions of those kinds. One of the interesting questions is, where do you get a sensibility that even has that ambition? 

We often talk about it in the context of human capital. Where do countries get human capital from? How do societies generate entrepreneurial capital? Again, that’s something that’s produced. It’s not something that’s given. There is something similar here. What are these moments in history, and for what reasons do you actually get this extraordinary alignment of people thinking of this as their professional identity? This is a thousand-year project. [chuckles]

The second general principle—for a modern society I think it goes without saying—is four things have to work in tandem, or at least not completely at cross-purposes: the professional identity of the community of academics and their vocation and mission; the state valuing these things; capital supporting it enough—honestly, we cannot wish away capital, as much as we can rail about the influence of donors and so forth; fourth, a demanding public. 

Again, there are these brief moments. When I think of snippets of good institutional building phases in India, I think of Ahmedabad in the 1950s and ’60s. There’s this interesting alignment of Gujarati capital, the state, independent academics.

RAJAGOPALAN: Union movements and mass movements.

MEHTA: Mass movements, and a sense that this is an engine of empowering you, even though it looks like an elite institution. Those alignments have got to be actively produced by some forces of political leaders. If any one of these legs is weak, it’s very hard to build and sustain those institutions. 

Each one of them understands that one of the values of that institution is just by existing, it’s a force for democratization. Not in the sense that it necessarily preaches democracy or is brainwashing people into a progressive ideology, but because it is an alternative center of power and has a different basis for legitimacy. Because that’s what a liberal society also requires: different principles of legitimacy across different kinds of institutions.

Michael Walzer used to have this nice phrase about liberalism as the art of separation, that the only way this politics can work is if you can make distinctions between public and private. 

If you can recognize that you need capital, you need the state, you need the autonomy of knowledge, there are principles specific to each of these spheres. They lean on others for support, but they have to do so in a way that their own essential integrity is not compromised. They should not be subject to this similar singular logic. For example, I think if you do subject higher education to the logic of profit, there is no way it can fulfill its core mission.

RAJAGOPALAN: I see two things happening. One is this exit from state-built or state-led higher educational institutions. This has all kinds of problems, from the way they treat personnel to leadership to campus politics and so on. The second part, simultaneously, is the rise of the multimedia education empire that we have. There are enormous YouTube stars who are actually teachers who are teaching IIT classes or helping you prepare for civil services or something. Now they’ve become modern-day icons or heroes, almost, which I largely applaud.

It’s very difficult to convert that into some kind of stable institution. Is this a threat? Is this a complement? What is a good way of thinking about it? I also, like you, operate in the world of second best, where I’m like, “Thank God for YouTube. If everyone can’t get a decent STEM education in their local school, then at least there’s someone to teach them literacy and numeracy.”

On the other hand, that doesn’t quite seem to be the only purpose of an education institution, which is literally transferring skills and knowledge. There seems to be something bigger, which we’re now not able to do on digital media or social media. Some physical building and continuity seem to be important. How do you grapple with that?

MEHTA: As you pointed out, we are at a moment where there will be massive disruption in higher education because of these new technologies. There’s no question about it. Like all disruptions at the moment, it seems there’s both a democratizing potential and possibly a destructive potential.

RAJAGOPALAN: Or at least narrowing.

MEHTA: Yes. As happened, I think, in the first phase of social media, when we thought of its impact on politics, initially, there was this incredible euphoria about democratization. Then it turns out it has authoritarian possibilities as well. 

The honest answer is we don’t know where all these chips are going to fall. I think there’s agreement that there is massive disruption. Now, the thing about the influencers, the YouTuber, of course, [is that] it’s part of a general phenomenon of the curious individualization of authority. Because the world of social media does not require intermediaries and gatekeepers.

It’s not just happening in the realm of higher—It’s happening practically to every institution in society, whether it’s media houses—Any institution whose function was arbitrage and mediation is increasingly under threat. 

I think the question to ask, and I think this is the one which is—One, obviously, a university has a very different social function, particularly a residential university. It has the function of scholarship and the production of knowledge, and I think this sense of, “We are just trying to wrest.”

It has to convey what it means to wrest snippets of intellectual order in a world that seems so unintelligible to us. What that process looks like. What that enchantment looks like. That, to me, is still the core purpose of the university. If you don’t think that’s the core purpose of the university, we have no business being in universities. Of course, as a site of education, universities have traditionally been the most powerful agents of a certain kind of socialization.

The joke in America is that you broke endogamy basically by the university system. In a sense, its socialization function, at all different levels of experience—personal relationship, the experience of this transition point between leaving home and being then completely abandoned to the wider economy. It’s this still-structured arena. That incredibly luxury space that a four-year education is supposed to give you. It’s the last time you probably have in your life where your function is to accumulate intellectual capital, discover yourself in a way that becomes much harder later on.

To that extent, there will still be a need for institutions. I don’t think those functions will go away. There’s another market reason to think you will still need universities. A lot of what we see by way of individual influencers and so forth—they have relied upon the fact that they themselves came through these institutions. Now, you could say, “Look, this was the story of the past. You may not need them in the future.” I suspect you still will. This is going to be the cherry on the cake, maybe a slightly bigger cherry, maybe a plum on the cake, as it were.

The conditions of interchange through which our views evolve, through which we form identities will still require modes of socialization. In fact, I could make the stronger argument that if you don’t have those modes of socialization, what you will produce is a society of incredible anomie and atomization. The theme which we began with, that if even these last bastions of structured sociability and the formation of nonreligious identities disappear, from grade one, we are on you and your YouTube channel and one influencer, and an occasional chat in a cafe with friends.

I think that atomization, frankly, is going to be pretty detrimental to society. I suspect that functionalist logic will kick in, even if you don’t buy the intellectual logic entirely.

RAJAGOPALAN: I'm actually nervous about the “you and your AI tutor having the conversation.” At least even with the YouTube influencer, there is a community which is not in contact. But there is this sense of community that we all follow a particular influencer. One-on-one, you and your AI tutor could unleash amazing things, but also a terrifying level of atomization.

MEHTA: There was one essay I read recently, I think it was in The New Yorker, where they were interviewing a bunch of undergraduates about what they thought of AI. There’s this one Princeton undergraduate who says this absolutely extraordinary thing [about] why she likes AI. 

She says, look, in a sense, it solves three problems for her in learning. One, she says, “With the best professor, I may get two hours [of] lectures a week and maybe 20 minutes [of] office-hours time. This is unlimited.”

Two, this is unlimited Socratic questioning. Even when it’s getting it wrong, if you approach it in a Socratic spirit, if you just approach it as, “I’m taking a question and not thinking about it.” Three, the more interesting social thing, which is the fact that right now, at least one is doing it in a context where we are not being judged opens up even greater Socratic possibilities, which maybe traditional education won’t.

I do think the human element—There used to be these studies which used to say that one of the indicators of a good teacher had to do with one physical attribute of lecturing, which is how you make eye contact. They looked at tons and tons of videos of how people lectured. Apparently, eye contact turned out to be a pretty good proxy for how much effect you had on students. Maybe we will need that eye contact.

The Assumptions of Nonalignment

RAJAGOPALAN: At the head of the conversation, we were talking about what’s happening in the global order. I just want to end with what that means for India. 

In 2012 you had written Nonalignment 2.0. Within that, there was the baked-in assumption that the international system had enough order and coherence, despite all its flaws, for India to navigate it and get a place in the world and strategic autonomy. 

Now, that’s completely changed, and you’ve written a lot about it. Does that 2012 framework survive for what India needs to do going forward? If it doesn't, what replaces it?

MEHTA: I think here’s what survives of that framework. I think one of the things we underestimate about nonalignment, partly because we just confuse nonalignment with the nonaligned movement.

RAJAGOPALAN: Movement. I don’t mean that.

MEHTA: I know you don’t mean that, but I think for some listeners, I think it’s an easy association sometimes. The core idea of the nonalignment was [that] we have to ask the question, what kind of world order do we want which allows maximum space for our development and adheres to some basic norms which in the long run are good for all of us? It was an exercise in world order-building. In fact, it did not even take for granted—I know the context was there is a Cold War, there’s a Soviet bloc, there’s an American bloc, can you be nonaligned between them?

The ambition was actually deeper, and it was tied to a second assumption which these days gets ridiculed, left, right, and center. The deepest assumption was that even if sometimes in the short run, there might be choices that are not entirely in your optimal interests, it is almost certainly the case that most things that will be good for the planet as a whole or humanity as a whole will end up being good for you.

I think we forget the power of that assumption. If you gauge every little war and skirmish with what it’ll do for me in the next 10 years as opposed to saying, “What does it do to institutionalize the rule of law or the next long duration?” 

Then, of course, the third idea was the idea of strategic autonomy. Strategic autonomy was the idea that what you need is options. We never fulfill the material dimension of strategic autonomy, but it was that in order to be an autonomous actor, you need a range of options. When you devise a strategy, you devise it in a way in which those options are available. You're not locked into just one choice or another choice. 

I think those three principles still hold quite powerfully. Right now, if you see the critique of nonalignment, on the options view, it’s, “Oh, we have no option but to align with x or y because China is an immediate neighbor. We have to put all our eggs in the US basket.” What options you can accumulate will be a matter of context, but you have to think of those options. 

I think the second point, that I do feel strongly about—maybe this is the last vestige of the idealism of Indian nationalism, the Tagore–Gandhi–Nehru legacy left in us—which is it can never be a mistake to ask the question, [whether] what is good for the planet and humanity will in the long run turn out to be good for you.

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.

MEHTA: If you are always playing the short-term tactical game, you will undermine not just your interests, but you will undermine your moral capital in some ways. I would also say it more strongly. I think there is a narrative in India—and I can sympathize with where it’s coming from—which thinks that India was hurt a lot by actually trying to occupy these moral high grounds. 

Some of that critique is fair. Obviously, when you just speak and don’t act, it opens you up for the right kind of criticism. Sometimes we did it in a way that was completely formulaic. It was not attentive to varying historical context. You just trot out a standard communique on everything. 

I think what that narrative misses is how much credibility that also gave us. There is that other side of the ledger. In fact, many of the big breakthroughs we managed to produce, the Indo–US nuclear deal, independently of what we think of our strategic relationship with the United States, was in part because you actually had that capital.

Whatever else, the charge was never leveled against India that India’s going to be a threat to world order. It's an extraordinary compliment to have in the long run. It’s a form of capital. Now there’s, I think, deep skepticism about that idea in some ways. What did we get out of that? 

It’s true. Sometimes bullies and bad boys get more attention than good boys in class, but ultimately, it’s the grade at the end of the year that’s going to count.

I think this is a moment to go back to the basics and say, “What are the first principles that will allow us to accumulate these options that do not make us vulnerable in the way in which colonialism did?” Geopolitics and economic reform. Again, the imperative has never been greater [for] their alignment.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much for doing this. I’ve been waiting to have this conversation with you for a long time, and it was wonderful to have you here.

MEHTA: Thank you so much. Always a great privilege to talk to you.