A Spanish-language version of this interview was published in Panamanian daily La Prensa as part of a series of reports from India

Despite many challenges, the Indian identity thrives and survives. Why do you think this is?

The magic of Indian identity is that it embraces diversity. The whole logic of Indianness is that you can be many things in one thing, you can have multiple identities. You can be a good Muslim, a good Bengali and a good Indian all at once. And that, ultimately, is a strength, because people are in our country very conscious of their different local, particular, sectarian identity. But those identities flourish securely under the protective shield of an Indian identity.

I often tell Americans, for example, they think of the melting pot. We are not a melting pot, because we have these different people who have, in many ways, a reluctance to intermarry with each other, but we all live together and dream the same dreams. So my metaphor is not a melting pot but a thali. A thali is an Indian dish you get in a restaurant, a big stainless steel plate with lots of different bowls on it. Each bowls contains a different dish, each dish tastes different so it doesn’t flow into the next—that’s why it is in a different bowl—but it belongs together on the same plate and it combines on your palate to give a satisfying meal. So that is the magic of the Indian identity, and I believe it works extremely well in our Indian context.

Is it also a commitment to an idea of a secular democracy?

Yes, very much. It’s the notion that a country like India, which is a large and diverse democracy, can overcome differences of caste, creed, culture, color, cuisine, convictions, costume and custom, and still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is on the democratic principle that you don’t really need to agree all the time so long as you will agree on the ground rules of how you will disagree. That’s why democracy is so important to the survival of the Indian idea, because democracy gives everybody an equal stake.

So that you can have a sense, some in our Muslim community may be feeling that they’ve not been able to fully participate in the Indian dream. But we’ve had three Indian presidents who have been Muslim, our current vice president is Muslim, we have Muslims in the armed forces, in the judiciary, all of our top movie stars are Muslims, all of our top cricketers are Muslims, so they are role models for the community to aspire to in all these walks of life. And I would say that it applies across the board. There is no part of India where anybody should feel excluded by birth from the opportunities that India offers.

You have written about the policy of affirmative action, which in India has been way bigger and more relevant that its counterpart in the USA, for example. But at the same time is has helped cement the differences between different Indians. Do you think it’s time for it to be changed or just dropped?

Well I think politically that’s going to be difficult. Because naturally when you have a policy that you practice for 65 years people develop a certain vested interest in pursuing it. I would agree with you that there are pluses and minuses. The pluses are that people have been able to overcome millennia of discrimination, because the government’s affirmative action program, unlike the American, doesn’t only guarantee equality of opportunity, it also guarantees outcomes, so there are quotas, reservations, seats in universities, in medical colleges, in jobs, in government positions, in Parliament, and so on, reserved for people of underprivileged caste backgrounds.

The negative feeling is of course that it means that merit is often put second, that the people of what we call the “general category”, who are not beneficiaries of reserved positions, and who have better records, and better marks in exams, may not get these opportunities because these opportunities are linked to quotas, to reservations. And there is also a perception that the elite among the underprivileged communities would profit but the poorest of the poor remain excluded from these benefits. So all of these perceptions show that the issue is complicated. But having said that, politically reservations have become the third rail of Indian politics. If you touch it you’ll get electrocuted, so no one touches it.

You have said that India is, and will be, at the crossroads of many of the developing world’s dilemmas. And with the recent blackout there were many voices criticizing the fact that India’s democratic system slows down the building of infrastructure whereas in countries like China the decision making process is faster and more efficient. In this particular sense, do you think democracy still pays off for developing countries?

I don’t blame democracy for that, I blame our own inefficiency. Democracy is about making political choices, and that we must have in a country as diverse as ours and given the temperament of the Indian people anything other than democracy would be a disaster. But you can organize democracy in a more efficient way than we have done. We have more checks and balances than we have opportunities for progress. Our administrative structures are designed in a way where no one has authority. Unlike in China, for example, where if you go to see a mayor of a town about setting up a factory there he can grant you everything: the land, the electricity, the road connections, the permissions, the licenses, everything. Here, a mayor of a town is nothing more than a glorified chairman of a committee. And that committee itself doesn’t have all the power, it has to go to multiple different agencies. To my mind this is unnecessary inefficiency, it’s not democracy.

Democracy does sometime come in the way of development. The Chinese will draw a line on a map and will bulldoze every village in its way if they want to construct a highway. And that’s a six-lane highway in China. In India, to widen a two-lane road you can be tied up for a dozen years. People will protest, they will refuse to sell you their land, political parties will get involved and lead agitations, Bollywood stars will come and hold a hunger strike. In the end you’ll go to court… it takes a long time, this is our democracy.

And yes, there you can say that it’s democracy that slows us down, but those are relatively minor examples. On the bigger picture issues, why do we make the policy choices we made that led to the power blackout? That’s not necessary! We don’t have to artificially keep prices low in order to win votes. We blame democracy for that, but politicians in other democracies are more responsible than we are.

 In an economic sense, what do you think of the choices made by the Indian government since 1991? Do you think this country needs more reforms or more control over the economy?

I’m very much in favor of more reform. I think that almost all the good things that have happened in the Indian economy have happened since the liberalization of 1991, and that the visible transformations one sees in India is a result of reform, and that the argument should be for more reform.

In the agricultural sector we should liberalize much more, so that farmers can really earn for their crops and lead more viable lives rather than having prices artificially depressed by government purchasing monopoly. Similarly, foreign direct investment in purchasing agricultural products will give the farmers better prices. Right now we have a completely archaic system: what we pay for at the bazaar to buy a vegetable or a fruit is eight times more than the farmer gets, and everything else is made by middlemen along the way. This are systems that are protected by vested interests. Reforming them actually would be good for everyone, including the farmer and the consumer.

What do you envision as India’s role in the world?

India is the kind of country that can play a very useful constructive role in building a global system of networked cooperative relationships of coexistence. We are in the Internet era, living in a networked world. We need to see much more of these networks and India has the capacity to belong to many of them at the same time. It belongs to both the Non-Aligned Movement—reflecting our anti-colonial heritage—and to the community of democracies, because we are a longstanding democracy, and we can work with the Western countries that used to be colonial powers in this opposite framework.

We can belong to both the trade union of developing countries—the G77—and the global management, in the G20. We meet with Russia and China every year, in the annual meeting known as RIC. Then we add the Brazilian and South Africans and we are the BRICS. Then we take out the Russians and the Chinese and we have IBSA, for South-South cooperation. We add the Chinese and take out the Russians and we have BASIC for environmental negotiations. And India is part of all of this. This ability to be different things for different purposes in different issues in different contexts is India’s great strength. So I speak of thinking beyond non-alignment to multi-alignment.

India recently abstained in a vote for a resolution condemning Syria in the UNGA. Do you think this is the correct position?

My guess is that India’s concerns relate to the respect India has for secular regimes in the Middle East, and the fear India has for such regimes being replaced by Islamist ones. That if the replacement for Assad is some of the elements we hear talking in the Syrian opposition who are fundamentalists we would be obviously be profoundly out of sympathy with them, because we are a nation that enshrines tolerance and coexistence of all faiths and so on.

Secondly, the feeling was that the resolution pre-judged the departure of the Assad regime without a negotiating process. And we feel that negotiations are the way out of this dilemma.

What’s your opinion on Narendra Modi. Do you think he could become the next prime minister?

I would doubt it somehow because he’s a very polarizing figure. The truth is that he is somebody who does represent, unfortunately, a particular strain of intolerance of minorities, and particularly of the Muslims. I think people would find very hard to pardon that after the violence of 2002 that took many lives, mainly Muslim lives.

My own feeling is that India would need to be ruled by less divisive figures, people who are conciliators, people who can bring people of all faiths, castes, religions, languages together on a common platform. When the BJP last came to power they actually ruled with a coalition. It is very very likely that if they would have a chance of power in the future they will again only do it through a coalition. Mr Modi is an unlikely leader for a coalition because many parties who do not share his agenda on the Hindutva front are unlikely to accept his leadership.

How would you describe the relation between the Indian people and the Nehru-Gandhi family?

There is a sort of mystical connection going back many generations. Our first prime minister was Jawaharlal Nehru, but his father was already a nationalist leader who died in the 1920s, one of the first highly successful lawyers in the British Raj who turned against the British and supported Indian freedom. So the family is seen as having made sacrifices for a very long time for the Indian people. And of course it has produced a succession of leaders. Nehru did not groom his daughter to succeed him, but when his successor Mr [Lal Bahadur] Shastri died very quickly, within two years of coming to power, then Mrs Indira Gandhi exceeded and she became one of the strong leaders of modern Indian history. Her son Rajiv, similarly, inherited some of her mass appeal and was a very successful figure during his one term in office. So there is a sense that this is a family under whom the nation has been safe.

Now, I’m not suggesting this a universally held view. The Congress party is one party, by far the largest, but there are many others who vote against the Congress Party. But within the Congress Party there is a comfort level with the leadership of the Gandhis that makes it likely that representatives of that family will continue to maintain a great hold on the affections of the Indian people.

Ironically, for India the biggest headache in foreign policy is right next door. How should the relationship between India and Pakistan evolve?

It should evolve to something like the US-Canada relationship, that will be the ideal situation: two countries, very similar but different countries politically, and yet coexisting, traveling easily and frequently to each other, common market, trading, all of these things. The only thing preventing that is the nature of the Pakistani state. Not just the Islamic element, but rather the dominance of the military. In India the state has an army, in Pakistan the army has a state. Because of that, people join the army in Pakistan to run the country, not to defend the country. They control the government very often either directly or indirectly. They also control real estate, import/export, petrol stations, universities, they are in every segment of Pakistani society and life. And the only way they can continue to justify their control of a larger percentage of the governmental budget and of the national GDP than any army in the world has, the only way they can continue to justify that is with the excuse of hostility with India. So they need to preserve that hostility in their self-interest. And that is why sadly every time India tries to make peace, we are rewarded with violence from Pakistan.

So when the BJP Prime Minister [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee took the famous bus journey to Pakistan, within a few months the military of Pakistan sent soldiers across the snowy Himalayan waste to Kargil. Years later when our present prime minister Manmohan Singh conducted talks, successful seeming talks with president [Pervez] Musharraf and then president [Asif Ali] Zardari, they gave us the 26/11 massacre in Mumbai.

This is not the civilian establishment that is doing it. This is the sinister state-within-a-state in Pakistan. The devious, evil—frankly—people in the military establishment of that country. And that has no cure until Pakistan changes itself, changes the nature of its state into one that will not allow such people so much control over their future and over their political destiny.

You made most of your achievements abroad, and then you came to India. How has the landing been?

(laughs) Initially it was a very smooth landing. I landed here and got a nomination to contest an election, contested it an won with a near-record majority and then became a minister, so I started off very well. Then the trouble started, and it was a somewhat rough period, I even resigned my ministership though I continued to be a member of Parliament. But since then things have become relatively more comfortable. After I’ve found my peace with the challenges of adjusting to this society and those who resented my coming in seem to have also in turn got used to having me around. So, hopefully the narrative will now be better, and you should ask me this same question in a couple of years.

What are you dreaming of now?

What does a member of Parliament dream of? To actually make a different to his voters, to his constituency, to make a contribution to the country in whatever way one can… and then to get reelected! (laughs)