ese are the cutting-files. In this, you have to put the whole organisation in the habit of changing together. So, in a new way, you have to come into practice. So, this is not an easy task. There is a lot of work and continuous communication with the top-to-bottom-most layer.    Absolutely, he is happy. And, in fact, at least, I am with the officials at the low level, who are not even a group of officers, who work in the group C, I interact a lot with them, I take a lot of input from them, I also take a lot of feedback. I am so happy with this, till we can make difference. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. You have been doing a great job, very well, wanna thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you'. Thank you. Thank you駋,駋. Thank you. But when it happened, it hurt everyone. Look, Kavach is a class of technology which is called automatic train protection, ATP technology. ATP technology started in the world's largest railway systems in the 1980s. In the 1980s, it started in the early 90s. In the 2000s, it was fully ATP in all the big railways in the world. What were the governments doing then? Were they not responsible for ATP? Were they not responsible for investing in safety? They didn't do anything for the new technology. In 2016, for the first time in India, ATP technology was considered by Modi. In 2016, the country should have covered the entire country from ATP technology. In 2016, it was considered. In 2019, it received all its certifications. In 2020, it was due to COVID-19. But even after that, it worked very fast. Kavach is not like a device that was installed on a train. Kavach is a system. You have to install optical fiber cables along the railway tracks. For example, there is a network of Airtel, Geo or BSNL. You have to install telecom towers every 7 or 8 km. You have to install telecom devices on the telecom towers. Then you have to install a device on the train. You have to integrate with the signaling system. You have to build a data center on every station. You have to build a complete data center. Then you have to complete a centralized train control data center. It's a very complex technology. In the world, it took 20 to 25 years to build a small network of 8,000, 10,000, 20,000 km. It's a network of 75,000 km. But it's working so fast. New manufacturers are joining. New designers are joining. Many types of innovations are being made. The design of the station is to be automated. This is a commitment. The commitment that Modi has made to make railway safe in the country, has invested 1,87,000 crores in 10 years. If you compare it, it is more than 2.5 times. In the last 4 to 14 years, the investment was more than 2.5 times. And you can see the result. The result is very unfortunate. But even further efforts will increase to 100% safety. There is a commitment regarding the bullet train. Mr. Ashwini Vaishnav, when there is so much dirt, which you are trying to fill, many people say, does the bullet train need this country? What will you say to them? Bullet train is a means of transportation. If you look at the bullet train, the bullet train that runs on the path, all the city's economy is connected to that path. I will give a very good example of Japan. When the first bullet train started in 1969, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka. All these economies become one economy together. You cover the distance of 500 km in 2 to 3 hours. If you are working in Kyoto, you worked in Osaka. In the evening, you came back to your children in Kyoto. There is a serious regional multiplier of development. When you look from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Thane, Wapi, Surat, Baroda, Anand and Ahmedabad. All these economies will become a single economic zone. You will have breakfast in Baroda in the morning. You will reach Mumbai within an hour. You will work day and night. You will get the train back in the evening.  When will Haseen's dreams come true? In 2026. Look at today. I forget to count 200 daily. I reviewed it 10-12 days ago. It has already become 284 km. It is looking like tracks. It is looking like an overhead electrical system. The manufacturing of the train. All these things are going fast. I will not mention the position of any country in this country. It takes 20-25 years to complete a project of 500 km. This project will be completed within 8-10 years. The train will go from Surat to Bilimura in 2026. You will see. It is a world class. Absolutely world class. Time is moving ahead. I am taking the train to my station. I am coming to your next minister. Before that. Do you want to give the number of the rail ministers of this country? 10-5 of them. It is your job. It is not our job. I want to work hard. I want to work hard. I am coming to Digital India. It is the dream project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It has the most important semiconductors. We are talking about it. In fact, it started from Basat. I will go by time. It has not been able to become a semiconductor. Now you are saying that India will soon get the first semiconductor. These are two questions. I will go in the sun shape. Why not yet? What have you done today? In December 2024, the first made-in-India chip will be in the market. December 2024. It is not too far. Keep it in note. In December 2024, the first chip will be in the market. Look, it has been tried since 1982. But until any effort is done, your fundamental conviction is not possible. Mr. Modi has such a strong conviction that when we want to make a developed India, what will it take in its foundation? It is very important in its foundation. Electronics manufacturing. Whether it is manufacturing in the sense that you watch TV at home, you watch the fridge, or you watch power electronics, telecom, or you watch the electronics in the defense, or you watch the electronics in the car, it looks like a semiconductor in everything. So anything that is on or off, there is a semiconductor in it. Absolutely.  I am saying this with a lot of responsibility. As Mr. Modi has shown the commitment, and I can give you personal examples of this. For the semiconductor discussion, when the Prime Minister used to ask for half an hour or 45 minutes of time, I am saying this in front of the public today, but the Prime Minister took half an hour and 45 minutes of time. We used to ask for 45 minutes of time, and he would give us 3 hours of time. One line by line, the Prime Minister would discuss in detail. All the concerns related to the government, there are a lot of issues related to the government. He would personally call every department and sit with them. And the Prime Minister would say, we have to be successful in semiconductor. We have to be successful in semiconductor. Such a commitment is impossible for any other Prime Minister. You are saying that the impossible commitment is visible from the government, from the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. But Vipaksh Askar, is saying that this is a jobless growth. He is saying that the working class is less than 50% and it has been around for the last 9 years.  Let me give you a challenge. Through this lunch, you have reached a challenge. EPFO, Employee Provident Fund Organization. This is an organization in which the person who goes to work has a registration, a deduction from his salary and a deduction from the organization. There is absolutely such data where the data is accepted everywhere. According to the data of EPFO, the new people who get into the job, the people who get out of the job, plus the people who come back in the job. They must have left somewhere and come back. The net number of this, that total job opportunity, it is a simple number, that total job opportunity is 6 lakh per month. 6 lakh per month. 6 lakh per month. 6 lakh per month. Today, on average, it is 12 lakh per month. 12 lakh per month means a year worth of 1 crore 24 lakhs. 12 x 12 is 144. 1 crore 24 lakhs is the job opportunity created. You should ask Mr. Chitamaramp whether this data is true or not. This is the data. Many economists have checked this data. I hope that Mr. Chitamaramp will accept this challenge and we will definitely reach you to this challenge. There is one more form of Vipaksh. He says that we have become manufacturing hubs. But you don't do any manufacturing, you just assemble. You have given the name to him. You are talking about manufacturing. Let's say, let me give you a name for manufacturing. Until you accept it. Look, in any country when any industry starts, take an example of the car industry. Since 1980 when the car industry started. First of all, it became the CKD of the car which is a completely knocked down unit. After that, it became the ecosystem of some component manufacturers. After that, it became the manufacturer of many components of the ecosystem. Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 vendors. After that, it started to be exported. This is a cycle. Every industry has a life cycle. If this life cycle is the government of Congress in 1980, in 1970, then where would the situation of the country be today? Congress had already wasted 4 decades of India. 4 decades lost decades of India. Because there were policies of Congress in which manufacturing was completely knocked down. It was made as a mockery of the laws. In which a person could not do manufacturing. Even before 1990, if you wanted to change the design of your car, then you had to come to a government and take permission. There was a mockery of the laws. You are getting more simplification. Baby steps are being taken. Today, we are in such situations where manufacturing is to be a hub. That foundation has been laid down. You will see in the next 5 years. I will give you examples and numbers. It is necessary to take numbers because we should talk to the data. We should not just talk to the data. Mobile manufacturing. Practically, it was a negligible number 10 years ago. Today, it is 55 billion dollars. Electronics manufacturing. Practically, it was a negligible number. Today, it is a data of last year. It is 105 billion dollars. Today, it is growing. Defense manufacturing. Today, it is export of 2 billion dollars. Telecom manufacturing. We could not even imagine that a veteran of some industry said that he had 30 years of telecom industry experience. He said, we could not even imagine that telecom manufacturing would be in India. Today, it is export of 1 billion dollars. America, US, Europe. It is export of all places. What do Congress people say? Until the end of the century, they are able to answer their mistakes and we are working hard. People are watching. When we are working hard, do they feel ashamed? We have only a few minutes left and I want you to answer these two very important questions. One is about fact checking unit. If the government starts checking then how will it go? Your work is about citizens' medicines. If you have to take information on CNN TV 18 then who will you ask? Will you ask CNN TV 18 or not? Who will ask the information of your organization? If you want to ask any news of the Indian government about any scheme then who will you ask? If you have work with the ministry then who will you ask? If you ask health ministry then will you ask power ministry or the power ministry. That is the basic common sense. You will ask the government or a private organization and you will ask the private organization. What if you don't like the question? It is not a question. It is a fact. There is a difference in the opinion. Where you don't like the fact then you can verify it. The verification is that how much vaccine did you take? Who will you ask? So, you are saying that this is the right decision and it is a correct decision, a democratic decision, a constitutional decision. Thank you very much, Ashwani Vaishnav Ji, for answering all our questions. Thank you. Thank you very much. There were many more questions. But Ashwani Vaishnav Ji, who was telling us about the work that has been done and how he is moving ahead with the development of India. Thank you very much, sir. Before we move on, I would once again like to thank you very much for the to remind you that we are going to be having in our presence four Grammy Award winners amongst us who will also be giving us an unforgettable performance tonight. Now, ladies and gentlemen, from religion to politics to economics, we've had a range of diverse conversations on issues that matter. In fact, one such burning hot topic was India versus Bharat. It was a political controversy that stirred the dynamics of a nation's name. So Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilization has remained a fascinating idea of research and debate. More so in recent history when Bharat years have begun to undertake a critical decolonial study of Bharat's history, especially in the context of the very important constitution. So that ladies and gentlemen, religiosity towards the document is moderated by a sense of proportion, perspective and most importantly, purpose. Our next session is with a very distinguished person on decoding Bharatya and Bharatiata. Please welcome Jayasai Deepak, lawyer and author and also Anas Ramheer, who is the advocate with the Supreme Court along with CNN News 18's Rahul Shiv Shankar. Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a nice huge round of applause. We've just come back from tea. Let's have some enthusiasm, Rahul. Thank you so much. Welcome Jayasai Deepak. Mr. Tanbir. Good evening. Good evening, everyone. The buzzword is Bharat. Bharat that is India. The Prime Minister has already outlined the ideological governance and cultural contours of the transition to Bharatiata. So let's decode Bharatya and Bharatiata with these two fine gentlemen on the stage with me. Let me first begin with you, Jayasai Deepak. You've written a number of books. In fact, you're coming out with a third in a series. What values define a Bharatya for you? So one, I think the question that is usually asked is whether this is a religious construct or a civilizational construct or a cultural construct. I think if you go by the words of Sri Sarvapali Radhakrishnan and Swami Vivekananda, it's impossible to take religion out of Bharatiya life. And I think a lot of people have tried but have failed to remove religion from even politics for that matter, whether that's for the good or the bad that I think positivity will decide. But it's a statement of fact, it exists. So I believe that religion and culture go hand in hand in informing the civilizational identity of this land which is Bharat. But the problem is if you were to treat this as a construct which is meant to exclude certain populations from the tapestry of Bharat's identity, well that's not the purpose of it. When you try and reclaim your identity, you're merely saying this is who I am and I'm happy to accommodate everybody else who does not have an antithetical relationship with this identity. So as far as I'm concerned, both Hindu dharma along with civilizational aspects which are part of let's say Hindu cultural mainstream define what is Bharatiya. During the course of the drafting of the constitution, one of the questions that was asked is that when public morality is sought to be defined and its contours are sought to be understood in the context of Bharat, what is the repository of the reservoir from which we draw those values? To which several members of the Constantine Assembly took the categorical position that dharma is the public morality of Bharat. So if you were to ask me what is the defining trait which defines Bharatiya then you start and end with dharma. Now unfortunately since English is a language which is incapable of providing a decent translation for dharma, it is typically and crudely and incorrectly translated or approximated to religion which it is not. It's more a code of conduct but it also has a certain set of principles which clearly trace their origins to the Hindu faith system or the agglomeration of Hindu faith systems so to speak. So for me in that sense, the civilizational identity of Bharat is significantly and primarily informed by Hindu dharma. But precisely because it's defined by Hindu dharma, it is capable of accommodating others who do not pose a threat to its very existence. Mr. Anas, let's build on this opening by J. S. I. Deepak. The RSX and other spokespeople expect citizens from other denominations to describe themselves as Hindus. Dharma is of course identified very closely with Hindun as they say. Vishne says the function of Bharatiata. Now how does one apply it in the context of a multi-religious society such as ours? See, my understanding of Bharatiata or dharma even for that matter has always been what I was taught as a kid in the school, We were that nation, we were very proud of it, that we are of different identities, different religions, different caste, different looks, different languages. But we were one, we had one flag, we were one nation, we were greeting it. And for me that was the only matter of dharma. Now, as J. S. I. Deepak said that Hindu dharma is defined, what is Bharatiata, what is it? I don't keep it a little separate, necessarily. My, I have to say that when in 1950 we adopted the constitution, so we decided to see this country as such, it will be such, it will be a secular country, it will be such a country where everyone will be equal, where everyone will have equal rights. Today, when you are in the nation, and I don't say that like there is a very prevalent argument regarding Article 14, I don't take that argument, so I believe that yes, the argument is for the Indians, for the citizens, I don't say that. But when you completely make the base of that dharma, then you will have to see that democracy itself is a Western construct, but we are taking it with us and we are proud of it, and in that, which other democratic or secular country where citizenship is being given on the basis of dharma, and citizenship is a right that you cannot take back. If you give it, you cannot take it. So who are we giving it, how are we giving it, it requires a lot of thinking. So this is interesting because his definition of Bharatiata is unity in diversity, sort of derives from there. Now, with the government that is identified with Hindutva, many are wary of outcomes such as these. I think he is referring without naming it to the CA. Correct. So how does one now reconcile the objectives of the CAA with the larger construct of the constitution as it stands? See, interestingly, both of us are just coming back from the Chief Justice's court. That's why both of us are trying to, let's say, channel those arguments. So you didn't finish your arguments then? No, it's missed it for April 9th, in fact. So we are on the opposite side in that matter, so I don't see why this has got to do with CA, but in any case, I'll try and address this. Just so that I answer your question to him in a slightly different fashion, I disagree with the RSS's definition of Hinduism and Hindutva completely. At least on their attempts to say that everybody who is born in this country is a Hindu. I don't think that needs to be said. I don't think someone who is a Muslim or a Christian needs to be expected to embrace the definition of Hindu in that sense because there are two problems with that approach. One, it dilutes the definition of Hindu Dharma for the followers of Dharma themselves. And second, it foists that concept on those who are not followers of the Dharma in that sense. You don't need to do that. According to me, good fences make good neighbors, period. You don't need to actually start this interfaith dialogue and look for equality and let's say similarity in everything. That is not even necessary. The point is very simple. When you speak of unity and diversity, Bharat traces that very value precisely from Hindu Dharma because Hindu Dharma is ultimately an agglomeration of multiple faith systems within itself. Several denominations subscribe to those points of view which may not actually find a point of convergence in that particular sense. The Vaishnavite might ultimately seem Vishnu as the supreme being. The Shyvait may ultimately see Shiva as the supreme being. The Shakt might see Shakti as the supreme being or Devi as the supreme being. For each of them, you can think of them as monotheism and silos, but it's a polytheistic pantheon in that particular sense. So unity and diversity as far as Bharat is concerned cannot have learned it from anybody else except Hindu Dharma at least in the history of the subcontinent, so to speak. So on that, I don't think there is a difference of view between Mr. Tanveer and me. There is a clear difference of view in the attempts on the part of, let's say, certain sections of certain cultural organizations to dilute the definition. Now, should we go to the argument of the CAA? I will just limit it to this because ultimately this matter has to be contested before the Court of Law. The Chief Justice was caught on April 9th, which is the next date. The point is, I don't think that piece of legislation is meant to threaten anybody who lives here as a legitimate citizen of the country regardless of their faith. Two, I don't think the definition of CAA or the way it is being included as a humanitarian intervention as part of the Citizenship Act has anything to do with the topic here. So let me stick to the topic here. The point is Bharatiata ultimately means that your points of loyalty, your points of allegiance are not extra territorial and that you choose loyalty to Bharat more than anything else. Now, that is easy as far as adherence of Hindu Dharma is concerned, simply because their sacred spaces are here. But if you happen to follow a certain faith system, I'm not saying that it is impossible for a non-Hindu to be loyal to Bharat. I don't think that statement can be made at all in light of the kind of examples that we have had. Right from Sri Arif Mohammad Khan of today to Abdul Kalam of the past. So I don't think those examples are valid. Those who are able to reconcile their faith which have emanated from other parts of the world and their loyalty to Bharat according to me are fully capable of subscribing to the concept of Bharatiata. I am not going to use religion as the soul and the primary filter to exclude people from the pale of Bharatiata. I'm saying those who are able to strike that balance will obviously fall within the definition. Those who think that their personal identity from a religious point of view is at loggerheads with Bharatiata would have made the decision anyways. I'm just hoping that since we are told that there is an Indian brand of certain foreign faith systems, there truly exists such Indian brands which is different from the brands that is followed in our immediate neighbourhood. That's all I can say. But this concept of let's flip the word diversity in unity. How does the CA take that forward? I know that you wanted to sort of disconnect the conversation from Bharatiata but this government claims that it is actually the one that speaks for the essence of Bharatiata and it talks about a Hindu-ness which it traces to a dharmic past. But if that CA is going to be or the Dharma is going to sort of at some level or the other bring out an exposition like the CA then we have a problem. So see let's have this conversation on the annuals of specifics. Is there any amendment to the existing Citizenship Act which precludes the possibility of non-Hindu applicants to knock at the doors of Bharat for citizenship or asylum? The answer is no. The CAA is a limited inclusive intervention. For the purposes of addressing the unfortunate realities of our immediate neighbourhood where three Islamic republics have a specific problem with other identities. That's the unfortunate reality. And we are operating under the premise that Indian Islam is different from the brands of Islam being subscribed to by our neighbours. Therefore those people who are getting the rough end of the stick thanks to the minority position in those countries are being given a certain expirited option because the first point of attack when it comes to these countries happens to be those people who do not share the faith of the majority in those countries. Therefore since they are the first points of attack, they are the softest targets possible. A limited intervention is being made. The myth that is being pervaded is that CAA translates to automatic vestation of citizenship. It doesn't because they still have to satisfy the rules that have been notified. Second, all it does is that it limits a certain cut-off period from 11 years to 6 years. Two, my own criticism of the CAA despite me supporting it in principle is the cut-off date that has been prescribed which ultimately translates to defeating the very humanitarian intention which is supposed to be the basis for the CAA. What is the point of limiting it to a particular date? Regardless of that, my argument still remains I welcome it because it doesn't take away anybody else's rights. It only makes sure that those people who are being kicked out are being welcomed as soon as possible. My criticism has also been the delayed notification of the rules. So because I am not the mouthpiece for any cultural or political outfit, I am at some liberty to criticize the proponents of the CAA themselves for the delay that they have caused after taking eight different extensions from the parliament in the notification of the rules themselves. So according to me, it's important to dehyphenate these positions from any political organization or a cultural organization because dare I say this, a lot of us are practicing Hindus not because of a political party or because of a cultural organization but because we have always been practicing Hindus their existence or absence wouldn't have made a difference to our practice in any case. So Anas, then what's the problem? He's saying that look, it's only fast-tracking, it's not denying. You can still come in if you're Muslims, if you're persecuted in various countries, in any country, you can still come here and seek refuge. See, to that extent, he's right. I'm also not denying that. It's not even fast-tracking, let me tell you. The purpose stands defeated as of now because to take the advantage of CAA, the cut-off is December 2014 and you have to be in India five years prior, that is 2009. Now that would have fast-tracked to six years instead of twelve years. We are in 2024, ten years since 2014. It's already redundant, it doesn't help anyone. See, it neither helps anyone. It actually does create problems for those who are left out of Anas in Assam. Only particularly to Assam, it does create problems for them and I will expound on that. But about the rest of the other things that Dharm and Sain Ki... I don't know if you guys remember, there was this series called Panchayat a very famous dialogue from that that he is watching without speaking in English so it's the same thing, speaking in English. What was the meaning of it? What did my brother Jay S.I. Deepak say? That if Hindus come, it's easier for them to be his brother. You are getting news every day, from Rajasthan, from Lucknow, from every place. Hindus are the ones who are arresting our agencies and supporting ISI.   This doesn't make any sense. The oath of allegiance has to be taken by everyone. But this doesn't make any sense. But reasonable classifications have been used by many countries. Let's talk about Hindu. What about Tamil Hindus from Sri Lanka? What about the Buddhists from China and other places? We have a... So why did you leave them? You had to take them. And I understand that you have different policies for Tamils. You gave them, but you didn't give them citizenship. You gave them a refugee, you didn't give them citizenship. So you didn't do anything good with Hindus. You have left them. Second thing, I said, there is no quarrel with my CA. It doesn't affect me. My citizenship is safe and secure. But in Assam, the citizenship of 19.4 lakhs has gone. They can be applied for naturalization. But if the CA has to do it, I am not saying that they have to do it. If they have to do it, then 2 lakhs are called Jyothibadi in Assam. Those who always say they are Assamese, they say they are indigenous, they are also foreign. Will they prove themselves as Bangladeshi first? To be called as Hindustani. It can be very absurd that for Hindustani, for Hindustani citizenship, for naturalization, they have to prove themselves as Bangladeshi first. Okay. I'll try and make sense of the garbled argument presented here and see if I can unpack a few layers from that. Garbled argument. Yes, okay. So first, see here's the point. Ever since the end of the LTTE, the situation has normalized to such an extent that Tamil Sri Lankans are not being forced to flee that country. That is a fact. The fact of the matter is if Bharat had an equation or at least the ability to pressurize Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to the extent that they could treat their Hindu minorities with some degree of dignity, then the CAA would actually be irrelevant and unnecessary. Because ultimately, it's a question of what is your relationship with those countries? What is the treatment of those populations by their native governments? Today, nobody can accuse the Sri Lankan government of meeting out the same treatment to Tamil Sri Lankans the way Hindus of Pakistan are being given treatment by Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan, so to speak, in those countries. So if you can ensure that they can stay in their own countries without creating any further trouble for themselves or for us, we would want them to stay there. So therefore, the entire argument is this that Bharat must effectively apply an open Dharamshala policy in the name of the CAA and the CAA is unconstitutional precisely because it doesn't open its doors to every persecuted community under the sun. Frankly speaking, this makes a mockery of the concept of sovereignty and our own borders and our own sovereign interest and security interest. I have no reason to trust a Muslim Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh period because ultimately a choice was made and therefore I will certainly view them with a certain degree of suspicion, a heightened degree of suspicion compared to people coming from the Hindu community in those states. That's a fact. But the Hindus in Pakistan stayed back in Pakistan. This is a funny part. The Hindus in Pakistan stayed back in Pakistan. The entire argument is the Hindus of Pakistan stayed back. Why? Here's the point. When Pakistan was created, the question was how do we divide land for this area called Pakistan? So the existing population of Muslims in this country and undivided Bharat was taken into account based on the 1946 elections and then the area was divided. Despite 90% of the population of Muslim community before 1946 voting for the state of Pakistan, the bulk of them stayed back. That's wrong. That's a fact. It's a fact. It's not a fact. You won't get to actually deny these facts. It is out of context. Today we are being told. We are being told. We are being told everybody who stayed back stayed back for purposes of patriotism. Sorry, 1946 elections proved whose allegiance were where. Secondly, here's the important thing. The Hindus of Pakistan... So you are talking about the 1946 elections and the results in the Muslim provinces where a large number of Muslims voted for no Muslim... Assume for a moment, you have a six-bedroom house. Out of that one portion of the family says we are X number of people. We need 50% of the house. Ultimately, only two people shift to that portion of the house that has been given for 50% of the family. The rest of them stay back. Now, because we are constantly told that Dr. Ambedkar is the framer of the constitution and we are expected to constantly count out to him. Why would Dr. Ambedkar speak of a complete exchange of populations after 1946 and after the elections if he wasn't aware of the ground reality when he was actually part of the drafting company of the constitution? So why is it that Ambedkar is selectively quoted and cited in other contexts? Why don't we quote him in this context? What did he say in his book, Pakistan of the Partition of Bharat? What did he say with respect to the reasons for population change? Why did he actually bat so vociferously for population exchange more than even? Madan Mohan Malvi for that matter. Madan Mohan Malvi is the founder of the Banaras Hindu University in 1916. These are all people who were participants in the Sangatan movement. The one who openly wrote a book asking for exchange of the Muslim population of Bharat with the Hindu population of undivided Pakistan, so to speak, was Dr. Ambedkar. What is their response to that? So if you have a problem with this argument, go ahead, call Dr. Ambedkar and Islamopope. We'll see what happens after that. No, no, I will not do that. I will not do that. Anyway, caste is a western construct. My friends said earlier. Fundamentally, there was a whole movement, as you know. Let me put nuance to what he said. They'll blame the two nation theory on Sabar Karna. They'll leave Sainad Amadkar out of the picture. See, when a man loses patience to listen, I know I have one. Of course you have one. First of all, see, this is what I learned during my days in debating. If a man attacks, see, this is the problem. This is the problem. We started with Bhadirtha. We started with Dharma. It ended up coming to Muslim from Pakistan. Like every single time. Is that Dharma? What about your own existence? Why are you not proud of that? I come from Banaras. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. Sanskrit. But you can deny the facts. No, I am not denying. 80%. 80%? Yeah, you deny this. 96%. 86%. So if they find that the idea is not a good one. In fact, they are getting actually discriminated because who they are in Pakistan, then it's not our responsibility to do that. It is not our responsibility. For Hindus also, the word for sovereignty, is said to be a border, it is a personal matter. If it's about India, it is about the people of India. Your citizenship naturalisation has a complete process. It was completed in 12 years. It was developed really well, it was a right despite the parliament. In 12 years, you are living here in India for 11 years. He is just saying that Hindustan has no civilizational obligation to the Hindus of Pakistan. Fair enough. That's what he keeps in 12 times. He's just dropped the word Hindustan. Second, Aligarh's London, which is Ayashi, is very heavy on India. Millions of people lost their lives.  And this is dismissed as Aligarh's London, Ayashi. How insensitive are the people of Ayashi? Millions? That's the funny part. Millions have no one. Here's the funny part. So the point I'm trying to make is, we discussed the obligation that independent Bharat has an obligation towards Hindus and Sikhs living in undivided Pakistan. This discussion happens from 45, 46, 47, because the conversation has already started. After the Lahore resolution and Karachi resolution, it's absolutely clear that Pakistan has become a reality. So then on the questions start getting addressed. The constant assembly starts, it's formulated in August 1946. Subsequently, once the conversation starts, we actually keep a few seats open in the hope that Pakistan doesn't become reality. That is the extent to which we went. When we realized this is not going to happen, we switched the conversation to ask the question, what do we do to those people who are being held hostage? Because the history of this period will show that Pakistan decided to use the non-Muslim population of that particular area as a hostage population to negotiate with Bharat. The entire basis for the Nehru Liaqat pact ultimately was this. Let's assume for a moment that we don't owe an obligation to the Hindus of Pakistan and Pakistan doesn't have a duty with respect to Muslims of India. Why did the fount of everything that's great in this country, Japan did Javarlal Nehru, choose to enter into a Nehru Liaqat pact where both of us are assuring the other with respect to the safety of religious minorities in their country. What is this basis then? Ultimately, at the political level and at the constitutional level, we have accepted that we have a civilizational duty towards these minorities. This is a documented fact. See, I'm neither holding brief for Nehru, nor I'm holding brief for Pakistan. Please answer the specific question. Forget about holding brief. I completely agree with that. At that point, we are not executing that civilizational brief. No, no, no. Allow me. The civilizational, Nehru Liaqat pact, what did it say?  It's going on there, it's going on there, it's not going on here. You can put pressure on international forums. India is very strong. We have beaten Pakistan a lot. What are you saying? We live in every war, we are higher than them in diplomacy. We are Vishwaguru, we are Madhav Democracy. The spirit of the agreement gave both the countries a say in the welfare of the religious minorities across each other's borders. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, they broke that contract, that agreement. Now we fear for the future of the religious minorities, the Hindus, the Sikhs, the Christians, the Buddhists, the Jains and the others. They say, where are the Jews? There was only one Jew according to the census of Pakistan. So here's the point. If you read articles 5 to 11 of the constitution, that is entirely Pakistan centric when you're defining citizenship as part of your own constitution because you realize that there's a continuing cord that connects you with the people there.  So in the backdrop of your specific history of the subcontinent, considering the basis for the partition, for us to say we owe no obligations whatsoever, despite the Nehru Liaquat Act, according to me, is to make an argument in vacuum when there are clear documented facts to the contrary. Look, I get the sense. Can I ask a provocative question? But I'm very thankful to my friend here. He knows that I'm fasting and I can't speak much, so he's doing all the speaking. No, I'm fasting on Tuesday. I'm just being thankful to you. Why are you getting agitated? I'm just being thankful to you. Don't get so angry. You need not be so angry. We are very angry. What has happened? Calm down. It's good. These are the responses to my arguments. Please continue. Now I'll come to that. I said, I don't have any quarrel with my CA. I said this in the beginning. I'll come back again. Why would I have a quarrel? It's a bit unconstitutional. I agree with Samvidhan. If Samvidhan doesn't have anything illegal, then that's wrong. Okay, so one very quick question that many people bring up. Article 14, ultra-virus. No, I'm on Article 15. I'm not on Article 14. Article 15? Okay. A quick response. It's just ultra-virus of the constitution. Can I explain that? Then you can rebut that. Okay, my argument. Let me raise my argument. Section 31c of Citizenship Act, which came by the 2003 amendment for the first time, said that a child born in India will be an Indian citizen if either of the parents are Indian citizens and the other is not an illegal immigrant. I'll wrap it up. Okay, it's not an illegal immigrant. Now place this like this. I am a Muslim born after 2003. I'm an Indian citizen. My mother is not. My mother is an illegal immigrant. Similarly place, there is a Hindu kid on the same footing. He can take advantage of the CA. I cannot. Article 15 says there cannot be a discrimination on the basis of race, religion, caste, gender, so on and so forth. One minute, 20 seconds. The problem with this argument is that a Pakistani Hindu refugee who has come through a legitimate refugee channel is being equated with a Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant who has come through the illegal channel as part of this particular definition. I'm talking about Indians. I'm not even talking about Pakistanis. A Pakistani Hindu refugee and an Indian parent, so to speak, when they combine, you're actually, it's a marriage between an Indian citizen and a refugee within Bharat which is recognized by an Indian law. But when an illegal migrant wants to marry a citizen, that is not the same as a refugee marrying a citizen. That's point number one. Two, since you're constantly being told equal treatment, we should be concerned about the people here. We should always think about the people here. What is my friend's position on the Uniform Civil Code? See, this obsession, no, no. It's not an obsession. It's a legitimate question. No, no, no, no. See, jumping. It is a matter of the constitutional. It's a matter of the constitutional. I raised a question on the point of law. You did not ask one. Mr. Anas, let's not say the goal post. He's asked you a valid question. We've got 20 seconds. I'm asking you. The constitution itself says we should give up, give ourselves a Uniform Civil Code, the Supreme Court itself. No, it is part of DPSP. It is not part of fundamental rights. First, let me realize my fundamental rights. That is the priority. Sir, it is an objective of the constitution of India. No, no, fundamental rights are the priority. First, give me that. Sir, it is a directive principle. You aspire towards that. The state aspires for that. It is an ideal that we must aspire to as the constitution also upholds many other ideals to aspire to. No, not that. You won't give me time to respond. Please, go ahead. One minute. You haven't even raised your question. What will I respond to? No, I've asked you. I said, how are you saying that this is a... See, UCC is part of DPSP. I am fighting for fundamental rights right now. I don't have food right now. There are so many people in this country who don't have anything to eat. So, it's okay if exceptions are made for certain communities. Exactly. Those exceptions are expected of religious leaders. And UCC able to oppose anybody else who is being actually affected in Pakistan. That's because 12, which is part of fundamental right, protects my personal right. Okay, gentlemen, you know, I didn't anticipate such passion, but we find that... Look, at least debate is alive in this country. So, tell all those people out there that we can debate without fear of favor even the trickiest issues in India today. I'll leave it at this. Thank you very much. That's right, Rahul. And that's what makes it such a strong democracy. Rahul Sushankar there and our guest. Thank you so much. It's Jayasai Deepak and Anas Tanbir. That was indeed a very insightful and a spirited debate, an amazing array of perspectives that we just heard on a very crucial issue, as we've all seen how the Citizenship Amendment Act has sparked a massive political furore recently. Okay, let's move on. Let's shift tracks now. Technological advances combined with fairly dramatic economic and social changes are also creating conditions for the emergence of new forms of money and credits. Ladies and gentlemen, central banks are rolling up their sleeves. They're also familiarizing themselves with these bits and bytes of digital money. So, what lies ahead? Well, that's the big question that we would be finding answers to in our next conversation. Let's listen in from Ryan McNenry, who's the CEO for Visa Inc. on the evolving money and payment trends. McNenry, in fact, is going to be in conversation with managing editor CNBC, Shereen Ban for our next session, which is titled Money Moves at a Fast Click. Please welcome our next guest. Let's have a huge round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. It will be wonderful to hear from you. Welcome, Ryan. Welcome, Shereen. Thank you so much. Well, it's great to be back on stage here in conversation with a global CEO who joins us here at the Rising Bharat Summit. Ryan, thank you so much for being here with us at the summit. We truly appreciate your time here. I know that you're here in India on a very short visit, so it means a lot to our star that you've made time for us here. For the benefit of our audience here in this room as well as those who are watching, just to give you a sense of the footprint that Visa occupies, in FY23, the Visa network enabled $15 trillion in total volume and 276 billion transactions. They operate across 200 countries, and of course, India is a strategic market for Visa. And here's why outside of their home base, which is the U.S., India is the second largest employee base for Visa. So, Ryan, it's great to get your insights on why you're bullish on India and what gives you confidence about the India digital story. Let's start with your visit to Mumbai. I believe you had quite the experience of using your digital payment system to buy some varapal on the streets. I did. It's an honor to be here looking forward to the discussion. And it's been a great trip. This is my first trip back to India since I assumed my new role as CEO of the company, and there's so much happening here. And so I'm here to learn. When I was in Mumbai, I was meeting with our partners and our clients, big banks, small banks, fintechs, big techs. I met with our employees who have lots of ideas on things that we can be doing better to help them in the market. And I got out and walked around. Soundboxes, QR codes, coffee shops. They wanted me to experience what's really happening here so that when we're back helping the team here in India, we really understand it. It was quite an experience. Did you expect it to be as smooth as it turned out to be? I had been told that it was smooth, but until you actually, you know, scan the QR code and see how quick it works, and you hear the sound box and the words that come out of it, and you see how that's helping the person who's running the small booth. It's very impressive. Speaking of impressive, let's talk about the UPI moment in India, and that's been the big sort of event. It's pre-UPI and post-UPI. That's how the digital payment network is being seen in India. Do you see UPI as competition or do you see UPI as a collaborator? Well, first let me say, I think what's happened with UPI in India is nothing short of remarkable. I think it has accelerated financial inclusion in this country by more than a decade. The speed, the growth, the adoption, the user experiences that I was talking about, they're nothing short of remarkable. We see it as an opportunity for Visa. I believe that we can help build on the financial inclusion that has happened as a result of UPI and help turn that into financial empowerment, help work with the banks in India, help work with the ecosystem in India to create new credit products, to help people grow up the credit ladder, help them build wealth, help empower them financially as a result of the great work that's happened with UPI in India. Given the fact that you believe that UPI presents itself as an opportunity and not necessarily merely as competition, what's the target that you've set for the India team? What's the plan in terms of incremental investments in terms of expansion? As I pointed out, you've got about 4,000 employees here working in India, largely sitting out of your Bengaluru spaces, your Bengaluru offices. What was all of this going to mean now as far as Visa's future expansion in India? First, I'm so proud of our team here. Our team in Bangaluru, our team in Mumbai, they are every day coming into work, serving our clients, serving our partners, and doing everything that they can do to not only help build new innovations for India, but increasingly to build products and services that we can export from India all around the world. We feel just so proud and so great about the team that we have here. I'll tell you, I leave India thinking I need to set the targets higher. Set the targets higher, not for just the investment that we make as a company, but also the results that we expect of our team here. So I'll definitely take that back from my trip. We have been in this country for 40 years. When we're thinking about the opportunities in this country, we're thinking about the next 40 years, and the next 40 years after that. Those are the time frames we're thinking about in terms of the investments that we're making in the country. Let's talk about the next five years, not the next 40 years, because we don't know what's going to happen in the next 40 years. Over the next five years, in terms of the opportunities that you spoke of and in terms of focus areas that you intend to double down on, remittances, cross-border, how is Visa going to operate in those spaces? How do you intend to leverage the advantages there? First of all, let me just step back for all of the success that you and I have been talking about with the digitization of payments in India. There's still more than a trillion dollars in cash. So we're not a cashless economy by any means. So we still have an opportunity to partner and to work to help digitize that cash. But then building on the consumer payments that you and I make every day, there's enormous opportunities in B2B payments, in government payments. There's an enormous opportunity in transit systems. We've been involved in more than 750 transit systems around the world, helping them operate more efficiently by digitizing the payments. And then, as you said, we see remittances as a tremendous opportunity. We've built out a platform, we call it VisaDirect, where we have 8.5 billion endpoints, cards, accounts, digital wallets, all around the world. And what we're doing is we're putting that platform to work to make remittances in and out of India and all over the world, but this is the biggest corridor for remittances in the world. Make them more transparent, make them faster, make them cheaper, make it a better user experience for both the sender and the receiver. And we think that's a tremendous opportunity for us to continue to help and add value here in India. You talked about the fact that cash continues to be a significant part of the economy. While digitization has, of course, grown as well. But you know, just before the UPI actually took over and took off quite literally, the view was that this could potentially mean the death of credit cards. That was the expectation. It hasn't quite turned out that way. But how do you see the credit card space evolving in terms of form factors, in terms of features, in terms of innovation? What do you see as the next wave of disruption to the credit card itself? Now, what we've seen around the world is users choose to pay with credit in different ways. Sometimes it's a card, sometimes it's a plastic card, sometimes it's a metal card, but increasingly it's a digital tokenized incarnation of the card. That can be on your phone or different form factors. So our strategy the whole time has been not to be wed to a card per se. In many ways we've unbundled credit from what we all think of as the legacy card and we've embedded that credit in the user experiences that people have as they're working their way through their digital experiences or as we were talking about earlier in the physical world. And increasingly the physical world and digital world are blending. So we very much have unbundled those capabilities and we do think that there's a lot we can bring to India in terms of innovative products and services in credit specifically that we've seen in different parts of the world. In many ways the credit product itself has melded and evolved in ways that it's embedded in people's lives in ways that it almost becomes invisible. And that's when you start to really empower that purchasing power in a way that's great for small businesses and merchants. You talked about financial empowerment and you also brought up the issue of the credit gaps and the credit gaps exist in many spaces in different degrees. What will be the focus as far as bridging the credit gaps specifically from an Indian consumer or an Indian market's perspective? Bringing new solutions to help underwrite near prime credit, new to credit, young credit customers, working with banks to provide different types of line management services, different types of ways to segment credit and make them applicable in certain use cases. All of this type of innovation is happening around the world and I think is going to be a great opportunity to build on, as we were saying earlier, the momentum that's happened with UPI. And in five years to come back to the question from a few moments ago, maybe we don't even call it a credit card per se, maybe we call it visa credit or maybe we call it... Who knows what we call it? The word card may drop from our lexicon in India given the enormous progress that's happened here but we view our role as someone who can help power that innovation for banks across India. You're talking about innovation, so we can't not talk about what's happening as far as the world of AI is concerned and visa, for those of you who might not be aware, has decided to put together a war chest of $100 million to look at nurturing AI across different startups. Take me through the idea behind that, what you intend to do, is that going to be a focus area for you here in India as well? Yeah, sure. I'll talk about that specifically and then more broadly how we're thinking about generative AI. That idea specifically came from a set of experiences where we were looking for companies that were using generative AI to create new commerce experiences and we weren't able to find a lot of them. We wanted to go find them and nurture them and we have a program we call FinTrick FastTrack, bring them on to the Visa platform and so we said why don't we put together an investment fund so that we can help go find some of those entrepreneurs, those people that are dreaming big about how they could use generative AI to transform commerce and why don't we invest in them and so that's where we started on that journey. If I back up, we're big believers in the power of AI. We've been a leader in AI for 30 years using predictive AI to build our products and services, secure our network. We've been very aggressive in adopting generative AI in our company. We've made all of the tools and co-pilots available to our employees around the world. How much have you invested on that side? I couldn't give you the number, but if you went and talked to any one of our employees in India around the world and said tell me about what Ryan's been talking to you about. Generative AI. He's honest. Every team in Visa is expected to have a roadmap and a plan of how they're using generative AI to make their function more effective and more efficient. Finance, HR, products, obviously technology. So the use case at this point in time, efficiency and effectiveness, right? It is. It's about efficiency and effectiveness, but I think the real magic. The real magic is when we're able to bring new products to market using generative AI. I'll give you an example. We have been using generative AI to take our transaction data and create what we call synthetic data sets. And what we're able to do with synthetic data sets is take the same fraud risk and cyber capabilities we've used on the Visa network and use those to identify fraud on real-time payment networks. And we found that we can identify scams and fraud using the same data and analytics from our experience in card payments and apply that to account-to-account payments and real-time payments all because we have generative AI to create these new synthetic data sets and these new analytic tools. You know, let me just stick with that. Given what's happening in the Indian fintech space specifically on the start-up side, is that something that you're looking at closely? Does anything excite you there? Are we likely to see you fund anything on that side? Yeah. First of all, what's happened in India in the fintech and start-up space is extraordinary. We partner with most, if not all of them, to help them. We've invested in several of them here in India. I'm looking for more generative AI commerce companies, so if you find any as part of this conference, please let me know. We're looking to invest in them. That's the pitch. So if anyone's watching this, the global CEO of Visa is on the lookout for Indian fintechs who are focused on the generative AI space. Hopefully you'll start to get a lot of people writing into you, Ryan. That would make me extremely happy. Well, you know, since we're talking about fintech, let's talk about regulation in India. The regulator has done many things, including data localization, which was brought in a couple of years ago. Of course, all of you need to be compliant with that. There have been some recent changes, four credit cards specifically. How do you see the regulatory environment in India at this point in time? Is it challenging? Does it add friction? Or is it making you feel that it is securing the digital payment ecosystem? Of course it can be challenging at times, but it makes us better. That's how we view it. We want to be in compliance as effective and faster than any company in our space. We want the regulators to look at Visa as a leader. And we lean into this regulation because we do believe that it makes us better. I also give enormous credit to the regulators in India for leading the charge on innovations that not only make the system more safe, they help drive commerce. I would use tokenizations, an example. I think the regulators in India leaned into tokenization. They mandated tokenization. And as a result, e-commerce is going to be adopted even faster in India. It's going to be safer. It's going to be more secure. It's going to have higher authorization rates. So you're saying that the regulator in India was ahead of the curve on tokenization? Absolutely. They were an innovator in that way of leading, as far as all the regulators in the world, by mandating tokenization for e-commerce in India. So what would you say are the key risks today? What keeps you up at night? You were talking about cyber safety, cyber security, and in general what we've seen with the momentum of digital transactions going up, that we've also seen the risks of digital fraud, of cyber risks and so on and so forth. How are you within Visa trying to fortify yourself and how much of this is a risk that you're factoring in? It's an enormous priority for us. I think it's a very big risk. You know, at the core of digital payments, at the core of the success of digital payments is trust. All of us are very comfortable engaging in digital payments, whether it's with a Visa card or anything else, because we trust that it's going to be safe. And we take the responsibility to safeguard our network and ensure that it's the safest and most reliable network very seriously. As you might expect, we're a very big target for the bad guys that are out there. We have somewhere between... Average, how much do you get attacked in a day? I was just about to say, we are attacked somewhere between 400 and 500 million times a month. Attack vectors that come from all different parts of the world. I'll give you another example. We have about 30,000 employees. Every month we stop 20 million emails that were meant to be sent to our employees and we stop them before they get to them. All of those are from bad actors. They're trying to trick our employees into doing something that they otherwise shouldn't do. So we take that very seriously. We've invested billions in our cybersecurity protections. We have 1,000 people that come into work every day, and all they do is focus on our cyber protections. But beyond that, we're also creating tools for our bank partners to help them stop fraud. Every year through those tools, we stop more than $30 billion of fraud that otherwise would have been perpetrated on our network and with our customers' clients. So this is going to be an arms race. It's going to continue to be an arms race, and we are going to invest and we're going to work as hard as we possibly can to stay one step, if not five steps ahead of the bad actors to ensure that the network is as safe and secure as it possibly can be. You know, when you say that this is going to be an arms race, explain to me how you're going about it. I mean, putting money at the problem or throwing money at the problem is just one aspect. But how are you thinking about this strategically? And more importantly, how do you look at this from your partner's perspective as well who may not have the ability to throw money at the problem? Well, first on the second part of your question, this is something I've been talking to everyone that I've had a chance to meet with while I've been in India. We want to protect our network, the Visa network, with all of the tools and security that I mentioned, but we also want to make these tools available to all networks. We want to make our services available to any network that's out there because, let's be honest, all of the network of networks that we operate in across the world, and on this particular topic, we're all in this together. We need to be investing in the safety and security of digital payments so that everybody across the world continues to trust... So Mastercard and you are aligned on this one? I think cyber protection is existential for digital payments, and so I want to make sure that we're making our products, our services, our talent, we're sharing information, we're sharing our services to anyone that's interested in putting them to work, and we feel like we have great products and services that we can be helpful with. I want to go back to something that you said right at the very beginning. You said that you're here in India to learn, and in the context of the digital public infrastructure and what India's been able to do with the India stack, it was a big part of our pitch to the world through our G20 presidency as well. What do you see as the opportunities to export the India stack to the world? First of all, I think the world is paying very close attention to it. I think there is a meaningful opportunity to export the stack.  Aadhar, UPI, ONDC, DigiLocker, I mean, all of these elements of the stack are extraordinarily impressive. I was saying to my team the other day, I think if you look at what India has done, and you look at the product roadmap, I would put it up against any of the best big tech players on the planet. Not just the roadmap itself, the clarity, the execution, the transparency, the length of the roadmap. It is remarkable execution, and I think there is a big opportunity to export the stack far beyond India. What do you think it will take for us to be able to do that in terms of prioritization, in terms of strategic choices? You know, if you were to sort of put together a roadmap of how we take it forward, what would that entail? I think at a foundation is public-private partnership. We view ourselves as a potential partner, and I think what's proven, if you look over time, with the adoption of similar types of things around the world, it's the public-private partnership at work. And I think this is an area where India's leadership, as you said, coming out of the G20, making the world more aware of the stack and the impact that it's had is a big first step. And I think engaging with governments, engaging with the private sector companies like Visa, and through public-private partnership, that should be a great way to expand those things. Let's talk about what's happening globally as well, Ryan. Clearly, you're confident about the India growth story, the macros as well as what's happening as far as the digital side of the story is concerned. But global, the macros continue to look challenging at this point in time. I think it's a great question of a cut coming in from the Fed in June, perhaps less likely today. Japan's just raised interest rates. What are consumer trends telling you in terms of spending power, spending capacity, and the possibility of the current trends holding up? Despite everything that you said, the consumer spending around the world remains resilient. It remains stable. When you look at the year-over-year growth in transactions or payment volume across our network and in most of the countries in which we operate, it's been relatively stable. That's some really good news, despite everything you said. Now, of course, higher interest rates are taking a dent out of consumers. Consumers are changing. They're purchasing patterns. What are they buying? What are they spending most of their money on today? Well, it's actually coming now having with COVID a couple of years in the rearview mirror. We've rebalanced pretty close to where we were in the mix of goods and services pre-COVID with a bit more shift toward services, travel, entertainment, Taylor Swift concerts, things like that. That's a whole other economy, isn't it? The Taylor Swift economy is a whole other economy. It's incredible, isn't it? It's incredible. Going back to your first question, the consumer remains resilient. Listen, there's pockets around the world. In some markets where, for example, you've got more variable rate mortgages. Australia is a good example. Hays a good example. Consumers are having to spend more of their discretionary spending or non-discretionary spending on mortgages, and we see that coming out of spending. But on the other side, we see travel in and out of China picking up. We see travel into the United States picking up. So international travel is very much still on the rebound. So overall stable with some puts and takes in different places. You talked about regional differences in the way that resilience is showing up, and you're on your way out of India, you're going to be headed into China. So let's address that issue as well. The recovery is underway, but patchy. There are concerns on what is happening as far as the real estate sector in China is concerned and whether that poses a systemic risk. How do you see China at this point in time, both in terms of recovery, as well as in terms of consumer confidence? Yeah, in terms of China, again, we think about it in five, ten year, 15 year increments. There's no question that, you know, the Chinese economy is going through some bumps right now, but there too, we view it as our role to be as helpful as we possibly can to invest in the tools and the capabilities to help the banks and the broader economy do well.  So as a global CEO, what do you map on your dashboard? I mean, outside of what's happening inside a visa, the other factors that you have on your dashboard is potential risks or potential opportunities today. Geopolitics, of course, emerged as one of the big concerns, given just the volatile state of play. But, you know, what are you looking at? What are the various factors that you're looking at? Yeah, I mean, geopolitics is always an issue. You and I were talking beforehand about the enormous number of elections that are happening this year. So from that, there's going to be change. There's always change. But, you know, I'm very optimistic, very optimistic of the opportunities around the world. You know, coming out of the elections, I think there's enormous kind of road in front of us, and I'm hopeful that the economy can continue to have the great success that it has, and, you know, hopefully we can be a part of that. You know, the other thing that I spend a lot of time on is consumer preferences, consumer trends. What are we hearing from buyers and sellers around the world? What do they need? What are the technologies that are changing, you know, how they're running their businesses or they're engaging in their lives? By the way, Generative AI, another topic we could talk about that's helpful is how I think it's going to change shopping, which I think it'll have a very big impact on that. More experiential? Yeah, I think, you know, it's just going to make it easier. You know, if you think about shopping, especially for someone like myself who's neither that good at it nor likes it that much, it's very inefficient. That makes the two of us. It's relatively inefficient. And so I think Generative AI, all of us are going to have co-pilots in terms of shopping. We're going to have much more curated experiences. We're going to have much more curated payment experiences that come with it. And that's just going to make a much better experience. I also think, I have a personal thesis that Generative AI could be a very empowering capability for small businesses around the world. It starts to give them access to the capabilities that only the largest retailers have had, whether it's product reviews or recommendation engines or things like that become unbundled and available to small and medium businesses around the world. I think Generative AI could be a very leveling force in the commerce space. You preempted what I was going to say. So you actually believe the Generative AI will level the playing field, not make the gaps wider? I believe it will. That's my personal thesis. I think it'll, for the largest retailers and the largest platforms, will certainly help optimize what they do and, again, make a more enjoyable experience for all of us as shoppers. But I think it has the power to level the playing field. It has the power to democratize a lot of the commerce capabilities that have been bundled in to some of the largest platforms and make them available. And for you and I as shoppers, I think we're going to have much more broad views to inventory that's available in small and medium businesses either in the cities that we live in or around us. So who would you consider as competition today in a fintech world, in an AI-led world, where every phone company wants to be a fintech player? Every big tech company wants to be in the banking business as well in some shape or form or in the payments business. What does the competitive landscape look like today for you? I'll tell you. Over the last several years, the early narrative on fintechs was they're going to be competitive for the payment system. We saw it differently. We saw all of these players as potential partners. And that's very much how we see it today. Fintech, big tech, little tech, small tech, we view all of them as potential partners for Visa and we view it as an opportunity to put our network to work to help them grow their business and ultimately meet whatever goal it is that they've set out for themselves. And I think if you go today, for example, down in Silicon Valley near where I live and you talk to fintechs, you'll find most, if not all of them, Visa has become their most important partner. And so that's how we see the world. We see the world in terms of partners and people that we can put our network to work, open our network, make it available and help them achieve whatever it is the goal that they're trying to achieve. You said that you see fintechs as potential collaborators, potential partners as well. You also said earlier on that perhaps in the future at some point, you may just drop card altogether as part of the sort of proposition that you offer to consumers because, you know, you're digital in many ways. So what do you see Visa being? I mean, in terms of your core DNA, how do you see that core DNA evolving and changing given the many changes that we are seeing in the ecosystem? What could that potentially mean over the next five to ten years? Yeah, at our core we're a network. We're the safest, most secure, most reliable, largest payment network on the planet with the largest reach. And the way we're evolving that is building out from not just being the Visa network to being a network of networks. And that's what we want to do. We want to be able to enable money movement across all networks around the world. You know, we were talking about remittances and that Visa Direct Platform that I mentioned to you earlier, we move money across ACH systems. We move money across RTP systems. We move money across other card networks. Again, all in service of giving our clients the biggest, most reliable, safest, most secure money movement platform on the planet. So that's how we think about our role. And we very much are an open network. We want anyone to build on us. Whatever they can dream up, the products, the services that they can dream up, they know that they have the Visa network available to them to put their products and services to work. So do you see India then being an incubator of some of the innovations that you would hope for Visa to focus on in the future? In Innovator and Exporter, there's no question about it. I mean, the FinTech community here has had a very profound impact on Visa.  We've worked with them. How has it changed Visa? How have Indian FinTechs changed Visa? Yeah, Indian FinTechs have opened up our mind to the power of QR payments. So now, we're looking at other markets around the world where QR might be the form factor that users prefer, buyers and sellers. So, well, okay, we don't need cards. We'll use QR, and that'll be the form factor that will then allow people to tap into the Visa network as an example. And that very much came from the inspiration of what we've seen happen here in India. So, you know, speaking of inspiration, again, Ryan, of course, has been with Visa for about 11 years now. He has held many jobs before that, but has been CEO for almost a year now. Feb is when you completed a year as CEO. You know, as CEO, managing people is, of course, an important aspect of your job as well. And especially when you manage people across 200 different countries, it's a complex job as well. How do you make sure that there is an alignment of purpose, that there is an alignment of vision as you operate across 200 different jurisdictions? Yeah, in terms of alignment, I find it's about clear communication, always on communication, and just being able to listen and learn from our employees around the world about what's working well, what's not working well, and how we can help them do their jobs better. You know, we, when I get back to the U.S. week or so, we're going to move into a new office. We actually call it our Market Support Center, not corporate headquarters. We call it the Visa Market Support Center. So if you ever come visit, you'll see that on the building. And I want people, when they come into work every day, to remember that we are serving our markets around the world. We're serving India. We're serving Brazil. We're serving England and Germany. And I want our employees to just remember that is our job every day, to listen, to learn, and to ultimately be in service of our markets around the world so that they can serve their clients and they can do the great things that they need to do here in India and around the world. So is there a Ryan-specific way of A, getting feedback and B, incorporating feedback into driving change? Yeah, I try to be as approachable and open as I possibly can. I, for example, I just, actually on the flight over here, I just launched a new internal social media platform. Think about it that way. And I regularly am now going to start posting what I'm thinking, my ideas. I actually posted some pictures from my experience in Mumbai to all of our employees around the world. I showed them how the sound box works. I showed them how the QR code works. And I encourage them to ask me questions on the platform, give me feedback on the platform.  But I've started to get really good feedback on that channel even just a weekend. So I just try to be as approachable as I possibly can, as open as I possibly can to our team members to ask them for feedback, to encourage them for feedback, to reward them when they give me feedback, and then do our best to incorporate that into our strategy, what we're doing, and then back to your original question, just be as clear and concise in communicating that out to our team as I possibly can be. So since you said that one of the things that you focus on is being clear and concise in communicating your message to the team, I'm going to end by asking you the message that you're sending or leaving your India team with. You said that you're going to probably up the targets given the opportunities and the potential that you see in India. What's the message to the India team on how they should leverage the India opportunity? India is an enormous opportunity. India has had incredible success. We are here to partner. We want to be an integral part of the India story. We want to put the visa network to work in every way that we possibly can to help accelerate the progress in India, help move from financial inclusion to financial empowerment, and I'm going to give our team all the resources they need to do that. And they haven't given you a number just yet. They've given me some numbers. Are you going to do better than the numbers that they've left you with? We're going to give them everything they need to be successful. Well, Ryan, thank you very, very much for joining us here. Ladies and gentlemen, the global CEO of Visa on their outlook for India, as well as the opportunities that it presents for the visa network. I appreciate you joining us. We hope you have a fabulous trip back and we look forward to seeing you back in India soon. It was fun talking to you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you once again, Ryan. Thank you, Shireen. That was indeed a fascinating conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, just a quick reminder. We do have a very exciting evening lined up for you. So don't forget to be here. Just a quick reminder. We have four shining stars of India for Grammy Award winners amongst us. It's going to be an unforgettable performance. It's going to be a very exciting night. I hope you all are enjoying. We've had an array of discussions. We have had also a very diverse mix of guests since the morning. We started off with Nitin Gadkari. We started off with Ashwini Vaishnav and of course we did have a lot of business talks and on the economy but most importantly on religion. A burning topic these days and of course a very contentious Citizenship Amendment Act. We are just setting up for our next session. It's going to be also a very interesting one. We have a very prominent and a popular BJP politician who's going to be joining us for now. A quick reminder to kindly stay seated and not leave your seats because the next session is going to begin in a short while from now. We're just waiting for our next speaker to come as well. That was Mr. Mech Inani who was in conversation with Shereem. He is of course the CEO of Visa Inc. and he was there with us all the way from the US and sharing his thoughts. Well, we have had some power packed sessions. I hope you all have enjoyed yourselves thus far. We have a scintillating performance that has been lined up as well and I personally am looking forward to that as well. We have a very renowned and noticed musician and artist who will be here gracing the stage in a short while from now. So be seated. We will just begin a session in a short while from now. Back day hasn't it? Since the morning, I have been really excited listening to all those stimulating conversations and also the discussions, some very fiery ones as well. My colleague Toya in fact has also been catching a lot of guests on the other side of social media. Toya, what is the kind of response that you're getting? How is it going for you and for all of our guests who have come today? So on the social media side over there we're asking softer questions. So we're asking some of the politicians for example we've had on stage who your favourite authors are what's the music you've liked when you've grown up because it's always exciting to discover that side too and you can only do that really on the social media platform. Obviously these areas are for the more serious conversations. But ladies and gentlemen as we wait for our next speaker we're going to come to each of you. I don't obviously mean each of you. We'll try to come to whichever one of you can. I want to ask each of you which moments here have stood out to you? What's left a question in your mind? So is there something you've heard any of the policy makers the politicians say up there that have actually left questions in your mind? Things you want answered because the panel doesn't just end today. Of course we're going to see Spiti Rani Ji right now. It's going to carry into tomorrow also. Any questions you bring up today we'll also ask on the softer side on the social media side in just a few minutes from now. Okay, any hands ladies and gentlemen I'll come to... Oh alright we've got one lady very ready. I like the spirit. Thank you so much. So basically going with the spirit of the show I feel it has been really lovely flow of actions right here and there were many standing I guess landmark moments of the conferences you know moving away from yellow journalism and getting to the real journalism is a very thin line between real and the real world today and you guys have done amazing what I really wish to ask upon to the next fleet of panel which is coming across today and you know tomorrow would be India is already on the global map we have been marketing a lot on many things and we always say to all claims we want to be this truly an economy and that what next for the small businesses out there that is what is in store for the small businesses out there because a lot of big fishers which are you know right there but I want to know what's in store You've touched on journalism on small businesses All right we've actually we've run out of time with this question and I'm excited to tell you we have our next speaker coming in in just a few minutes we're going to keep doing this so please keep questions on your mind we'll see you in just a few minutes But that was wonderful man thank you so much and we of course will take your views we would also ask those questions and we are ready for our next session ladies and gentlemen our next session is a conversation with one of India's most articulate and powerful leaders in fact union minister for women and child development and minority affairs minister Shreemati Smriti Zubin Irani has seen her careers political innings take off ever since the 2014 elections where she took the fight to Rahul Gandhi in Amiti but most importantly when she won that historic context in 2019 she was given charge of the high profile HRD ministry later the information and broadcasting ministry textiles and now the women and child development and minority affairs it's such a pleasure to have you ma'am please welcome Shreemati Smriti Zubin Irani the honorable minister of women and child development and minority affairs in conversation with my colleague Alumaz Namaste everybody are you all awake it's miss Smriti Zubin Irani in the house she deserves a bigger round of applause and welcome so let's just thank you very much for gracing rising Bharat we're talking about a vixit Bharat at 2047 Smriti ji I just want to read out something which has just come fresh off the coals if I may say that this is what is being said in a time of high unemployment rising prices corruption and oppression Rahul Gandhi is the only hope for 1.35 billion Indians dedicated to bringing justice to every corner of our country and is the only leader who can end this regime of fascism and dictatorship hashtag only hope Rahul Gandhi this is by Mr. P. Chidambra your thoughts ma'am I think the snigas in the audience speak louder than any statement that I can give but I also believe that the destiny of a nation cannot be decided by a man who is scared of being defeated in Amiti so a leader is one who does not leave his fleet behind the gentleman hashtag is somebody that I had the privilege of contesting against in 2019 victory and loss are a part of electoral politics but what defines a leader is that if they have grit enough courage enough to stand with their own beliefs amongst their own people and I don't think somebody who escapes and is feared of being conquered electorally is somebody who can lead a nation to better prospects so I understand the compulsions of Mr. Chidambra but I also recognize that the voter at large respects the reality of a rising Bharat but he is saying that he will defeat Shakti see, he has kept himself in a clarified position he has said that he is not writing that Shakti which has nothing to do with religion but in today's time of expansive communication and media his words are not hidden in any country this is not the first time that he has given time against my religion against Hinduism but I believe that if he really is secular then he should not fight in the form of religion he should fight in the form of issues the whole nation heard him from a clear view when he said that Shakti whose religion is Hinduism he wants to fight with that so I want to say as a Hindu that till date the one who has made my religion and my heritage what has happened to him if someone read Ramayana Gita Mahabharata he will get an idea of this but if someone tells us that we could not understand his words and maybe his writing was in the context of politics not in the context of religion so I want to know which Shakti he wants to fight Prime Minister Modi in this country did a special writing of four Shaktis one is female Shakti the other is young Shakti the third is Krishi's Shakti and the fourth is that poor who is now moving towards Uttan so which of these four Shaktis do you want to fight with Raul Gandhi? he is talking about that Shakti which controls ED controls EVM see in ancient Hindi there is a saying of a thief's beard now the one whose beard is full of tins that is also seen as a thief but the one who who has apologized in the Supreme Court for using the word he does not give false proof he is talking about electoral bonds he is saying that BJP is a Ugahi party now Mr. Rupeshwari has said on a cyber-genic that the party of 303 saints through electoral bonds transparently through the banking system got a bond of 6000 crores but the one whose power is not even of 200 they got 14000 crore rupees so my turn is that which Ugahi party has left Raul Gandhi that he has got 14000 crore rupees you people react it is not like they will react during elections they will not worry this this one more is not only in India it is also in the world that India in the current government is moving towards an electoral autocracy if we are talking about smashing a status quo then how would you respond to this that we are gradually becoming an electoral autocracy i.e. we are born but everything is being progressed the country which has thrown the government 940 million voters will give their vote with an authentic identification I have not heard such a huge amount of that electorate to say that you are wiser than the voter just because you are an analyst overseas is one of the biggest hypocritical positions taken to analyze our democracy especially from countries which don't have such a large voting populace what they cannot fathom is why the average Indian today is buoyant about their future prospects what they cannot possibly come to terms with is why India and Indians are so blatant about their ambitions and their pursuits of excellence and possibly that is why this is the same voice which when covid came said how will India survive with 6 lakh plus villages how will Indians eat how will Indians receive pharmacological support how will Indians get a vaccine I think the metal of a country and a leadership is best tested when your back is to the wall India not only made vaccines delivered it to 1.4 billion citizens it also gave vaccines and pharmaceuticals to 160 countries India is the only nation in the world today that at the doorstep of 800 million citizens consistently for the past 2 and half years is delivering free ration every month no country in the world today has an expansive health covered system like Ayushman Bharat where 100 million people receive 5 lakh rupees worth of medical support across 28,000 hospitals with not a single human being who's covered missing a treatment in any hospital in the country so I think that those people who sit in these analogies and analysis possibly cannot come to terms with the fact that India has a functional government which is tested every time we go to polls and that you have a leadership that responds to the people's needs and people who appreciate that leader I also believe Anand when we go to vote for too long and for too many years in our country we have seen people vote on the basis of an emotion Narendra Modi and before him Atal Bihari Vajpayee I'm very proud but two leaders are two leaders who said judge us by our development performance what you see on the opposite are people who are blind and depending on negative rhetoric but Modi is the only leader right now who has given you a national ambition remember after the independence freedom movement we've never had a national ambition in a clarion called like 2047 so while Modi says for 2047 we need to create more opportunities for education for enterprise for skill for manufacturing what is Rahul Gandhi of you division on the basis of religion division on the basis of class division on the basis of caste while Modi says let's talk about Atman Irbha Bharat what is Atman Irbha Bharat it is economic sovereignty of this country what does Rahul Gandhi tell you Atman Irbha Bharat while Modi says let's pull 25 crore Indians out of poverty and today the world poverty clock forget anybody else says that less than 3% people in India now live under the line of poverty what does Rahul Gandhi tell you he glorifies poverty he glorifies a martyrdom at the order of lost opportunities so why should any informed voter then vote for Rahul Gandhi or an alliance which is barely together but he says that voters do vote for us but the life of the king is in EVM look the one who was born in the royal family the one who was born who was born in the royal family who was born in a tea house this is a political what kind of a illusion is that now they see the tea house king now as much as I have heard Rahul Gandhi as a survey general in many things he has given clarification I ask for clarification election commission of India repeatedly the survey general of the announcement come and test did Rahul Gandhi go once it is very easy to glorify but on whom are you glorifying on the planet are you glorifying on people's choice are you glorifying on election commission and do you think the entire universe is in this struggle to make Modi the prime minister this struggle is for voters because voters in the age of 10 have seen Modi complete every word if I consider where the 50 year old king of the family 15 year old Rahul Gandhi stayed in Satta Rubika ji there are 1,9,000 families in the last 5 years 4,000 families have got toilets in their life where their family is 50 years old only 4 people 16,000 people in the population of 25,000 this family could not give toilets and they are doubting on EVM Mr. Smriti ji you said that till the time of death this is your statement I will not let the Gandhi family win in Amethi and it seems to me that I have lost my pride but you will agree but but why this feeling this anger this change I am saying this because Rubika ji if you have seen 4,000 poor women in the dark in that area where the 50 year old king of the family you will be as angry as I am if you have seen 3,000 people in that area who used to be the prime minister in that area you will also be angry as I am if you have seen 4,000 people without a roof do you know where the 50 year old king of the family was sitting there for the past 10 years his mother was the prime minister his friend Mr. Akhilesh was in Uttar Pradesh do you know that Amit Shah came to the office of the collector the first CT scan machine was brought by the Modi the first dialysis center the first blood bank was brought by the Modi the first passport office was brought by the Modi why couldn't they make it they didn't want to because until people are in front of them they don't get votes you can imagine that this is the rule of the family that the poor have to serve the rich they were strong they were ordinary in the process they had the right to be in the policy they could have done it but they didn't do it but you will also believe that they had the right they had the right there was no option there was no option of tenacity and let me tell you Anand there is no easy fight when I went to fight for the first time in 2014 no one gave me a place to stay I had to stay in a room I was so scared of that family when I went there for the first time in 2014 then there there was no reason to stand there there was no word of love there was no word of fear there was no word of fear if you ever I have asked Gandhi Sharad Yadav Ji is not here ask him who has ever fought in Amethi Raj Mohan Gandhi Ji please take a look at the history people have been killed they have been shot on the candidate of Amethi please take a look at the history they have been shot so today someone seems to be on the hind side that Switri Rani must have done something that's why she got the vote 1,20,000 houses there was no electricity you will believe where there was a kingdom of 50 years there was no electricity in 60% of the houses in such areas for the first time there was no ordinary election so when you were told that you have fought there now you are told that somewhere you have made Amethi your house but in that also you are 5 years old yes that is Adal Ji's poetry I will not give up I write on the paper of time I erase it I sing a new song so if you have a politician who has such poems then it is possible for him to be a astrologer so I would like to ask you why did you send me Amethi? I liked it that I got my name in the whole party but I don't know anything Adal Ji are you confident that they will not come? it doesn't matter if you go and I am saying this I am very confident because it is not that they did not have any argument brothers and sisters and I keep the feeling of confidence because in 2020 there was a election where both of them were fighting with Amethi and then to that family in Uttar Pradesh there was a duty to fight and there are 5 seats in the 4 districts where both of them were fighting in the 4 districts the times of Congress were over in 2022 in 2019 the Congress Party was not alone Akhilesh Ji and Mayawati Ji were with them the three of them fought in front of me then there were about 4,300,000 votes near this gang if you look at the elections after the Congress in Amethi Lok Sabha Chetra in 2020 only 1,20,000 votes were left meaning between 2019 and 2020 3,00,000 votes were lost before them now imagine when in 2 or 3 years 3,00,000 votes were lost from 2022 to 2024 that is why when they came with the travel they didn't even do it they say it was a confusion because the alliance wasn't there I am aware that you said the leader is confused the alliance is confused the carter is confused there is no confusion in the country so you believe that the country has no confusion 370 plus let's do one thing leave all my doubts you can ask No, you can ask I am not sure who believes Rahul Gandhi is the hope for 1.3 billion people not even 1.4 billion let's do a show of hands we don't agree with Mr. P. Chidamram now tell me who is the king Janta K.V.M if you are afraid then don't be afraid I am afraid of Mr. P. Chidamram and Rahul Gandhi I am afraid of Mr. P. Chidamram that he won't come back in 7 months so that the loot doesn't go back to the looters I want to contextualize you with your permission when we say the lost decade of opportunity there is no such thing that there is a loss of only from 2004 to 2014 whenever in Congress if you look at their performance today we will talk about Mr. Modi when Mr. Atal was the Prime Minister his work if we talk about banking when he inherited the banking the NPA was about 16% or 17% when he left the office in 2004 the NPA was about 7% till that time in the state of Congress if you go then the NPA was 13% when Mr. Atal left and came to the UPA your agriculture sector was growing at 9% your service sector was growing at 7% your overall economic growth was 8% your advances in public sector banks were about 6 lakh crore rupees if you look at the UPA the UPA from 2004 to 2012 do you know how many advances it gave from the public sector banks? 39 lakh crores out of which 3.8 lakh crores were bad assets and never declared who built this factory? the country that is why you are saying their tradition to rob the country and the 10 years Mr. Modi is not taking money politics of revelation this whole family has been tested on its metal on its political performance and inputs and the best test I think for the country when covid came even this government is blamed for not revealing numbers statistics are not out statistics are out but statistics don't endear themselves to the opposition that's a different issue altogether they may not like the statistics they don't like the growth numbers why would they? they are fighting on a negative the allegation is that the growth numbers are dressed up yes there is growth but some of it is dressed up let's give me a small interjection 30 crore Mudra loans given to only women 8 crore loans given to youngsters first time entrepreneurs out of the 30 crore loans given to women NPA is less than 2.5% which means these loans got serviced business got done there was a profit that's why the loans got serviced so are those 30 crore women who got the loan who did the enterprise are they not employed? they are right 8 crore new entrepreneurs obviously they serviced their loans obviously they paid back so were they not employed 38 crores I have made you sit here with respect to your ministries so banks are right women and child care development and also the minority minister two aspects let's talk about malnourishment we still rank one of the highest in terms of malnourishment who is ranking us if you are a number cruncher there is a public data available on a tracker called portion tracker what is portion tracker track 75 million children below the age of 6 correct how do they track on WHO standards who does the third party evaluation the world bank whether the testing methodology is correct or not evidence is available today for 75 million children when did the congress last computed there was no such evidence available before the other aspect is of food security if 80 crore people were not being given the food security which is also being extended for the next two years you would still have a large you would still have a large number of people people should not get food is that your position you would still have a large number of people who would be struggling around the poverty line or would be going hungry everything is not as rosy as it is painted and I tell you why 13.5 crore Indians came out of multi-dimensional poverty only because of Modi's health initiatives what are those health initiatives primary being Ayushman Bharat Yojana for every Indian especially the poor who got 1, 2 and the booster dose free how much was it in the normal market if you went to buy the vaccine 600 bucks per shot so 1800 rupees let's say if you don't take the booster shot 1200 rupees in a family size of 4 people how much would that have been for a poor family second if you look only at the Ayushman Bharat numbers from October 2023 5 crore 70 lakh hospital admissions worth 70,000 crore rupees done do you compute the cost of the burden on the GDP if this health support was not given to these people for instance when we talk about sanitation we talk about 11 crore toilets built I will take you back to this very channel in the year 2010-12 this channel has carried a report about what 6% negative impact on India's GDP is a lack of sanitation so when Modi gives a sanitation facility it has a positive impact on the growth numbers when Modi gives Russian free to poor it not only helps them come out of multi-dimensional poverty it sustains them out of multi-dimensional poverty it also fires up rural consumption hence keeping industry and manufacturing alive Mr. Smriti Ji, this confidence you can say with confidence that it will be in numbers yes, so in Uttar Pradesh how many seats will you get from 80 I am not a yogendra Yadav or a psychologist or Rahul Gandhi I can assure you that what Modi has said is the luck of stones India is now 404 time is short last 30-15 seconds so we will tell you 5 words we don't know Anand Narasimhan Karan Johar look this is a drama from Karan Johar no, no, no, from entertainment Karan Johar is not a good friend but I will tell you okay you see your journalist friends all the eyebrows are going up so we will speak in front of you the first thought in your mind that you will end in one or two words or in one line so we will start okay Shakti Durga Rahul you should have told him that he was Smriti if you say that word then Maryada Vihin Modi the luck of power 370 400 and last last Smriti Ma ladies and gentlemen Smriti Irani lovely, a huge round of applause once again for Minister Smriti Irani at her oratorical best and also daring Rahul Gandhi thank you so much ma'am Anand Rubika thank you so much as well well she is known for a fine oratory Smriti Irani there also daring Rahul Gandhi to contest from his old battleground of a Metis clearly politics is heating ahead of the loks of our polls she also said that the Prime Minister is an emotion he is someone who has given a natural ambition to the people of the country that was Smriti Irani speaking to colleagues Anand and Rubina we have another very very interesting session coming up more on geopolitics foreign policy I request everyone to be kindly seated please we are just about to begin our next session for the evening so let's begin without further ado ladies and gentlemen it's a conversation that we are going to be having with a scholar and expert who is often described as one of the most influential realist of his generation he has also been one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War his standoff thought which is sometimes described as quote-unquote defensive realism holds that the need for security and ultimately for survival makes states to be aggressive power maximizers states do not cooperate except during temporary alliances but constantly seek to diminish their competitors' power and to enhance their very own he has also spread no punches in arguing just why Ukraine crisis is the West's fault and why the United States and its European allies actually share most of the responsibility for the ongoing crisis please welcome John Joseph Mayor Schreimer political scientist international relations scholar and also the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago he joins us in conversation with News 18's Palki Sharma for a session titled GeoCalculus Cracking the Code let's have a huge round of applause ladies and gentlemen for our esteemed guest thank you Palki over to you thank you and good evening to all of you we live in exciting but dangerous times geopolitically there are many wars and many internal conflicts that are going on across the world there are new alliances being forged and old ones being dismantled and in this context we are exploring a very important and complex question what is the driving force of decision making today is it realism, is it power is it morals or is it a mix of everything also where does India stand in this mix what role will India play in the looming conflicts of this century we look forward to exploring all of this with you Professor Mayor Scheimer welcome to Bharat Rising my first question to you is what would you call the current world order how would you describe it would you say it's still unipolar with America in the lead would you say it's truly multipolar how would you see this I believe that the world today is multipolar most of you in the audience came of age during the unipolar moment which ran from roughly 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed up until about 2017 and the United States was of course the most powerful state on the planet by far during the unipolar moment but by 2017 roughly 2017 Vladimir Putin had rescued Russia from the dead and Russia was back as a great power and China because of all of the economic growth that had taken place during the 1990s and the first 17 years of the 21st century was also a great power so we're now in a system where there are three great powers the United States China and Russia what about India where do you see India standing in this and do you see India then as a bridging power trying to bridge different ideological camps or is India just tilting things in the direction that suited well I would say first of all India is hiring great power the two building blocks of power in the international system are population size and wealth you need a great deal of wealth and you need a lot of people to qualify as a great power the reason that China was not considered a great power until recently was because it didn't have the wealth it certainly had the population size what China now has is population size plus wealth what India has for sure is population size and it's growing wealthier and wealthier by the year but I think according to most accounts it is not yet reached the point where it qualifies as a great power nevertheless there is no question that India is a major power and it is in a very important way caught in between those three great powers because India has all sorts of potential problems with China mainly revolving around the border between those two countries India has very close relations with both Russia and the United States and from the American point of view that causes problems because the Americans don't want India to have good relations with Russia but of course from India's point of view it makes good sense to have good relations with Russia so relations between India and the United States have been somewhat testy they've been very good in terms of relations with Russia and the question of China is I think a looming problem for India but nevertheless the world that India operates in now is very complicated and India is going to have a very complicated task moving forward dealing with this world Is another way of looking at it this that India is best poised to make the most of this complicated situation because India can talk to and do business with all camps I think at some point India will have to make some hard choices I think the most interesting question is what happens between India China and the United States my sense is that China will continue to grow more powerful that it will build a potent blue water navy and it will try to project power into the Persian Gulf and it will therefore move through the Indian ocean and this will not make the Indians happy and will push the Americans and the Indians closer together In the event of a conflict between India and China do you think Russia will be forced to take a side I think if there were a conflict between India and China the Russians would do everything they could to sit on the fence and to not get committed the Russians have no interest in having bad relations with either China or India so if there was hopefully there will not be a conflict between India and China I think the Russians would do everything they could to stay far away You have said in the past that great powers will always seek hegemony or dominance over others you say that India is an aspiring great power when it does become a great power do you think I would do the same because any of the rhetoric that comes with these hegemonic tendencies My basic view of international politics is that the ideal situation is to be a hegemon in your region of the world and to make sure that there is no other hegemon on the planet and I basically argue that the United States is the only regional hegemon in the world it's a hegemon in the western hemisphere and the United States goes to great lengths to make sure that no other country dominates its region that's why we dominate the western hemisphere and that's why in the 20th century we played a key role in putting imperial Germany, imperial Japan Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the scrap heap of history the United States does not tolerate peer competitors at the same time I believe it makes eminently good sense for China to dominate Asia I think that as China grows more powerful economically it will try to dominate Asia and I think from China's point of view that makes good sense from America's point of view it does not make good sense and certainly from India's point of view it does not make good sense for China to dominate Asia just one final point I would argue that if India were to grow more powerful than China and the Chinese economy were to falter and India's economy was to take off and India looked like it could dominate Asia it would try to dominate Asia not because of Indian culture or Indian politics because that's just the way great power politics work the best way to survive in the international system would be really powerful interesting let's talk about the Ukraine war now and you've accused the west of poking the Russian bear it's been two years it's a frozen conflict no side is making much headway and Putin has won a record fifth term in power how do you see this war ending and what do you think the west should do should they stop military aid to Ukraine I believe that it's actually not a conflict I believe that the Russians are winning the war and that the Russians will end up with an ugly victory I believe the Russians now control about 20% of Ukrainian territory the balance of power has shifted decisively in Russia's favor in terms of both weaponry and manpower which are of great importance in a war of attrition like the one you see taking place in Ukraine and what I think is going to happen is that the Russians will end up conquering about 40% of Ukrainian territory I think they now have a next four oblasts plus the Crimea this is I want to underline that this is just my guess is that they will end up annexing four more oblasts and they will end up with roughly 40% of Ukrainian territory and what will be left is a dysfunctional rump state Ukraine in other words will be a dysfunctional rump state that the Russians will go to great lengths over time to make sure is politically and economically weak so that it cannot become a part of NATO but that I think is the likely outcome that's the military end that you're talking about what about the political end do you think Ukraine will end up joining the NATO no I think politically that the Russians will go to great lengths to make sure Ukraine doesn't join NATO and I think that the west will not bring a dysfunctional Ukraine into the alliance so I think that it will not Ukraine will not become part of NATO do you then think the west should stop the military aid to Ukraine because the American aid is tied in the congress and the Europeans are still struggling to find the money to fund this war yes this is a great question I believe that it is best for Ukraine and I want to underline that I believe it is best for Ukraine to now end the war to reach a settlement with the Russians and that means two things one Ukraine must sever all of its security relations with the west not just give up but severing NATO Ukraine should become a truly neutral state by severing its military or security ties with the west because Russia's principal concern is the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO that the Russians say to a person is an existential threat and they do not accept that so I think it's imperative that Ukraine become a neutral state and then the other thing is I think it's very important that the United States cut off all assistance to Ukraine and that the Europeans collectively provide aid economic aid not military aid to Ukraine moving forward until it gets on its feet to the question of the aid in a bit but you've said that Ukraine should become a neutral state and you've argued in the past against NATO expansion to the east the argument from the other side is that that's not a choice for Russia to make which side Ukraine should go to that's not something that Moscow gets to decide plus recent polls have said that close to 70% Ukrainians want to be part of the NATO so there is realism and then there is public opinion and in most leaders are swayed by public opinion so if Ukrainians want to join the NATO what should the leadership do? well the thing is that Ukraine for obvious reasons at this point would like to join NATO but this would be a fundamental mistake because if they join or try to join NATO their country is going to be wrecked if Ukraine had never made any attempt to join NATO Ukraine would be intact today Crimea would be part of Ukraine those 4.0 blasts that have been already next to Russia would still be part of Ukraine this war is all about NATO expansion into Ukraine if the west had not pushed hard to bring Ukraine into NATO starting in 2008 there would have been no major crisis in 2014 there would have been no war in 2022 and Ukraine would be intact so the argument that Ukraine has a right as a sovereign democracy to join NATO makes people feel good when they hear that because we love to talk about the rights in the west but the fact is talking about the right to join NATO and pushing Ukraine to join NATO has led to the destruction of NATO and in my personal opinion that is a horrendous disaster Russia's war has also led to the expansion of NATO in the last 2 years but you talked about the west stopping military aid America stopping military aid if and when that happens what message would it send to other players for instance Xi Jinping what would stop him from seeing a Ukraine in Taiwan there is this argument that if the United States cuts and runs or loses in Ukraine that this will have significant effects in East Asia because Xi Jinping will think that the United States will fight in East Asia if China behaves aggressively I do not believe for one second that Xi Jinping or the Chinese elite thinks that the United States for example will not fight over Taiwan Joe Biden has said on four separate occasions that the United States will fight for Taiwan there is no doubt in my mind that the United States will fight for Taiwan because Taiwan is of great strategic importance to the United States and the United States as I said earlier in my comments is determined to contain China so I do not believe that losing in Ukraine and I want to be clear here I do think the United States is in the process of losing in Ukraine I do not think there is a deterrent position in East Asia vis-a-vis the Chinese the thing is that we do not know for sure that Joe Biden will be around until the end of this year to make that decision vis-a-vis Taiwan having said that do you think that Xi Jinping is going to attack Taiwan in this decade? No I do not think that Xi Jinping is going to attack Taiwan anytime soon and there are reasons for that one of the main reasons is that for him or for China to attack Taiwan it has to cross a large body of water and amphibious operations are among the most difficult military operations you can ask an army to perform it is very difficult to cross a body of water as large as the Taiwan so the task that the Chinese have set for themselves if they decide to attack Taiwan would be a formidable one the second point is China has not fought a war since 1979 just think about that the United States of America is fighting wars all the time the United States has a highly primed military combat the Chinese military has not fought a war in a long time it's a rusty military and we know from watching how the Russians performed in Ukraine in the early stages of that war armies take time to get used to fighting wars to fighting battles you just don't take an army that hasn't fought a war in a long time and send it into battle and expect it to do well so what I'm telling you here is that the Chinese would have to perform an extremely difficult military task launching an amphibious operation across the Taiwan Strait number one and number two they don't have a highly tuned military that can perform that difficult task but the logic says the China will not attack but leaders do not always operate on logic and the region is a powder keg so there is always the possibility of conflict breaking out if that happens my question is what role do you see India playing there because India controls the entry to the Malacca Strait India has an agreement with the US to allow the aircraft to refuel at Indian bases do you think India will have a role and will it support America militarily in the conflict my sense is that if a conflict were to break out it would not break out over Taiwan for the reasons that I just stipulated I think the most dangerous area in East Asia is the South China Sea and I would not be surprised if a conflict broke out between the Philippines and China and the United States got dragged in which then goes to your question what India do I think that India in that event would provide indirect support for the United States I don't think that India would get involved in the fighting I think if conflict broke out at a low level the Americans would pretty much handle it by themselves maybe with the Philippines by their side in the fight if they played it into a larger war I think the Japanese South Koreans and Australians would be likely to come in before the Indians but it is possible that India would come in the problem that India faces is that it has to protect its home waters and it has to protect its border with China and I think the last thing India is going to be anxious to do is join the fight and get into a war with India excuse me with China I think it's in India's advantage in the scenario that you described to provide indirect assistance to the Americans and do as little as possible to help the Americans that will not make the Americans happy but that I think is in India's national interest you mentioned the Chinese economy and they're not in the best phase they have way too many challenges the world is talking about decoupling, de-risking, friend-shoring do you think Xi Jinping revealed his hand too soon that he should have waited for a few more years before openly challenging the US there's no question that it was in China's interest as Deng Xiaoping pointed out many many years ago for China to rise as quietly as possible and not in any way threaten the Americans and I believe that the Chinese by and large tried to do that but the problem is that the United States eventually came to see that China was growing economically and militarily more powerful and we started telling ourselves stories about how China might end up being a really formidable military foe now you want to remember this is very important when the United States started to pursue a policy of engagement towards China in the early 1990s which was designed to make China rich we believed that China would eventually become a democracy and when it became a democracy it would get along very well with other democracies like the United States like India, like Japan because democracies never fight against each other in the story that we told ourselves now I want to be clear I don't believe that story but the vast majority of foreign policy experts in the West do believe that story but the problem in that story is that China did not become a democracy so what happened here is it got richer and richer it began to build larger military forces and even though it didn't in my opinion do much to provoke the Americans the mere fact that it wasn't a democracy combined with all that military might that it was developing forced the Americans to abandon engagement and move to a containment policy the funny thing is that China does call itself a democracy with Chinese characteristics but you have said in the past that the US foolishly fed the rise of economic rise of China the US is now working very closely with India do you foresee a potential rivalry with India in the future no just to go back to the Chinese-American case as some of you remember in the early cold war China and the Soviet Union were on one side and the Americans were on the other and then starting with Nixon and Kissinger in the early 70s we brought the Chinese over to our side so it was the Americans and the Chinese versus the Soviet Union during that second half of the cold war we had a vested interest in helping China to get rich because as China got rich it helped us contain the Soviet Union when the cold war ended when the cold war ended and the Soviet Union went away my argument is we no longer have a vested interest in helping China to get rich now let's go to the India question at this point in time the United States has a deep-seated interest in seeing India grow wealthier and militarily more powerful because India can help the United States contain China India is a member of the Quad if China develops a powerful projection, naval projection capability into the Gulf area India will play a key role in helping the United States deal with that scenario we have a vested interest in helping India grow if, however, China at some point in the future goes the way of the Soviet Union China breaks up it's much weaker tomorrow than it is today and India continues to grow more and more powerful you can rest assured the United States will put its gun sights on India all I can say is that American policymakers do not learn from their own history they also supported the rise of Pakistan to counterbalance India and that did not go very well we are out of time but I have to ask you one last question how do you see the Gaza war ending we know that you have criticized Israel's actions very strongly which is also a contrast with how you see Palestine versus Ukraine but how do you see the end to this conflict I think the Gaza war from Israel's point of view is a disaster it is important to understand that Israel conquered Gaza in 1967 after the 1967 war Israel ended up with the West Bank and with Gaza and they built some settlements in Gaza after 1967 and they stationed military forces in Gaza after 1967 in 2005 Ariel Sharon who was a super hawkish individual and who was Prime Minister of Israel at the time pulled all of the Israeli settlements and the Israeli military out of Gaza and basically turned it into a giant open air prison but there were no Israeli settlements or military forces inside of Gaza Sharon understood that was not in Israel's national interest because Gaza was like a hornet's nest for the Israelis well if you look at what's happened as a result of October 7th the Israelis are back in Gaza they have large scale military forces there and they plan to stay there at the same time there is virtually no chance that Israel is going to defeat Hamas so they are going to have significant resistance from Hamas they're stuck in Gaza and world opinion and this includes countries like India which favor the two state solution and the United States which favors the two state solution are going to put enormous pressure on Israel over time to move to a two state solution which Israel doesn't want to do all of this is to say Israel is in real trouble I have a lot of questions we are completely out of time thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your insights thank you indeed it's interesting that you call the two state policy that India holds to the present conflict at illusion ladies and gentlemen once again thank you for this engaging conversation with our guest political scientist John Miersheimer expressing his insights his recommendations his very crucial and sometimes very interesting observations about geopolitics on just why the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis firmly believing the reckless expansion of NATO that provoked Russia and in his concluding remarks how he holds Israel responsible for the present turmoil in Gaza so very controversial statements there but he is also someone who is extremely respected in geopolitical circles so that was ladies and gentlemen John Miersheimer but don't forget for the big event that will happen in just a few hours from now the grand finale which promises to be a mesmerizing evening perfect end to a power pie packed today we also have our guest ready for the next session so like we promised Bharat's march as a global leader is much about its economic arrival as about its rich and diverse social cultural soft power and what better way to really invite the proceedings a group of very distinguished artists whose compositions have made our country stand out on the global music map their creations are a synthesis of not only music from east and west but also the classical forms from north and southern India transcending geo-cultural boundaries they are ladies and gentlemen a quintessential embodiment of India's Shakti please put your hands together let's have a nice round of applause for our next guests and our Grammy award winners Shankar Mahadevan V. Selva Ganesh Ganesh Raja Gopalan and Rakesh Charasya in conversation with my colleague Anand Narsaman warm welcome wonderful to have you to the evening amongst us let's have a huge loud round of applause ladies and gentlemen our shining stars not 1, 2, 3 we have 4 Grammy winners among us ladies and gentlemen this is a very very special moment personally for me and also for us at the news AT network and the entire family and I must say it because this is a group of geniuses to get them together on a platform like Rising Bharat is a historic moment it's a phenomenal moment to get 4 Grammy winners who amongst them have actually won 3 of them with Shakti and Rakesh Charasya Ji has won 2 Grammys this year 2024 so this group Shakti is a phenomenal one and Ustad Zakhar Hussain we are missing you sir Ustad Ji we are missing you but to have all of them here from the far corner the renowned violinist brothers Ganesh Kumbres so Mr. Ganesh Raja Gopalan who's flown in all the way from Seattle for us to be here with us if you heard of Viku Vinayakram then that's the pedigree that follows so from the Ghatam to the Kanjira if the father did we are what the father did with Ghatam so Selva Ganesh Ji thank you very very much and I am going back to many years ago I shouldn't have said that but yes I first met him in college and I was an emcee and he was performing and there were others who said and I remember Viku sir telling me that's my son and he's not playing the Ghatam but whatever he plays people will remember the Kanjira that's what he's done so fantastic and I hope Viku sir gets well soon thank you very much Rakesh Chaurasi Ji thank you very much for doing this now he is getting into compositions and into the realms where many would not want to go but as a flottist he's taking another Karana another legacy forward