So Indian democracy has been under attack, has been very badly weakened, and now it’s fighting back. And I’m confident that it’ll fight back, Gandhi said.If you see the election results, does it give you more hope for a democracy in India? he was asked.Yeah, I mean, it does. But it’s not good enough to say that the Indian voter is resilient and knowledgeable. Because the Indian voter is informed by a whole set of structures.So if we don’t have a level playing field, the voter might be very knowledgeable and resilient. It doesn’t really matter, he said.We fought an election with our bank accounts frozen. I don’t know any democracy where that’s happened. Maybe that type of thing happened in Syria or used to happen in Iraq. But we literally sat during our election and spoke to our treasurer and he says, well, we have no money.Now, you can have a resilient voter. You still need to run campaigns. You still need to have conversations. You still need to have meetings, he said.I’ve got 20-plus cases in me. I’m the only person in Indian history to get a prison sentence for defamation. We have a chief minister who’s in jail right now. So, mean, one way of saying it is, yes, the Indian voter is very resilient, and he stands like a rock. Absolutely, he does.
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