PB: What is your take on cultural relativism?

AS: Where it's most diverting is in the field of relativist ethics. It is argued: How can you criticize other countries because in their context, their ethics is the right one? That view overlooks the immensely constructive possibility of arguments that are used in the context of a debate in one culture but where the argument draws also from another. And it's always been like that, even religion. Buddhism arose in India. It's the only agnostic world religion. But it went out to Japan, China, Korea, all kinds of places from India. In contrast, the purely cultural relativist position would be to ask: What has a Korean or a Japanese got to learn from the Indians on Buddhism?

A similar thing can be said today. To say of some practice that's prevalent in some countries, like stoning of adulterous woman in Afghanistan or genital mutilation in North Africa, - "Look, that's their practice, you can't criticize," is ridiculous. That critique may not survive even in Somalia or Afghanistan, provided a free discussion is possible, involving women as well as men, rather than dissidents being threatened or being put in jail. One of the strongest arguments that shows the weakness of the cultural relativist dismissal of dissent is the need that authorities have to put local dissidents in jail for taking a - "foreign" point of view.

And there are some strong intellectual arguments for universalism. Just as Chomsky claims that our ability to use certain forms of syntax and language are present in all human beings, similarly there are a number of capacities to think on your own, if you try, that exist among different people.

PB: Some of your critics in India - and there are some, true to the argumentative tradition - have said that in this book you have indulged in the same kind of partisan selection of evidence from history that you find in others. They say that spanning more than 2,000 years, for your point about tolerance and pluralism and the inclusionary view of Indian identity, you choose figures like the Emperor Ashoka in the third century bc, Emperor Akbar of the 16th century, and then Rabindranath Tagore in the 19th/20th century. And they say that others could choose historical figures representing the opposite: orthodoxy, intolerance, etc.

AS: I am not claiming that Akbar or Ashoka represent anything like the - "essential India." My point is that they represent a very strong perspective that has come up again and again, which includes a lot of tolerance. But of course there is also a long history of extreme intolerance and nastiness. Indian culture has this variety that needs acknowledgement. Since the focus has been so much on the other side, I am using my focus as a correction. I have quite an elaborate discussion of science and mathematics in India. This is not a claim that everyone was a scientist in India. It's a claim that that tradition exists.

When we try to draw on the past, we draw always in a selective basis. When the French and the British and the Americans were drawing on the European past in saying there is a democratic tradition, and they referred to Athens and ancient Greece - over a small number of centuries from sixth, fifth, fourth, third century bc - they were not looking at the Goths and Visigoths and Ostrogoths. Because in the context of the debate on democracy in America in the late 18th or early 19th century, the relevant reference is Athenian democracy. Ostrogoths, Vikings, and in a different way, intolerant masters of the Inquisition are no less - "European" than ancient Greeks. Nevertheless, one could say if you're looking for representative Europe, it ain't like that.

Looking back on our history, it is not surprising that Gandhi or Nehru would emphasize those parts of the Indian tradition of public reasoning that were particularly relevant for modern India - the first poor country which chose to be an uncompromisingly democratic, multi-party state. I don't think any of them claimed that their focus was the only tradition that existed in India.

This point is worth mentioning because there is a tendency in the West to think of something of which they approve as being a Western thought. Describing Iranian dissidents as - "ambassadors of European thought" is to add insult to injury because there is also a history in Iran of democracy going back to the third century bc. And to be told that no, no, no, you are actually implants of John Stuart Mill, misdescribes the nature of Iranian dissidence.

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