Temples, Twitter, same-sex marriage... Dr Palanivel Thiaga Rajan had a lot more than finance and politics in mind in this exclusive chat with Brut.
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00:00I do see the point.
00:01No, I just got to finish the story just so you know.
00:03Cut it out of the interview, you don't want.
00:04But you got to know what the truth is.
00:05So, around the 1860s...
00:07We won't cut it out of the interview.
00:08So, tougher to be a politician versus a corporate banker?
00:11Much, much, much tougher.
00:12Should India allow same-sex marriage?
00:14This is Pallanivel Thyagarajan for Brute.
00:17The Finance Minister of Tamil Nadu, Mr. Pallanivel Thyagarajan,
00:20thank you so much for speaking to Brute today.
00:22I'm going to ask you...
00:25We'll get to the finance bit and everything else in just a few seconds.
00:28But I'm going to ask you my favourite question via social media.
00:31For a long time, I believe from 2016 to 2021,
00:35you were also heading the IT, DMK IT wing.
00:38Tell us something...
00:40Tell the common man something about social media that they don't know.
00:47It is more powerful than you think in some ways
00:51and much less powerful than you think in other ways.
00:54In the sense that, especially YouTube,
00:57in my understanding,
00:59is probably the single kind of most widely watched medium anywhere.
01:05And that's largely because
01:09almost all the phones sold in India are Android phones
01:11and they come with YouTube already installed
01:13and you don't need an account, you don't need to register.
01:16So, the utilisation and reach of YouTube is amazing, phenomenal.
01:20Like, you know, I've been recognised on the streets of Perth,
01:24Western Australia, or Toronto, or London, or some place
01:29because YouTube is just ubiquitous,
01:31particularly in the Tamil diaspora and Tamil community.
01:34On the other hand, if you think you can win even an MLA election
01:38just because you dominate social media, you're completely wrong.
01:43What voters want on the ground is personal connect.
01:47I think social media has a couple of advantages.
01:50It's the ultimate democratic medium.
01:52Anybody who wants can start a channel or start a handle or, you know, page, right?
01:57And as attractive as you can make yourself be, you get followers.
02:01So, it doesn't require large investment and infrastructure
02:04like having a TV channel or radio station.
02:06That's the good news.
02:08The bad news is, because the entry cost is zero,
02:11you can find a lot of nonsense, right?
02:14And it's a bit surprising. Think about it this way.
02:17There are huge propaganda factories out there.
02:20In fact, in my opinion, the real propaganda machines are not social media,
02:23not WhatsApp, not, you know, Facebook and Twitter.
02:26It's the TV channels and the newspapers that can be bought.
02:30Because people assume that if they see it on a computer,
02:33it may or may not be true. I mean, or on a phone.
02:36But when they see it on TV, they think it's true.
02:39In fact, it's completely not the case.
02:41There's huge amounts of propaganda on traditional media.
02:44It's democratic, can't win elections, but super important.
02:48Just one quick question more on social media.
02:50And what I want to ask you is that,
02:52do you think social media platforms have a lot of power
02:55and they need some kind of supervision and censoring?
02:58I have changed my mind in the last two weeks.
03:01I know about too much ever since the Twitter take private.
03:05It's very clear that one individual can do whatever he or she wants,
03:10at least for a long time,
03:13before the regulators really swing into action.
03:16So, you know, I used to think that the market
03:19had a natural equilibrium and wouldn't allow like crazies
03:24to kind of, you know, you just have drop-off rates
03:28and people like people wouldn't congregate
03:31at places run by crazies, I thought.
03:34But now I'm not so sure anymore.
03:36So maybe I think there should be some,
03:39I'm not saying there should be censorship,
03:41I'm not saying there should be deep regulation,
03:43I think there should be some accountability.
03:46I'm going to change tracks slightly.
03:48And in an interview with me, Kannimori Karunanidhi told me,
03:52she's an atheist, she doesn't believe in God.
03:55You are known to be a staunch Hindu.
03:57I want to ask you, does it bother you?
03:59How do the dynamics work?
04:01The party that you belong to, the people heading it are atheists?
04:05Yes or no? I mean, this is a very interesting question, right?
04:08I don't flaunt my faith.
04:12I happen to be a believer.
04:14I am a very low-level believer compared to devout believers
04:19in the sense that I don't believe in many rituals.
04:23I don't believe in being in one place at one day.
04:25I don't believe in eating some things on some day
04:27and not some other day.
04:28I don't believe that only if I attend the highly popular festival
04:32I will get the grace of God.
04:34I believe in my own way.
04:35And that belief is constant across time, date, cuisine,
04:40I don't change my…
04:42It's not like this is the most auspicious day, so I should…
04:45That's my way of believing.
04:46Other people may believe differently.
04:48My mother follows all those times.
04:50I don't.
04:51So, the whole point of self-respect and individual choice
04:57is that all of us can co-exist.
04:59What happens when that clashes and we've seen A. Raja come out in news
05:04and he said you are a Shudra prostitute's son till you remain a Hindu.
05:09What do you do in a situation like this?
05:11You know, Mr. Raja has his own interpretation.
05:14Mr. Raja comes from a community that has been oppressed
05:17for hundreds if not thousands of years.
05:20He has an interpretation based on his understanding and his life
05:25and his reading of the papers, of the documents.
05:29He is entitled to his view.
05:31His view doesn't have to affect me in any way.
05:34His view is his view.
05:35My view is my view.
05:36The party didn't call all of us and say reconcile your views
05:39because we have to stand on a religious platform.
05:42We are standing on a social justice, financial inclusion, progress, education, uplift.
05:48Those views have to be common.
05:50Otherwise, we can't stand on the same platform.
05:52You'd call Jaggi Vasudevan a charlatan.
05:54Why did you take on Jaggi Vasudev and call him that?
05:59I want to understand that.
06:00And my supplementary question I'm just going to put there as well.
06:03I want to understand your party has been against Free the Temple movement.
06:10It's been there for a while.
06:12I want to understand whether there was a connect between the two.
06:14There's a lot to unpack there. Let's go one step at a time.
06:17Let's do the trivial stuff first.
06:20I don't have the time or the necessity to take on Jaggi Vasudev.
06:24I think Jaggi Vasudev is a wild, despicable charlatan.
06:28I have always thought that. That view hasn't changed.
06:31That's a personal view.
06:32It's not the view that is integral to my job as finance minister or human resources minister or planning and development minister or economics.
06:40I have a lot of portfolios.
06:41But would you elaborate on it?
06:43In the sense that the main views that I had expressed were when I was an opposition member.
06:49Because it came up in an interview about the Free the Temples, allegedly.
06:55I'm going to come back to that in a minute.
06:57So, in the course of that, I said, if I was ever going to argue with somebody about temple privatization or nationalization,
07:05the last guy I would argue with is this guy.
07:08Because he's not fit to be qualified as, you know, in any way special status to talk about temples.
07:14Who is he?
07:15He sells tickets for five thousand, fifty thousand, five lakhs.
07:18Somebody told me he was sitting in the fanciest box at the World Cup in Qatar, the final, in the greatest hospitality suit.
07:25Right?
07:26Whatever business he's in seems to be a good business.
07:29Right? He's in business.
07:30So, that guy, I said, was not the right guy for me to be answering what the status of temples ought to be.
07:36He had no special status to be the counterparty on my argument.
07:40That's the only reason I had touched him before I got into office.
07:45I made the mistake in the office.
07:47The first interview was from a newspaper that asked me a series of questions about the finances, about the status,
07:53and incidentally asked me, what is your view on this?
07:57I said, my view has not changed.
07:59But this is not a ministerial view.
08:00This is a personal view that I had before I came to office.
08:03And he still has that.
08:04What the reporter did, he first took that and ran one headline on that two days after I became minister,
08:10as if that was my highest priority in life.
08:12And then ran a second piece three days later with all the details of the finances and all the stuff.
08:18So, it was never in my ambition to even touch on the guy.
08:22I have nothing to do with him.
08:23He's not a good person.
08:24My views have not changed.
08:25A lot of complaints have come.
08:27But it's not my day job.
08:28There's a lot of evil in the world.
08:29I'm not designated to be the evil fighter.
08:32Let's take the Madurai Meenakshamman temple or Tirupati or, you know, take big temples.
08:39Padmanabhaswamy temple is a good one.
08:41Who do these temples belong to?
08:43Who do they belong to?
08:44The people.
08:45Yeah, yeah.
08:46But who did they belong to?
08:48They belong to the kings.
08:50Kings.
08:51Okay, I see what you're saying.
08:52So, when they were with the kings, the kings used them both as a source of patronage
08:57as well as a source of divinity or claiming divinity.
09:01I am the protector of the temple, therefore I am closer to God.
09:05This is how it happened in churches, in kings, in, you know, mosques and kings.
09:10Everywhere the ruling elite were with the temples and had ownership.
09:18Just like they had ownership of the kingdom, they had ownership of the temple.
09:20This is the history.
09:21Now you take the Madurai temple, Madurai Meenakshamman temple in my constituency.
09:25At some point it was largely built by the Pandya kings and their predecessors.
09:30At some point it fell into the hands of the Chera kings.
09:33At some other point it fell into the hands of the Cholas when they took over all of it.
09:37At some other point it fell into the hands of the Muslim Kiljis who came down,
09:43the generals who came down from the Mughal empire and then decided to run independently
09:47without paying rent to the Delhi empire.
09:52Then it got taken over by the Vijayanagaram kings, Nayak kings who took over and ran.
09:58And then the Nayak kings went and the East India Company came.
10:02And then the East India Company took over the temple. Right?
10:05Right.
10:06So all of this, who now owns the temple?
10:10You go from East India Company to Government of the United Kingdom, the Queen,
10:14and then to Independence. Who should own this temple?
10:17I do see the point you are making.
10:19No, I just got to finish the story, just so you know. Cut it out of the interview, you don't want.
10:22But you got to know what the truth is. So around the 1860s,
10:25We won't cut it out of the interview.
10:27Around the 1860s, a whole bunch of people went and complained to the new,
10:32after the British East India Company was found to be doing extremely bad things,
10:37and the crown cancelled the charter and the government, the Queen took over the Kingdom of India directly.
10:43After the first charter ran full, the second charter was cancelled halfway,
10:46thrown out, government took assets. Minute the government took all the control,
10:51a lot of people went and complained to the viceroys, the governor generals and said,
10:55these temples are being turned into dens of bad activity. The state needs to take them over.
11:01So in the 1890s or so, in the Madras presidency, a committee of eminent Brahmin gentlemen was formed to go look into the issue.
11:10And they came back and gave a report and said, yes, there is no clear ownership, there is no clear trusteeship,
11:15small temple, my land, my jameen, my panne, I know, it's my family's.
11:20But the king's temple, there is no king left. So they recommended that the crown should take them over.
11:26And they should be regulated and run through government controlled trusts.
11:31So when you say free the temples, I asked two or three questions. Free it from whom?
11:36And give it to whom? If you say is the department less than ideal? Yes, all departments are less than ideal.
11:42If you say is going to be given, who should we give it to? Why should I give it to Jaggi Vasudev?
11:48Is he a special status human being? Who will I give it to? Then there is a bigger problem.
11:53If this is going to be the basis for whatever is to be kind of plus or minus,
12:00where will I elect or select or justify constitutionally who gets to manage or own a temple that belonged only to the king?
12:11I think, Mr. Minister, we will probably need a day at least to talk about this. But I do think that, you know,
12:19there is also a little bit of contradiction in the story that you told me and what we are discussing on free the temples.
12:26But like I said, the contradiction would be that if you look at, and I don't mean to get into the Hindu,
12:32Muslim, Christianity debate here, but because we are talking about free the temple movement,
12:38you do have other religious sites, monuments, which are not under the state. That's one. That's one portion of it.
12:47Nothing is under the state. No, no, let's be very clear. The HRNC board operates independently. We appoint officers,
12:52but their employees don't shift. They don't be one day PWD, one day HRCE, one day housing.
12:59HRCE is HRCE. The minister is from the government, but everybody else operates.
13:02I think the top two officers like commissioner and all that change, but everybody else is within the department, number one.
13:07Number two, there is a waqf board. The waqf board is also administered by the government of Tamil Nadu.
13:13All the ancient mosques are with the waqf. Number three, the Christian churches,
13:17the British government was smart enough that they brought the Church Nationalization Act while they were here itself.
13:24And by nationalization, they set up the Church of South India, the Church of North India, the diocese.
13:30And they moved all the churches out of the Church of England and out of independent hands into these boards by themselves.
13:36Now the question is, are those boards regulated less rigorously than the HRNC board? Answer is maybe.
13:43But that is why we along with other states are now passing new legislation. We already passed one and it was withdrawn for different reasons.
13:51I would love to talk to you about this much, much longer, but I have to get on to some fun questions as I call them,
13:57because we have a young audience and I'd really like to know your views on this. So, moving away from politics for a little bit,
14:04I went through your website and it says, stay current with computer networking and audio systems technology.
14:11Can set up, repair most current home use level systems. So, my team wants to know, can you fix a mixer grinder for dosa idli?
14:18No, that was probably true till only about three, four years ago. I used to be an engineer and I'm pretty good with my hands and I can dismantle and connect things up.
14:27But the technology around networking and IOT and all has changed so dramatically in the last two, three years.
14:35That I probably can't keep up. But till about 2016, 17, 18, I was probably current. Now it's too much.
14:46Was hands on, now it's too much with technology changing. You've of course worked with Standard Chartered, Lehman, others.
14:54You have an MBA, you've done an MS from the US as well. Can you tell us some similarities about being a politician, being in politics,
15:03holding a portfolio and being in the corporate sector?
15:08In fact, this morning when I flew up from Chennai, my next seat was a very senior executive in the media space.
15:17And before that he had worked in the FMCG space, globally and in India. Same guy, FMCG, media.
15:28And we were talking and he was saying, you know, some things are similar, some things are different.
15:32And I said, actually, the higher up I go in a large organization, the more I realized some things are common across all large organizations.
15:42What it takes is vision, administrative kind of skills, understanding of human psychology, organizational design, behavior, alignment of incentives.
15:57You know, just, I don't know, the capacity to manage large complex systems requires roughly the same skill.
16:09I'm not talking about politics now. I'm saying if you're actually sitting as a minister and running a department that has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees,
16:17or in my case, finance department, that oversees, I don't know, 4 lakh crore budget in a 30 lakh crore economy or 25 lakh crore economy,
16:27then it comes down to only three or four things. Can you manage the org structure, the design, the vision, the alignment of incentives, the people part, right?
16:37Can you manage the fisc, the balance sheet, the debt equity ratio equivalent, the interest revenue ratio, the debt to GDP, right?
16:47And can you get the execution skill? Can you have the right workforce with the right talent at the right place to deliver the outcome?
16:56In some sense, all large organizations, from large media companies to large software companies to large banks to large government,
17:06it comes down to these skills and it comes down to these attributes. In the government, in general, we have two, three limitations.
17:14Because political selection processes, whether it's election or nomination, are not based on your resume.
17:23So, tougher to be a politician versus a corporate banker?
17:26Much, much, much tougher.
17:27All right. You visited 60 countries on five continents. I'm sure the number of countries has gone up from the time that I saw this on your website.
17:35All 50 of the United States and six Canadian provinces. That's quite extensive. What's the one best thing about travel?
17:43It opens the mind. You know, you get to see different places, different people, different cultures.
17:49You get to realize there's many ways of thinking of something. And it also, I would say, it's calming and it's humbling.
17:57It's calming in the sense you realize there's such beauty in nature and such tremendous diversity.
18:04And, you know, we are like little cogs in the grand scheme of things.
18:09I'm down to my last two questions. The one is, should India allow same-sex marriage?
18:15I happen to be a libertarian kind of guy. Everybody to their own. So I don't have any reason why the state should intrude into anybody's.
18:27You know, it's only recently decriminalized homosexuality, right? We have, right?
18:34Right. Yes.
18:36So I'm saying it's a progression. If you look around the history of the world, it goes from being very conservative to less and less and less.
18:42So though I'm not a union lawmaker, which is really where the question would apply.
18:47And therefore, in theory, I shouldn't really be answering any hypothetical questions.
18:52My philosophy is broadly to each their own. Why should I try and intrude into somebody else's life?
18:58And my last question is what I wanted to ask you first, which is, should Elon Musk step down as Twitter CEO?
19:04I'd say it's slightly differently, right? I've seen a lot of this around the world.
19:08Unfortunately, especially in the world of high finance, is that if you get successful very quickly and very successful, it's a very dangerous thing.
19:24Because it starts putting the notion in your head that somehow you exist in a different plane than the rest of us.
19:31And I don't mean that in terms of racism or classism. I mean, you start thinking that you're such a genius that you can't get anything wrong.
19:41But you have this unique ability to always see everything perfectly and predict and manage and run and all this stuff.
19:50And I've seen it before in large hedge funds and large banks. In fact, at Lehman, we saw some of that.
19:56And that almost always ends one way. In fact, every time it ends one way, the only question is how long.
20:03And it ends with you getting kind of way ahead of your real abilities.
20:08Because the reality is, and I'll say this in a very, very important message to the youth.
20:14The reality is that you could be successful 100 different ways through a different combination of circumstances.
20:23And you could lose or fail at something 100 different ways.
20:28So it's very hard when you're successful to either assume that you're very smart or very good or uniquely qualified.
20:35And the same way, just because you fail at something, you shouldn't let that failure determine your self-worth or your self-understanding or realization.
20:45Because nothing is permanent, right? Everything is redeemable. All failure is redeemable. All success is temporary.
20:53There's no guarantee of any of this stuff. But most people who get really successful really fast, forget that.
20:59They start believing that somehow they have this unique vision and they have unique.
21:04I mean, I would think most people would agree with me that the last couple of months have not been kind to either Twitter or to Elon Musk's reputation in the world.
21:13All right. Mr. Minister, thank you so much for being candid and speaking to Brute today. Thank you very much.