Teasing Questions- Exploring Disconnects in Contemporary India (Selected Speeches of Vice President of India)

About the Book A selection of speeches by Vice President of India M. Hamid Ansari delivered at university convocations, national and international conferences, seminars, professional gatherings, book launches, ceremonial events and formal inaugurations during his tenure, held between August 2007 and December 2012 lends form to some of the most intriguing and unsettling questions and issues gnawing at the very base of the world's largest democracy.

The speeches, covering a wide range of themes in the national agenda, are a revelation of the core elements designing the current and future states of affairs in India.

About the Author Mohammad Hamid Ansari is the Vice President of India since August 2007. He is the only person to get elected to this high office for two consecutive terms since Dr S. Radhakrishnan.

Besides being the exofficio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, Shri Ansari is the President of Indian Council of World Affairs and the Indian Institute of Public Administration, and Chancellor of the universities of Delhi, Panjab and Pondicherry.

In a diplomatic career of almost four decades, Shri Ansari served as India's Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; High Commissioner to Australia and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in New York.

He was a Visiting Professor at the Centre for West Asian and African Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Academy for Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. He was also Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University and the Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities.

He is the author of Travelling Through Conflict: Essays on the Politics of West Asia (2008) and has edited, Iran Today: Twenty Five Years After The Islamic Revolution (2005).

Preface An n occupational hazard associated with the office of the Vice President of India is the demand for a fair amount of public speaking in response to invitations to formal functions. These include university convocations and inaugural addresses to national and international conferences, seminars, professional gatherings and the like. The themes of the addresses or speeches are sometimes defined by the occasion: at others, chosen by the speaker. The present volume consists of a selection of these speeches made by me in the five years of my first tenure and the first five months of my second tenure. They cover the period from August 2007 to December 2012. The rationale for exploring disconnects is to identify the pitfalls and help prepare ourselves for avoiding them. Such an intellectual Endeavour, to some extent at least, enlightens and precedes corrective action.

In selecting the theme or subject of a speech, my intention most of the time was to go beyond the obvious, mutely or boldly official, and to focus instead on the challenges that we as a people and a society are facing today or are likely to face in the foreseeable future. I found resonance of my approach in a passage, cited on the preceding page, penned by B.G. Varghese in his book Rage, Reconciliation and Security: Managing India's Diversities.

It has been said with much justice that there are times when the present breaks the shackles of the past to create the future, and there are also times when the past creates the future by breaking the shackles of the present. Perhaps we in present-day India need to deal with both imperatives; hence the importance of correct choices. If the perspectives delineated in this volume succeed in some measure in drawing the reader's attention to these, I would consider my effort amply rewarded.

**Contents and Sample Pages**