So

i'm going to go back to te, you know, the early frame that you mention in your book, which is that of the hedgehog, which was schopenhauer's hedgehog, and then freut took it over and it up and fed it and nurtured it, and then ft handed it over to you. In my mind, that's kind of how it's going. Hssi, so now, you know what, through this beautiful metaphor, what you kind of postulate is that, you know, the attention of our early freedom fighters shifted from, you know, the foreigner, which is the british, from the colonial force, whether they took it for granted or whether they assumed that that force would be gone at some point, to each other. And there was sort of this fraternal mingling. And the one cor consideration there was violence, right? And i find the metaphor very beautiful, hedgehogs coming close together, then prickling each other, pushing apart, and all of that. So to take that forward, can you, you know, talk about how, from those decades, from the failure of e our resistance to the partition of bengal up on independence. What are the various ways in which the hedgehogs came together, pushed away, came together, pushed away? And what do i cont that's such a nice image to thank you for using that mater form. Thank you. Thank you.

Ha ha, ha akes, i'll be very pryd t do it quickly, because i think i'm giving very long answers. So one of the ways to think about it would be that these hedgehogs or, you know, there's a big coalition terthethe sadaci moment, in the gother moment, which is, you know, international where there's even a declaration of government of india in kabul, where actually moslems do a higret large number of moslems leave india in cabul, only to be then sent back, and the have a huge crack down, you know. So you have movementso, you know, coming together. And i think that the question of the hedgehog question is most horeper in most systematically and most sustained way. Really dis discussed pag ganti and abetger and their fight, which iave elaborated on, whether we can live together. What are the conditions of living together. The question of extemacy. What might be the right fok of gandi is an extemacy for abetkeri is a kind of recognition that actually there is a huge amount of civil war. The reason these hedgehogs are apart, these, these hedgehogs might be apart, but they are apart as in the casts, because this is a chasm of violence that has insured that they are separate. This is not their separate because they are just hurting each other because of their intimacy. He's saying there is no intimacy between casts and, you know, and there's. And that lack of intimacy is produced by violence, by a civil war in indian history, and which is repeated now. He uses a wa, you know, that the nazis could learn from the hindus, he says in oneinn his books, because, you know, they, they don't even have to display the violence now too to have control over it. So so you have this story, you know, this question of closeness, violence, intimacy, fraternity as an sovereignty, which is the life and death question. Who, who controls the state? Who controls the power of life over others? That is what sovereign power is. And for that, the answer always also, then denabetker steers away from the hands of, you know, for want of a better word, from garntey's death politics, individual death politics. And we know more about moving it towards republican order, likenes, i say, the democratic formation. But i think the moment oft the real head comes to it in the partition violence. And and there, you know, i think a patal's owning of this idea that this a fratricide, it is a civil war, allows him to kind of reorder that violence into a kind of new republican form. Which is to say that this violence, to me, i revise the study of partition violence as simply something that history does to people, because i am very critical of, well, let's useo less negative word. I'm very surprised that people think that in this, this narration of partitian violence, every one is a victim. No one has perpetrated that violence. Howis that possible? I now, a million people die. So that's why i was interested in seeing its political nature. So it was seen to be a guilt free violence on the one side. And nother side, it was seen to be something that history extracted out of people the price of history. Or it was seen as a blame game, you know, ginna paten heru, you know, the british, a kind of revolving game.