PVPF 2024

Interview with Kapil Gupta, author of "India Vision"

on Jan 18, 2022

A marketeer to the core, Kapil Gupta is an entrepreneur, both in thought and in style who believes that the power of a message & its delivery is what causes true revolutions. Kapil Gupta is a parallel entrepreneur who believes in providing true meaning to the various organizations he runs and builds them in sync with one another. He jokingly calls himself the jack of all trades and a master of some. He is the founder and CEO of OMLogic (India’s leading digital marketing agency), PragatiE (a virtual exhibition platform), Frontlist (portal for the publishing industry), Solh (a mental wellness platform & his current passion project), and Advit Toys (a board games company).

Kapil is a true believer in new-age equality, which for him is deep rooted in providing equal opportunity to all. He believes that the current world of equality is still a 20th century way of working, which is rotten with personal benefits in the forms of subsidies & reservations (women, LGBTQ, religion, race, caste, region based). For true equality, everybody MUST be treated equally. Period.

Frontlist: In the month of December 2021, Prostitutes won their long-fought voting and social rights from the highest court of the country. As a gender equality representative, please share your thoughts on this new and bright victory.

Kapil: Prostitution in my view is a profession. Perhaps I count it as one of the oldest professions. I have been a strong supporter of the legalisation of prostitution in India. Although I say there should be a structure made around it but then the structure should be made around every profession. I’m very glad that they got their voting and social rights from the Supreme Court but I still believe the profession should be taken to a next level and in fact, when I worked as an activist for women safety after the brutal Delhi gang rape in 2012, one of the aspects I actually talked about was of legalisation of prostitution. I think it's an individual choice and if a woman or a man perhaps wants to take it up as a profession in their life then that is completely their personal choice.

Frontlist: The way the NDA government has been working towards the betterment of the country, does it reflect your vision to see India as a Developed Nation as mentioned in your book?

Kapil: I’ve never seen a government as successful or unsuccessful. I think a government is partly successful and partly unsuccessful. You need to see the figures for taking out the percentage. But the question arises, which missions of the government are successful and in favour or which missions or agendas see a downfall?

Although I love the current government for taking a stand on a variety of different issues. I hate them for taking the ‘Farm Laws’ back. Now I do not say anything on whether the farm laws were good or bad. But in a country like ours, a law has been passed from both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and it has just been taken back because of some ‘Mob Activity’. And I keep calling them a mob...

The mob sat somewhere and protested and for that reason, the law had to be reverted, it is very shameful. I don’t think it is a victory of democracy at all. It is just a victory of what I always keep calling ‘The Mob rule’.

Frontlist: As the country will mark its 73rd Republic Day, Farmers are still grappling with the security of their livelihood. Do you think that we are on the right path as a nation when our primary sector is under a huge threat?

Kapil: First of all, I do not consider farming as a noble profession. Just like prostitution, it is also any other common profession. Interestingly farming is the only profession where the person doing the role has earned nothing in their life on their own. They’ve taken the lands from their forefathers and they are using it to generate employment. Yes, there should be a space for constant change and growth in every profession but calling farming a noble profession, I’m completely against it. If small farmers think that farming is a non-profitable profession then the government should look for nationalising farming in the country. Well, I’ve written a chapter about it into my book, everyone should definitely read it.

Frontlist: How are you hoping to see the UP Elections 2022 that has come so close especially when it was previously fought primarily on a religious basis?

Kapil: What do you mean by ‘previously’? It’ll still be fought on the same basis. It is Uttar Pradesh. It is not about what politicians want but in fact, it's the people’s ask. People there like it that way. They are too much into religion, caste and every other kind of discrimination.

From my point of view, I think once again Yogi (Yogi Adityanath, Current CM of UP) is going to win. First, I think he has not done too much wrong. Second, if not ‘he’ then ‘who’? So in our country, I think that has been the core theme of all the elections that the citizens keep running out of options.

Frontlist: Do you think ‘India Vision - New Age Equality’ is the roadmap that our country is moving on or is it just a visionary thought in the corner of your head?

Kapil: I don’t think it's into the corner of my head but definitely, it is visionary. And not just India but I don’t think any country on the globe is moving through this. We are still living in the 20th-century definition of equality which is why I decided to write this book. We still live in a society where we keep thinking of social justice as bringing the oppressed one up and not equality. I stand by equality. I always had and I always will but not any kind of subsidies or privileges to any individual or community based on their religion, caste, nationality, gender or any other thing.

While we keep saying equality, we just keep giving the subsidies or privileges to a certain community which I don’t think is the right way to go. Equality means 100% equality.

Frontlist: ‘India Vision - New Age Equality’ also revolves around Gender Equality. Don’t you think that if this term would have ever existed, Feminists and Activists who fight for the rights and freedom of women would have been at the best of their mental peace?

Kapil: See going with this question I’ll mention that I have got a huge problem with the feminists and activists. All they do is misuse the privilege that they are fighting for the lower strata of the society. Why will a woman who is empowered need a reserved seat in a metro? Why will the woman who is empowered require a six month holiday from the business owner? Where is the equality in that?

I think equality needs to be looked upon differently. Only government privileges may exist for certain strata of society. Even the government to an extent should also not intervene in that. Let equality be generated like this over a period of time.
You cannot set the past wrong, you cannot work on repressions. The problem I have with almost all the activism is that they think past as wrong but the past is actually right in the context of the past. Society evolves, the needs of the citizen’s change and it needs to be looked at that way. In fact, these issues should be visualised with the changing needs of the society and evolution of humans and this is how we should start looking at gender equality versus what was wrong earlier.

Frontlist: How do you differentiate between a democracy and a democratic republic? Share your views in context of India?

Kapil: Well if 50.1% of the population gets up and tells that we want to be a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, we will not become a Hindu Rashtra because we are not a pure democracy. We are a democratic republic. Democratic republic means that we’re governed by the constitution. The entire country revolves around this book known as the Constitution. People need to understand this. We cannot have a majority simply standing and asking for something.

UK is a democracy. That is why 50.1% of people could get up and say that we do not want to be a part of the European Union and thus ‘Brexit’ happened. In India, you cannot do that which is why people keep shouting for the referendum in Jammu & Kashmir which is unconstitutional.

Frontlist: Do you consider the Constitution as an absolute document of act or guidelines open for interpretation?

Kapil: I think it's an absolute document of an act which should evolve with the changing needs of the society. So I don’t necessarily say it's open for interpretation but it should be open for evolution as the structure of the society changes.

Frontlist: Every person evolves over a period of time. Do you think the constitution of India should also be evolved?

Kapil: Absolutely! It should be evolved.

Frontlist: We’ve got the right to freedom of opinion and expression in our constitution but the government opposes it every time someone tries to speak up. What’s your opinion on this?

Kapil: I’m a very strong believer in the freedom of speech. We need to make smarter audiences versus smarter orators. This is a huge challenge to cope up. The assumption that the listener is stupid and will misuse the information or wrongly use the information fed to them in itself is a problem. However, there are areas where the government can come in and intervene. The challenge in all this is if you look at the social platforms of today like Facebook and Twitter; they’ve become the policing zone that determines what you should read and what you should not. Who made them the owner? And where is the authenticity? Where is the actual control? Yeah! Government should not be allowed to take control but then it should be the same with all other parties as well.