Winklets: Visions through Versions

The Enemies of the Idea of India

Essay
By Ramachandra Guha
Copyright© Ramachandra Guha
First published in Outlook, January 2011
Winklet edition first published in November 2011 by DC Books in
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The Enemies of the Idea of India
Ramachandra Guha
 A Note on the Series
Winklets: Visions through Versions
Well researched and insightful yet not pedantic, Winklets are short e-
books covering current topics. Written by well established authors, these
essays and stories are tailor-made for intelligent readers who want more
than just a superficial overview. Pushing the boundaries of thought,
Winklets provide a broader perspective of the world around you.
 A Note on the Author
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and columnist based in Bangalore. His
writings cover a variety of themes including politics, environment,
biography and history. Before becoming a full-time writer, Guha taught at
the University of Oslo, Stanford University and Yale University and also at
the Indian Institute of Science. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin and also the Indo–American Community Chair Visiting Professor
at the University of California. For the academic year 2011–2 he is the
Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the
London School of Economics.
Some of Guha’s important works include The Unquiet Woods: Ecological
Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989),
Environmentalism: A Global History (2000), A Corner of a Foreign Field:
The Indian History of a British Sport (2002), and India after Gandhi: The
History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2007). He was the recipient of
the Padma Bhushan in 2009.
 The Enemies of the Idea of India
I

Let me begin with two epiphanies.

A few years ago, I visited a book fair held on the seafront in Kochi. The
local publishers were represented, as were Indian and foreign firms. In
between the stall of Oxford University Press and a shop stocking the works
in Malayalam translation of Marx, Engels and Lenin, I came across a man
selling, of all things, pickles from Bikaner. His wares were contained in
large open buckets, one containing aam ka murabba, another shalgam ka
achar. I asked the young man how he had come from a far northern desert
to participate in a book fair in this southern port. ‘Maine suna ki Keral mein
mela lag raha tha’, he answered, ‘aur maine socha ki wahan ek dukan khol
doon.’ (I heard that there was some kind of fair on in Kerala, so I thought,
why don’t I bid for a stall there?). Thus spoke a pickle man in a salad bowl
nation, adding his charmingly naïve logic to an apparently illogical country.
Some months after this encounter, I was travelling by car from Patiala to
Amritsar. It was a hot day, and the countryside was monotonous. I fell
asleep, and woke when the car slowed down. We were now in the market
town of Khanna. I scanned the buildings and their signs. One, particularly,
caught my attention: it read, ‘Indian Bank, Khanna Branch, Head Office,
Rajaji Salai, Chennai.’ I was charmed and uplifted, sentiments that
(especially for the young) perhaps need explaining. For ‘Rajaji’ was C.
Rajagopachari, the scholar-statesman who had been Governor-General of
India, Chief Minister of Madras State, founder of the free-market Swatantra
Party, and author of best-selling versions of the Ramayana and
Mahabharata. In his person he embodied all the Punjabi stereotypes about
the Madrasi; he was slight, wore thick glasses, had never played a single
sport or consumed an alcoholic beverage, and was vegetarian. Yet here was
evidence of his enduring legacy in the Punjab, where—as that sign
informed me—there were many whisky-guzzling, chicken-eating Sikh
farmers banking their savings in an institution headquartered in Chennai on
a road named after a dhoti-wearing, rasam-drinking, austere Tamil scholar.
 The poet Wallace Stegner once remarked that ‘…the tracing of ideas is a
guessing game. We can’t tell who first had an idea—we can only tell who
first had it influentially, who formulated it in some form, poem or equation
or picture, that others could stumble upon with the shock of recognition.’ So
it is with the idea of India. Rabindranath Tagore used the phrase in a letter
to a friend in 1921, writing that ‘…the idea of India is against the intense
consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others, which
inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts.’ There may have been others who
used the phrase before him. But it was only in 1997, when Sunil Khilnani
used it as the title of his wonderful book, that his fellow citizens stumbled
with a shock of recognition at what the idea of India represented.
The nationalisms of 19th century Europe, which provided the template
for many later nationalisms (including those of Israel and Pakistan) united
citizens around a single religion, a single language, and a common enemy.
On the other hand, as articulated by Tagore, Gandhi and the Indian
Constitution, the idea of India contains within its capacious borders more
social diversity than any other nation. It privileges no particular religion,
does not enforce a common language, and does not promote patriotism by
identifying or demonising a common external (or internal) enemy.
As citizens, we ubiquitously use a humdrum manifestation of the miracle
of India — namely, our currency notes, which have a portrait of Gandhi on
one side and the national parliament on the other, and its denomination
written in seventeen languages, indeed seventeen different scripts, each
encoding a distinct, sophisticated, ancient and proud literary culture. Since
rupee notes are an artefact of everyday life, we do not see or sense their
significance. However, in its own way our paper currency is as marvellous
and strange as the Bikaneri achar-vendor in Kochi or the signboard of the
Southern bank in the Punjab.

II

The plural, inclusive, idea of India has three enemies. The best known is
the notion of a Hindu Rashtra, as represented in an erratic fashion by the
Bharatiya Janata Party and in a more resolute (or more bigoted) manner by
the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the
Bajrang Dal and other associated organisations. When Khilnani published
his book in 1997, Hindutva appeared to be the major challenge to the idea
of India. To the ‘theoretically untidy, improvising, pluralist approach’ of
Gandhi and Nehru, he wrote, the Sangh Parivar offered the alternative of ‘a
culturally and ethnically cleaned-up homogeneous community with a
singular Indian citizenship, defended by a state that had both God and
nuclear warheads on its side.’
Living in North India between 1988 and 1994, I experienced this
challenge at first and second hand—by seeing my Muslim friends board
trains under assumed Hindu names, by visiting Bhagalpur after the riots
provoked by Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra, by witnessing a more general
polarising of public opinion on religious lines. The poisonous residues of
those years carried on well into the next decade, as illustrated by the
pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
Shortly after the Gujarat riots, I was driving to the Mumbai airport from
the south of the city, when I noticed the tricolour hanging out of every home
on Muhammad Ali Road. As I proceeded northwards, beyond Parel into
Dadar and Shivaji Park, the flags were not visible anymore. The contrast
puzzled me, till I reached the airport and saw the live telecast of an India-
Pakistan cricket match. It remains one of the saddest memories of my life—
the memory of how, intimidated by decades of harassment and violence at
the hands of Hindutva bigots, so many of my fellow citizens had to shame
themselves into a public display of patriotism solely on account of their
faith.
The threat to India from Hindutva bigotry was at its most intense from
about 1989 to about 2004. When judged by political (and social) influence
the threat appears to have receded, although the terrorist activities, recently
exposed, of sundry sadhvis and swamis suggests that one should not be too
sanguine on this score. At any rate, right-wing religious fundamentalism has
now been matched in force and influence by a challenge to the idea of India
from the extreme left—that posed by the Communist Party of India
(Maoist). Reports and essays by Smita Gupta, Nandini Sundar, Arundhati
Roy, and others have documented in detail how the rise of the Maoists is
linked to the dispossession of the tribals of central and eastern India. These
tribals live in India’s densest forests, along its fastest-flowing rivers, and
atop its richest veins of iron ore and bauxite. As the country has
industrialised, they have lost their homes and livelihoods to logging
projects, dams and mines which are directed by and benefit more powerful
social forces.
 Even when they are not dispossessed, the tribals are actively
discriminated against. Demographically concentrated in a few hill districts,
they do not constitute a vote bank whose voice can, at least symbolically, be
attended to by the political class. There is a contrast here with Dalits (as
well as Muslims), who are more evenly distributed across India, and hence
have a far greater impact on the outcome of state and national elections.
Lacking adequate representation in the higher civil services, and without a
political voice anyway, the tribals are subject to contempt and
condescension by the officials of the forest, police, revenue, education and
health departments, who are obliged by law to serve the adivasis but
oriented in practice to harass and exploit them.
Altogether, the tribals have gained least, and lost most from sixty-three
years of democracy and development in independent India. This is not to
say that Dalits and Muslims have not been discriminated against. However,
their concerns have found powerful expression through democratically
elected parties and politicians. The tribals have not even had that
consolation. If there was no adivasi Ambedkar, there has been no adivasi
Mayawati either. This is the vacuum that the Maoists have sought to fill,
with increasing success, and also with increasing sympathy among sections
of the Indian intelligentsia.
Metropolitan intellectuals have been fascinated by left-wing rebels for a
very long time. From Mao through Ché Guevera and Fidel Castro, onto
Sub-Commandate Marcos of the Mexican province of Chiapas and
Comrade Kishenji of (as the news reports have it) ‘somewhere on the
Jharkhand-West Bengal border’, guerrillas in the forests or highlands have
attracted admiring comment from writers and poets themselves living in the
cities. The contrast, indeed, explains the intensity of their commitment.
Because they themselves lead bourgeois lifestyles in a land where so many
are so poor, these writers sublimate their guilt by an effusive and excessive
endorsement of armed rebels who claim to speak on behalf of the deprived
and disadvantaged.
In the summer of 2006, I travelled through the district of Dantewada in
Chattisgarh State, as part of a group of independent citizens studying the
tragic fall-out of Salwa Judum, a vigilante army promoted by the State
Government. We found that the Judum had polarised adivasi society, fuelled
numerous murders and killings, and displaced at least 60,000 people from
their homes. Disgust and revulsion at the policies of the state did not,
however, blind us to the errors of the other side. The Maoists had
contributed to an escalating cycle of violence, by beheading alleged
‘informers’, assassinating village headmen, and setting off land mines
which killed civilians as well as policemen. They had also blown up
schools, transmission lines and railway tracks, and stopped paramedics
from working in villages which were under their influence.
I knew beforehand that the Naxalites were no Gandhians, but it took a
conversation with a Muria tribal to see them in clearer light. This man, a
first-generation graduate and former school-teacher who had been rendered
homeless by the civil war, explained to me how behind the macho image of
an armed revolutionary lay a man who lacked any moral courage
whatsoever. His words ring in my ears still—he said, in Hindi, Naxaliyon ko
himmat nahin hain ki wo hathiyaron gaon ké bahar chhod ké hamare beech
mein aake behas karé. (The Naxalites do not have the guts to leave their
weapons outside our village and then come and have a discussion with us.)
It was an arresting remark, deep in insight and understanding about the real
meanings of democracy. Despite his machismo and certitude, the Naxalite
was actually so fearful of his own self that he dare not engage in democratic
debate—even with poor and unarmed villagers. If he really had confidence
in his beliefs, why would he seek, in the first instance, to enforce them at
the point of a gun?
The remark of the Muria teacher also allowed me to see that Maoist
violence was not random or anarchic, but highly focused. Schools were
attacked because the revolutionaries did not want children to be exposed to
any pedagogy other than their own. The Maoists regularly murdered
panchayat members and leaders (including many women) because they saw
electoral democracy, even—or perhaps especially—at the village level, as a
threat to their vision of a one-party state.
In the short-term, the Maoists may sometimes provide the tribal succour
against the exactions of the forest guard or moneylender. In the medium and
long-term, they provide no real solution. For them, the tribals are essentially
cannon-fodder, a stepping-stone in a larger war against the Indian State
which will end—or so their ideologues claim—with the Red Flag being
planted on the Red Fort in thirty or forty years time. In enacting this fantasy
they will further escalate the violence and expose the adivasis to even more
suffering and discontent.
 III

The history of postcolonial India, like the history of interwar Europe, is

one of an unstable democratic regime in the middle, challenged from the
left and right by absolutist ideologies that seek to replace it. In January
1948 Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu fanatic; six weeks later,
under the orders of Moscow, the then undivided Communist Party of India
launched an armed insurrection against the Indian state. Through resolute
leadership, the threats from left and right were contained, and a democratic
Constitution put in place. However, ever since, the Hindu Rashtra and the
Communist dictatorship have stood as sometimes recessive, sometimes
aggressive, alternatives to the democratic idea of India.
The third challenge to the idea of India also goes back to the founding of
the nation. This is the notion that the Indian Union is an artificial cobbling
together of many rival nationalities that must, in time, break up into its
constituent parts. In the summer of 1946 a section of the Nagas announced
that once the British departed, they would form an independent nation of
their own. In the summer of 1947, similar claims were put forward by
(among others) the Dewan of Travancore, the Maharaja of Kashmir, and the
Nizam of Hyderabad. August 15 1947 was marked as a day of mourning by
the Dravida Kazhagam, an influential Tamil party that likewise wished to
strike out for an independent nation. Some Sikhs were upset by the division
of British India into India and Pakistan, since they had hoped that a third
nation, Khalistan, would also be brought into being.
Many British imperialists believed that an independent and united India
would not survive. These skeptics included the former Prime Minister,
Winston Churchill, as well as officials serving in the sub-continent at the
time of the transfer of power. The Mizo Hills, then known as the Lushai
Hills, were governed by a man named A. R. H. Macdonald. In March 1947,
Macdonald wrote to his immediate superior that his ‘advice to the Lushais,
since the very beginning of Lushai politics at the end of the War, has been
until very recently not to trouble themselves yet about the problem of their
future relationship to the rest of India: nobody can possibly foretell what
India will be like even two years from now, or even whether there will be
an India in the unitary political sense. I would not encourage my small
daughter to commit herself to vows of lifelong spinsterhood; but I would
regard it as an even worse crime to betroth her in infancy to a boy who was
himself still undeveloped.’
In subsequent years, the infant developed sufficiently to persuade or
coerce its recalcitrant partners to unite with it. But the process took time
and money, and spilt a great deal of blood. Between 1947 and 1950 more
than five hundred princely states were integrated into the Union. In 1963
the Dravidian parties formally dropped the plank of independence. The
Mizos launched a rebellion in 1965; two decades later their leaders laid
down arms and successfully entered the democratic process. The 1980s
witnessed a movement for Sikh separatism in the Punjab; this was finally
tamed, albeit with much loss of life. The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed
much violence instigated by the United Liberation Front of Assam; this too,
has abated, with a vast majority of Assamese seeking a better life within
India rather than a separate homeland for themselves.
In 2011, three nationalist insurgencies retain their force and relevance;
those in Nagaland, Manipur, and Kashmir. The first of these has been led
for more than three decades by a Thangkul Naga named T. Muivah. In the
late 1980s, the Dutch writer Bertil Lintner trekked across the India-Burma
border to meet the Naga leader in his jungle hideout. Muivah told him that
‘…the only hope the Nagas had to achieve their independence would be if
India itself broke up.’ The Nagas had made contact with Sikh and Kashmiri
separatists, and Muivah ‘…fervently hoped a similar movement would
emerge among the Tamils of southern India—which would indeed plunge
the country into the anarchy he desired.’
The Tamils remain quite content to live within the Indian Union, and (the
recent reappearance of Bhindranwale posters notwithstanding) the Sikh
separatists are no longer active or influential. But the Valley of Kashmir
remains on the boil; Manipur is home to dozens of armed insurgent groups;
and despite thirteen years of cease-fire no agreement has yet been reached
between the Government of India and Muivah’s men.
The discontent in these three states has four major causes: their distance,
geographical and cultural, from the Indian heartland; the power of the idea
of national independence among young men; the impunity from arrest and
prosecution of soldiers, with their actions against civilians then leading to
more discontent; and the support by the Centre to manipulative and corrupt
local politicians. These insurgents have their own crimes to account for, as
for instance the expulsion of Pandits in the case of Kashmir, and the steady
extortion of civilians by Manipuri and Naga rebels. They are also often
funded by foreign nations. That said, the principal reason for the conflict
remains the intense commitment of the rebels on the one side, and the
excessive use of force by the state on the other.
Those with a detached, long-term view may point out that it took
centuries for countries like Spain and the United Kingdom to successfully
subdue the ethnic minorities that live on their borders. There is also the
example of the American Civil War, and of China’s troubles in Tibet and
Xinjiang. These are all illustrations of the pain, the anguish, the bitterness
and the brutality that often accompanies the process of nation-building.
India, however, claims to be a modern democracy. The standards it sets
itself must be different from those acceptable in aristocratic regimes of the
19th century or totalitarian states of the present time. To reconcile the
Kashmiris, Manipuris and Nagas to the idea of India must involve methods
other than coercion or bribery.
The state’s reliance on repression, and the rebels’ insistence on full
national sovereignty, has led (in Tagore’s phrase) to ‘ceaseless conflicts’. If
the violence is to end, the Government of India must do far more to reach
out to the people of Kashmir, Nagaland, and Manipur. The notorious Armed
Forces Special Powers Act must be repealed. Policemen and soliders guilty
of human rights violations must be punished. The constant interference with
the functioning of democratically elected state governments must end.
At the same time, one should not romanticise little nationalisms, for they
can be rather ugly themselves. The intolerance of Naga activists was on
display in the summer of 2010, when they blockaded the Imphal Valley for
more than two months, denying access to food, petrol and medicines
intended for ordinary civilians. The narrow-minded-ness (and perhaps
paranoia) of Meitei insurgents is evident in their banning DVDs of Hindi
films from being shown even in private homes. As for Kashmir, the readers
may wish to consult an essay by Yoginder Sikand in the Economic and
Political Weekly laying out the reactionary, medievalist worldview of Syed
Ali Shah Geelani.
There is also the question of viability. The small, hilly, land-locked
independent homelands the radicals dream of, will, in an economic and
political sense, be unviable. (And an independent Kashmir will most likely
become a receptacle for Al Qaeda.) If Tamils and Mizos can live within the
Indian Union there is no reason why the Meiteis and Nagas cannot.
Educated, English-speaking, and characterised by a high level of gender
equality, these communities can access the best jobs in the whole of India
(in fact, some of their members already do). Why then restrict oneself to a
small, circumscribed, piece of turf?
The idea of India is plural and inclusive. The Constitution of India is
flexible and accomodative. As it stands, India incorporates a greater variety
of religions (whether born in its soil or imported) than any other nation in
human history. It has, among things, a Sikh majority state (the Punjab),
three Christian majority states (Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya), a
Muslim majority state (Jammu and Kashmir), Muslim majority districts in
Kerala and West Bengal, and districts dominated by Buddhists in Kashmir
and Arunachal. India also has a greater variety of languages and literatures
than any other nation, and a federal form of government. If flexibility is
promoted more sincerely and accomodation implemented more faithfully,
one can yet arrive at a resolution which allows for real autonomy, such that
Manipuris and Nagas and Kashmiris have the freedom both to determine
the pattern of their lives in their own state, and to seek, if they so wish,
opportunities to work and live in the other states of the Union.

IV

These three conceptual and ideological challenges (Hindu

fundamentalism, Communist dictatorship and ethnic separatism) all date to
the founding of the nation. To these have, more recently been added, three
more mundane and materialist challenges. These are inequality, corruption
and environmental degradation.
In India today, there are gross and apparently growing inequalities of
income, wealth, consumption, property, access to quality education and
health care and avenues for dignified employment. These diverse disparities
in turn run along diverse social axes; among them caste, religion, ethnicity,
region, and gender. Upper castes (and Brahmins and Banias in particular)
go to better schools and better hospitals, and are massively over-represented
in the professional and entrepreneurial classes. In economic as well as
social terms, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians are significantly better off than
Muslims. The tribes of central India, as we have seen, may be even worse
off than Muslims. Those who live in the west and south of the country have
more regular sources of income than those who live in the north or east. All
across India per capita income is much higher in cities than in the
countryside. Finally, in every social stratum, men have easier access to
education, health care, and employment opportunities than do women.
I am not a socialist, still less a Marxist. The history of Communism
shows that those who seek by force to create a perfectly equal society only
end up suppressing citizens, catalysing violence, and creating a new class of
nomenklatura who enjoy greater privileges and even greater immunity from
public scrutiny than did medieval monarchs. The state of North Korea today
is perfect proof of the idiocy and barbarity of the search for perfect equality.
As that wise Indian, André Béteille, always points out, what we must
strive for is reasonable equality of opportunity, not absolute equality of
result. That we have plainly not achieved, hence the disparities noted above.
The life chances of a Dalit remain grossly inferior to that of a Brahmin; of a
Muslim to that of a Hindu; of a tribal to that of a Hindu or Muslim; of a
villager to that of a city dweller; of an Oriya or Jharkhandi to that of a
Maharashtrian or Tamil.
These inequalities are intensified by corruption, the diversion of public
money meant to generate income and employment, or to provide social
services, into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. In a novel written in
the early 1950s, Verrier Elwin noted how homespun khadi, once ‘the
symbol of insurgence against British rule’, had now become ‘an almost
official uniform, the sign of authority and power.’ The rebel had become the
governor; even so, the association of khadi with decency and honesty
stayed on awhile. I am just about old enough to remember a time when
Indian politicians were, by and large, not selfish and narrow-minded, and
not on the take. As Prime Minister between 1964 and 1966, Lal Bahadur
Shastri presided over a Cabinet of largely honest men and women. His
colleague, Gulzarilal Nanda, lived out his last days in a dark, poky flat in
Ahmedabad, with no car, no fridge, etc. The politicians of the left and right
were often as upright as those in the centre. When, in the 1980s, a robber
raided the home of E. M. S. Namboodiripad, who had served three terms as
Chief Minister of Kerala, he found eight hundred rupees and a gold
sovereign.
 There appear to have been three, overlapping, phases in the evolution of
political corruption in India. The license-permit-quota Raj of the 1950s and
1960s was the first stage. Favours were granted to particular individuals or
firms in return for a consideration. The second stage, inaugurated in the
1970s, involved the ruling party taking a cut, off large defence contracts.
The third stage, which began at the same time but has really intensified only
in the 1990s, has rested on the abuse of state power to allocate—or
misallocate—land and natural resources to friends and cronies.
At the close of the last century, my home town, Bangalore, was a
showpiece for the virtues of liberalisation. Access to global markets had
allowed the skilled workforce of the city to generate vast amounts of
wealth, which in turn spawned a new wave of Indian philanthrophy. At the
beginning of the present decade, my home state, Karnataka, has become a
byword for the darker side of globalisation. The loot of minerals and their
export to China has wreaked large scale environmental damage, and
polluted the political system through the buying and selling of legislators. A
state once represented to the country and the world by N. R. Narayana
Murthy was now being represented to itself by Janardhan Reddy.
The massive profits on mining are in part because of high international
prices, but in greater part because the state charges a very low royalty on
ore, allows many consignents to proceeed to the ports without any royalty
payments, and does not impose any environmental or labour standards on
the mine operators. In October 2010, an attempt was made by the
Opposition parties in Karnataka to unseat the Government. According to
news reports, individual MLAs were offered close to 50 crore rupees to
change sides. Since many stayed where they were, it can safely be assumed
that their party bid higher to retain them. Several thousand crores may have
changed hands on this single transaction alone. It is a reasonable
assumption that those who were willing to pay that amount were reckoning
on making at least ten times as much money in the course of their
government’s tenure. One may further, and equally reasonably, assume that
the commission paid to politicians by private entrepreneurs was one-tenth
of their estimated proceeds. These are crude estimates, but it is clear that
illegal and criminal profiteering on mining in Karnataka exceeds tens of
thousands of crores annually.
Mining may have caused even more destruction to the fabric of
democracy in other states, notably Goa and Orissa. As a report in Outlook
by Smruti Koppikar suggests, Maharashtra appears to be next on the list.
Recently, I spent several hours in Puné with India’s finest ecologist,
Madhav Gadgil. Gadgil had just been on a tour of the Western Ghats. He
found a thriving agrarian economy, based on the cultivation of fruits and
spices and on fishing. However, there was now a massive land grab afoot,
with promoters of mines, power plants and luxury resorts working with
legislators and ministers to displace local residents and destroy forests and
estuaries.
To suppress opposition to these projects, the district authorities routinely
impose Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which prohibits public
gatherings of more than five people. Himself followed (against his will) by
a police escort, Gadgil found an atmosphere of terror and intimidation,
which, as he recalled, ‘…struck me full in the face as I stood, for the first
time in my life, flanked by policemen on three sides talking to Muslim
fishermen of Nate village expressing their fear of total destruction of their
livelihoods as the nuclear power plant comes up and swallows up their
entire estuary as part of its security zone.’
As Gadgil and I spoke, there was a knock on the door. It was the
postman, who was carrying, among other things, a sheaf of some sixty
postcards from the residents of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts. This was
apparently an everyday occurrence. Since I do not read Marathi, I asked
Gadgil to translate a letter for me. It was from a girl in high school, who
urged the scientist to keep the marauders away and save the social and
natural integrity of her district.
The mining and power sector boom is in part propelled by the fetish of
achieving 9% growth, which, it is said in some circles in New Delhi, is
necessary for India to achieve superpower status. Those who most actively
promote this ambition are a certain kind of Cabinet Minister, a certain kind
of corporate titan and a certain kind of newspaper editor. They are all, I
believe, beset with a deep inferiority complex, whereby they wish
desperately to be placed on equal terms in international fora with the
politicians, billionaires and editors of the West.
The superpower aspiration is as much a male, macho thing as Naxalism
or Hindutva. It is likewise a fantasy, and an equally dangerous one. It has
already spawned much conflict in its wake. With public policy
overwhelmingly determined by the desire to achieve 9% growth, we have
handed over peasant and tribal lands for the most destructive forms of
industrial and mining activity. By making that one number the sine qua non
of national pride and honour, the Central Government has encouraged State
Governments to promote corruption, criminality, social strife, and massive
and possibly irreversible environmental degradation.
To be sure, the Indian economy needs to grow at a steady rate to lift our
people out of poverty. However, we must look more carefully at the
components of that growth, at its distributive impacts across and between
generations. We must assess different enterprises and sectors according to
the kinds of employment they generate, and their varying impacts on nature.
We must ensure that all processes of land acquisition and natural resource
allocation are fair, just, and transparent. The costs of a narrow-minded focus
on GDP growth, and of a fetishisation of a particular number—8%, 9%,
10%—can be colossal. For, the GDP accounts do not subtract for the loss of
water, land and vegetation polluted or destroyed by open cast mining.
The market can promote efficiency and productivity, but not ecological
sustainability or social justice. The market does not value the needs of poor
people who have no money, it does not value the future, and it does not
value the right of other species to exist. It is thus in the rational interest of
miners and industrialists to externalise the costs of degradation and
pollution. (The laws to prevent this exist on the statute books, but, with a
few spectacular exceptions, are not implemented.)
India today is thus an environmental basket-case, characterised by falling
water tables, dead rivers, massively high rates of air pollution and soil
erosion, the unregulated disposal of toxic wastes, and the decimation of
forests and biodiversity. These processes are caused by a combination of
inequality and corruption. Politicians in the Centre and the States, acting at
the behest of the wealthy, pass on the costs of environmental damage to the
poor and to future generations.

On November 4 1948, B. R. Ambedkar introduced a draft report in the

Constituent Assembly. This, with a few modifications, was to become the
Constitution of India. Ambedkar said of the document he had overseen that
‘it is workable, it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country
together both in peace time and in war time. Indeed, if I may say so, if
things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we
had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that, Man was vile.’
Sixty-two years later, the conclusion must be that in our failures to fulfil
the Constitutional ideals of freedom, fraternity and equality, one kind of
man has been particularly vile—those mandated by law to promote these
ideals in office. For, the scale and ubiquity of political corruption means
that perhaps the most powerful enemy of the idea of India now is the Indian
state.
The Congress has played a leading role here. As the party of the freedom
movement, it helped define the idea of India. As the party which, after
Independence, promoted unity and democracy, it deepened the idea of
India. However, over the past three decades the party and its leaders have
worked principally to damage and degrade the idea of India.
One may as well name names. Indira Gandhi, herself a child of the
freedom struggle, schooled in the traditions of Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru,
converted a decentralised, democratic party with robust district and state
committees into a family firm; and destroyed the autonomy and integrity of
the civil services by making loyalty to the leader the principal criteria of
professional advancement. Rajiv Gandhi, a modern-minded man who said
he was going to take India into the twenty-first century, opened the locks in
the Ayodhya shrine and then, to please the bigots on the other side, annulled
the progressive Supreme Court judgement in the Shah Bano case, thus
catalysing two decades of religious rivalry and rioting that left thousands of
Indians dead and many more homeless (and also incidentally opened the
space for Hindutva to move from the political margins to centre-stage).
Manmohan Singh, himself a man of personal integrity, presides over a
political regime stinking with corruption, watching as thousands of crores
illegally change hands as commission, on the sanctioning of Special
Economic Zones, infrastructure and communication schemes, and energy
projects.
It is important to name Congress leaders at the Centre, since Chief
Ministers in the States have been encouraged by them to act likewise. The
example of Indira Gandhi surely inspired M. Karunanidhi and Parkash
Singh Badal (to name no others) to groom their children to take over the
party after them. Had the senior Mrs Gandhi not promoted the notion of the
‘committed’ bureaucrat, we would not have had such a large-scale
subversion of the administrative machinery, with every state government
assigning departments to civil servants on the basis of caste, ideology and
personal loyalty rather than competence. Had Rajiv Gandhi not so readily
banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses at the behest of reactionary
clerics, Ashok Chavan would surely not have, so obediently followed the
instructions of another kind of bigot, and withdrawn Rohinton Mistry’s
novel Such a Long Journey from the curriculum of Mumbai University.
Had Manmohan Singh not been so reluctant to act against his tainted
Ministers, B. S. Yediyurappa would not so easily have ridden out press
exposure of his corruption and that of his Cabinet colleagues. Finally, had
the junior Mrs Gandhi not promoted a cult of her husband and mother-in-
law, naming scheme after scheme after them, Mayawati could scarcely have
launched her own extravagant projects of personal memorialisation at
public expense.
The short-sightedness and amoralism of the post-Shastri Congress has
permeated the political system. The JD(S), the RJD and the SP were, from
the beginning, personal fiefdoms. The Shiv Sena and its splinter, the MNS,
cannot be other than narrow-minded and chauvinist. However, some other
regional parties, such as the DMK and the Akali Dal, have a history of
progressive social reform. Surely, had the Congress not shown the way,
there would have been some attempts to deepen that legacy instead of
subordinating party and state to the interests of a single family.
In terms of personal integrity and decency, the Parliamentary communists
may be the least odious of all our politicians. They do not, for example,
have Swiss bank accounts. They are not often to be seen in five-star hotels.
Many of them have a deep sympathy with the poor and excluded. However,
they have, when in power, energetically promoted party loyalists in the
bureaucracy, the police, and perhaps most depressingly, the academy.
Kolkata University, once an institution of high quality, has been destroyed
on account of all senior positions having to be vetted, first by the party’s
ideologues in Alimuddin Street.
The ideology itself is astonishingly archaic. The Nepali Maoist ideologue
Baburam Bhattarai says his party wishes to ‘try out a new model which will
incorporate the ideas of Gandhi, Lohia, Marx, Lenin and be a synthesis of
all’. His leader, Comrade Prachanda, often speaks of the Buddha with
admiration. Their Indian comrades, on the other hand, get all their
inspiration from more distant quarters.
 The annual congresses of the CPI (M) always feature four portraits on the
dais. These are of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—that is to say, two 19th
century German thinkers, and two 20th century Russian dictators. I do hope
that in my lifetime I will see pictures placed at CPI (M) meetings of
representative Indian democrats, such as (for example) Gandhi and
Ambedkar.

VI

To function moderately well, a democracy needs three sectors to pull

their weight—the state, private enterprise, and civil society. In the 1950s
and 1960s, when entrepreneurs were timid and risk-averse, and civil society
was non-existent, the state performed superbly well. In 2011, it appears to
be civil society which is performing best of all. There are hundreds of hard-
working and selfless social activists, working in the fields of education,
health, environment, women’s rights, consumer protection, civil liberties
and more. The private sector, on the other hand, is marked by both
visionaries and marauders; whereas ten years ago it was the
philanthrophists who defined the trends, now it is the crooks and cronies
who appear to enjoy more power and influence.
To restore faith in the idea of India, a more capable, focused and honest
political class may be necessary.
Meanwhile, we can take succour in the manifest intentions of the
citizenry, who, despite the provocations of the extremes, continue to hold
democracy and diversity in high regard. Outside of Gujarat, hardline
Hindutva has repeatedly been rejected by the electorate (as demonstrated
most recently in Bihar, where keeping Narendra Modi out of their campaign
helped the NDA to a spectacular victory in the state elections). The acts of
Islamist terror in Mumbai, Delhi, and elsewhere have not been followed by
religious scapegoating or rioting. Likewise, peasants and adivasis in areas
of Maoist influence regularly defy them by participating enthusiastically in
state and national elections, thus proving, incidentally, that ours is not a
democracy for the bourgeoisie alone. And while the Centre must be more
sensitive to the sentiments of citizens on our borderlands, it is striking that,
even as the stone-throwing proceeded in Kashmir, shawl merchants were
seen conducting brisk business in Kerala, while thousands of students from
the two states in the north-east hardest hit by insurgency—Manipur and
Nagaland—studied peacably and with dignity in Bangalore, Puné and
Hyderabad.
The decent instincts of the citizenry were also at display when they
rejected, quietly and without any fuss, the campaign launched before the
2004 campaign to portray the leader of the Congress party as a foreigner.
By speaking of the dangers of a ‘Rome Raj’ led by ‘Antonia Maino
Gandhi’, the xenophobes hoped to catalyse the base instincts of Indians in
general and Hindus in particular. Outside the Hindutva faithful, the call
found no resonance whatsoever. Voters made it clear that they would judge
Mrs Gandhi by other criteria. Her birth in Italy and her Catholic upbringing
were immaterial. By four decades of continuous residence on Indian soil
she had claimed the right to be an Indian. To be sure, there remain many
Indians who are unhappy with the promotion of a family cult, and many
others who are critical of the Congress President’s social and economic
policies. But her European ancestry does not matter at all. Like the
Rajasthani achar-seller in Kochi, she is free, as a citizen of India, to
exercise her vocation where she pleases. We will assess her wares as they
appear to us—and accept or reject them as we please.
Based as it is on dialogue, compromise, reciprocity and accomodation,
the idea of India does not appeal to those who seek quick and total solutions
to human problems. It thus does not seem to satisfy ideologues of left or
right, as well as romantic populists. To these skeptics, let me offer one final
vignette. One Independence Day, I was driving from Bangalore to Melkoté,
a temple town in southern Karnataka which incidentally also houses a
celebrated Gandhian ashram. The first part of the drive was humdrum,
through the ever extending conurbation of Greater Bangalore. Then we
turned off the Mysore highway, and the countryside became more varied
and interesting. Somewhere between Mandya and Melkoté we passed a
bullock cart. Three young boys were sitting in it; one wore a suit with
spectacles, a second a bandgala with a Mysore peta atop his little head, the
third a mere loin cloth.
The boys had evidently just come back from a function in their school,
where, to mark 15th August, they had chosen to play the roles of B. R.
Ambedkar, M. Visvesvaraya, and M. K. Gandhi, respectively. Remarkably,
none of their heroes were native Kannada speakers. Yet all spoke directly to
their present and future. The boys knew and revered Ambedkar as the
person who gave dignity and hope for the oppressed; knew and revered
Visvesvaraya for using modern technology for the social good, as in the
canals from the Kaveri that irrigated their own fathers’ fields; and knew and
revered Gandhi for promoting religious harmony and leading, non-
violently, the country’s fight for freedom.
The vision of those young boys was capaciously inclusive. Ideologists
may oppose Ambedkar to Gandhi; historians may know that Gandhi and
Visvesvaraya disagreed on the importance of industrialisation in economic
development. Yet the boys understood what partisans and scholars do not—
that our country today needs all three, for all were Indians of decency and
integrity, all seeking sincerely to mitigate human suffering, all embodying
legacies worthy of being deepened in our own age. What I saw that day was
a spontaneous, magnificent illustration of the idea of India. To more fully
redeem that idea would mean, among other things, matching the pluralism
that those schoolboys articulated, with the democracy defended so precisely
by the Muria school-teacher in Dantewada.
This article was published in Outlook on January 31, 2011.
 Table of Contents
A Note on the Series
A Note on the Author
The Enemies of the Idea of India