Witnesses to our Times
by
A. D. Moddie
Dedication
This, my last book, is dedicated to my late son, Behram (Varji),
who lived through these times in his sixty years, both as one of Richard Bach’s “ happy otters of the universe”, and as a victim of modern civilization’s pressures;
who so kindly began to put my manuscript on his computer in 2006 in our Bhimtal cottage, but could not live to complete it for me;
who also found aesthetic joy in photographing the flowers in our Bhimtal garden, leaving a beautiful memory of him;
and who is so sadly missed by friends and family.
A. D. Moddie
Mumbai, India
September 2008
PS: and now I wish to thank my son Riaz who put this manuscript on the Internet at admoddie.blogspot.com and at Project Gutenberg and can be contacted at indiariaz@yahoo.com.
Witnesses to Our Times
CHAPTERS
Preface
The Owl’s Nest
University and World War II: Opening of the Real World
Interlude to the Civil Service
District Days: Reversion to Indigenous Style?
Madhubani I: Famine and Flood
Madhubani: Work Choices Before State Planning
State Headquarters: Signals of the Future
Introduction to Markets: A Contrast
Behemoth Sirkar: Realities from the Outside
Nehru: Discoverer of India
The Nehruvian State: Another Failed Mahabharata – I
The Nehruvian State: Another Failed Mahabharata – II
Witnesses to India’s Sixtieth Swadeshi Anniversary
Voices in the Wind
Babylon: The Game of Chance and Time Perspectives
Terror I: “In a Time of Darkness”
Terror II: “The Eye Begins to See”
Beyond Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilizations
“Is Man God’s Debris?”: The Web of Life
God or…?
“The Great Sense”: Genesis to Cosmogenesis
Witnesses to Our Time: Preface
“Life is not so much what happens to you, as by the way
Your mind looks at what happens”
- Khalil Gibran
There are biographies and studies of social phenomena. This book does not pretend to be either. A friend who read this manuscript said, “Such a small life, and such a firsthand commentary of the big time of the Twentieth century”. And so I have summoned many witnesses to our times from small Kumaoni farmers to Nehru, to bureaucrats and politicians in high places, to international figures to my grand-daughter of nine, to a range of scientists. Then, I have projected major issues of our time through these witnesses, and in the last chapters, through distinguished scientists, philosophers and poets of our amazing times.
That small life relates to the drastic transition from a cocoon in the last decades of the Pax Britannica in North Bengal, to the tectonic changes and harsh realities in the first five years of early life in World War II (the Burma Theatre), the freedom struggle, the Bengal Famine (1943), the Great Calcutta Killing (1946), and the Partition of hearts, minds and territories (1947); multiple tragedies before Jehadic terror. No time to think then beyond coping and survival in multiple avalanches in human affairs; stunning, quick changes from the Raj to Swaraj, and later twentieth century upheavals.
Swaraj and first-hand insights into the hopeful rise of the Nehruvian State and its bankruptcy by 1991, is perhaps central to the book, with the emergence of an India ‘Unbound’, and still ‘Bound’ thereafter. India, a major case study of the new Third World: its governments, its politics, its markets in the making; the last phase in the centuries-old making of the Indian state in the first decade of my adult life. Then, the grassroots learning lessons of the future India inside and outside the Nehruvian state, followed by two contrasting scenarios: first, the changing Himalayan world from past Shangri-La and Silk Route, to the establishment of the International Centre for Mountain Region Capital in Katmandu in 1983; the first Asian collaboration of eight Himalayan countries from Afghanistan to China in the non-political tasks of Himalayan eco-development and change. All this by four unknown men, the founding fathers, in President Clinton’s “most dangerous area of the world”; second, the extension of the communal killings, from the Great Calcutta killing in 1948 to the Bombay blasts in 1993, with a historical and contemporary examination of recent global terrorism; a new harsh aspect of globalization beyond Bin Laden, Bush, and Musharaff; finally, a return to Nature in a denatured civilization, beyond the “Clash of Civilizations”, beginning with an earlier awareness in the Himalayan region, and the significant transition from Genesis to Cosmogenesis.
The Himalayan region runs like a thread through the book and my life. “Is Man God’s Debris?”, and lastly, the enigma of God in our time, arise from a simple question of a nine-year old, a grand-daughter in Sydney, “God or the Big Bang?” – an examination of the first and last issue of our time, Man’s invention of God (and Gods), its misuse, and its questioning by scientists, atheists, and agnostics, and now by children, all starting from the mouth of a contemporary child. Can we now go from the early Semitic Genesis, its fictional promises of Heaven and Hell, to the Cosmo genesis of Einstein, of the Mother of Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, to Saul Bellow and others - the last of the witnesses of our times?
This, like much of my writing, is being done in the owl’s forty-year nest, in my Bhimtal cottage in the Kumaon hills of Central Himalaya - the still center of my moving world. Like that owl in a storm, I have flitted from place to place, eking out a living, doing my thing, then sitting and observing the world. In tradition, the owl is supposedly both wise and foolish. Hence, in my last years I set down to write, not an autobiography of an old owl, but more about that exploding world as seen through witnesses’ anecdotes and experiences, and in the interactions of inner and outer spaces; “the way your mind looks at what happens”, as Khalil Gibran said.
Unlike my earlier writings, the origins of this book did not originate in my mind. In recent years, during recollection with aging friends, they had asked, “Why don’t you write your autobiography?” I rejected that summarily, as I considered my life too insignificant for such. Instead I wrote, The Failed Mahabharata: The Making of the Indian State”, as much of my life has been involved in a small way with India’s governance, from inside and outside; and as I was told by friends from Bombay and New York Universities that there was no macro historical work on the subject of the making and unmaking of the Indian state in the last twenty five centuries of recorded history – a real ‘Mahabharata’ of a task for the Indian people over millennia between the Mauryas and the Nehrus.
Only when a friend, Ravi Batra repeated the earlier urging of friends, did the idea of Witnesses to Our Times, occur to me. In it, the little life is unimportant. It is only relevant in so far as it touches those larger issues of our time, in India and the world. How could the small pieces of personal recollections and anecdotal history lead to those larger issues? How to be the little center in the turbulent circumference of life, and so make a readable record of one small life in one hell of a time? That has been the central challenge of this writing.
We are in an unprecedented demographic, social, psychological, economic, and ecological and energy trap on a beautiful planet, with weak governance from the U.N. to killing societies in far continents in a globalized age. Never before have six and more billion predatory people so greedily preyed on this planet of finite resources. A civilization based on huge consumption of energy and natural resources is coming to the end of the oil and forest and fish resources. It is witnessing terror from the heartlands of oil and natural gas, largely the result of conflicts of past Semitic faiths and recent Western empires. There are prospects of new kinds of water and oil wars, besides old wars of religion - history’s empires of minds and materials. Cheap, clean fusion energy seems far away, and nuclear proliferation is the epochal threat. And behind these, the rise of old Semitic hatreds and holy wars seem to challenge post-Renaissance rationality, and the promise of a liberal, multi-cultural world seeking bread, peace and global fusion. To me the secular is a Western concept, with no roots in Asia yet.
The only sane overall view perhaps in the whole century was of the first Moon astronauts who saw clearly in far space the one precious ‘oikos’, as the ancient Greeks called it, the home of humanity on this one beautiful blue planet, rolling in Einstein’s infinite and expanding dark universe. How can we make less of a hell of this beautiful blue planet? And, perhaps, the great irony of this century is Man’s search for life in those dark infinite spaces, whilst deliberately destroying life on Earth as never before. Are we heading for ‘ecotastrophy’ and mass homicide? In his Himalayan wisdom, the Dalai Lama once said, “The Earth, our mother is telling us to behave”. Do we listen?
At the end of this writing, and beyond the clamorous world of this last century in the midst of Marigolds and Chrysanthemums in my Bhimtal hill home, I return to India’s Himalayan North-East of my early years. It was rich as one of Earth’s beautiful, bio-diversity hotspots and rich in imaginative myth, legend and poetry. In this imaginary return I can say with Mamong Dai, an Arunachal poet:
“We live in territories forever ancient and new…
I am an old man sipping the breeze that is forever young.
In my life I have lived many lives…
Instructed with history and miracles.”
And like him, “I am mingled in chance and fate” in my life’s touching of wider worlds.
The Owl’s Nest
My childhood from 1921 to 1939 belied the nature of the world to come. It was hardly an apt preparation for a violently changing world. We lived in a quiet isolated cocoon of the Raj, and it was a rather sterile cocoon. No chrysalis of a butterfly.
My home was in the last house of a railway colony in the heart of then Bengal, between chugging, whistling railway systems and green, peaceful rice fields, now in Bangladesh. Most around the railway colony were poor but contented and peaceful peasantry. How often I watched them on the road in front of our house, with a strong rhythmic movement striding between village and market, with their produce hanging in baskets strung from a flat bamboo across their shoulders. They were like pieces of moving bronze sculpture with burnished backs shining in the sun; arms, bodies and baskets swinging steadily all the way. This was my first link with the Indian peasant. Though of a different class, I established a lasting link of admiration and fellowship, continued into my future district and development days. I used to walk deep into the peasant’s fields in my winter holidays, read Tagore’s poetry alone, and feel the ecstasy of the Good Earth about which the poet wrote.
Life was a simple routine, placid and uneventful. Regular meals, in-between snacks – an addiction of my mother – play in the garden, cycling on the colony’s traffic-less roads, raiding other people’s plum trees with my brother Kersy, during afternoon siesta, listening to the B.B.C. news in the late evening. We played the old H.M.V. gramophone with popular English cinema records, when my mother was not listening to tear-jerking sentimental Hindi film songs. When we asked her why she played music to weep, she said, the emotion was beautiful. The emotion was usually that of lost love, or a mother-son relationship. Having two sons, her major regret was the lack of a daughter, unlike millions of other Indian parents whose primary ambition was to beget sons. Later, I read the Japanese had similar sentiments in their theatre in their ‘On’ code.
My father, a silent, uncommunicative character was given to prayers at 4:30 in the morning and 7:00 in the evening, to weight-lifting for a muscular body, and to running a wrestling team, apart from his work. He also shared in the fashionable sport of shikar in those days of abundance of species, usually bird shikar with the officers of the Raj. Nothing seemed to give him more satisfaction than mixing with Indian and British officers of the Raj, the I.C.S., who were the real rulers of those days, the then ‘Mai-Baap’ (mother-father) of the people. He seemed to have no time for such frivolities as the gramophone or social parties. He was quiet, serious minded man, and the keeper of communal peace in the area between Hindus and Muslims, building a temple and Idgah for each. For these efforts, he was made Khan Bahadur and awarded the MBE. Coming across a letterhead of his, decades after his death, I found a quill and a space crossed, with the bottom inscription, “Man is Wealth”. Today we call it social capital. He was a respected local leader in pre-political days, but years of social work and peace-keeping did not spare him in the mad, hate-filled days of the partition of India in 1947-48.
He was deeply religious, as compared to my mother who prayed regularly, but somewhat mechanically. Her passions were simple – dress, trinkets, parties, food and good luck. Between meals in the dining room downstairs, she stocked snippets for in-between snacks upstairs. She loved the simple joys of life, and was unconcerned with its complexities. Later, she would dismiss my talk on aspects of life different to her’s as futile “filsufy” (philosophy).
One charming example of my mother’s simplicity was with a British Governor of Bengal. Those were the days of garden parties for Governors. My mother found herself sitting beside a British Governor, Sir John Woodhead – later a member of Churchill’s War cabinet. She hit on the simple and practical question of asking Sir John what he would do to preserve his tinsel garland. He asked to know. Quite unselfconsciously, she gave him a short lecture and advised him to wrap and keep it in a tissue paper! It was in the days before plastics; I am not sure whether Sir John made due note of it. It did not occur to my innocent mother, that he was probably collecting hundreds of garlands and petitions (silver-encased in those days) almost every week.
Decades later, her simple, real work contrasted, to her amazement, with her son’s imaginative unrealism around mountains and the Moon. She could never understand my later passion for the mountains; to her mind a streak of craziness. Years later, when the Americans first landed on the Moon, I came home excited, in the evening to ask her if she had heard of it. She dismissed the very prospect as impossible and futile. You could look at the Moon and the mountains sitting comfortably and sanely at home. She could never understand how her apparently intelligent son could have such crazy spells. The Moon story was dismissed by a simple practical statement: “As you are going to Poona tomorrow, get me some gulkand or preserved fruit”. The Moon landing mission was reduced to a ‘gulkand’ mission!
We knew an isolated peace and abundance and a simple life, free from any worries of the world. My father’s silent remoteness and my mother’s simple, girl-like enjoyment of life ordered our peaceful, eventless life at home. Life had simple needs, simple values, and simple regular functions, oblivious to the problems of the world. We had heard of World War I – then known as the “Great War” – only because my father served in what was then the Mesopotamia; the early days of the present Iraq story. Only his photographs in military uniform lent a little personal reality to it. He mentioned names like Muscat and Baghdad long before the Bush era, but gave us no stories of his life then. We had never heard of the Great Depression. Chamberlain, Churchill, Mussolini, Hitler, Chiang Kai Shek, were merely passing names on the radio and newspapers. We were hardly aware of the Spanish Civil War and its issues. The freedom movement, Gandhi, Nehru and Subhas Bose were also distant names. Our lives were almost untouched by the world outside. Even inflation – later touching millions – was unknown to us then. My mother merrily bought twelve chickens for a rupee, and never understood, post-World War II inflation, later. It was a mysterious machination of the new rulers in her mind. We never heard of globalization or Terror. We never thought flying in a plane would be a part of our later lives. We had no idea of different times to come. It was a cocoon existence.
At the unusual age of four-and-a-half, I was packed off to a distant convent school in Halflong, now in remote North-East India hills. The only recollection I have of that time was I was haunted by frightening dreams of being kidnapped by the big, tall “kabuliwallas” – Afghans who were the walking creditors of the people, instilling suitable fear in them for repayments. Later in life, I came to learn of an amazing natural wonder near Halflong in the Jatinda valley. Every monsoon, vast numbers of birds, over fifty species, descended on the valley and committed mass bird suicides. First discovered in 1905, there has been no established scientific explanation since. Living as a nursery school boy and as an under-graduate in the North East hills, I deeply regret in those British days, the lack of any exposure to the rich myths, legends and customs of the North-Eastern people of India. No one told me then of the earthy stories of the creation of the tribal people, the realistic stories of earthworms creating soil on barren rocks; more realistic than Genesis. No one told me that a tribal God opened the windows of heaven and poured water on a dry earth; which we may need with water-harvesting in the water crisis of the future. No one told me “the stars are flying, but that is Awana’s daughter flashing her hair pin at the demon pursuing her across the sky”; an explanation for a shooting star. I only came to know about our wonderful tribal world from Verrier Elwin’s writings years later. It was a charming revelation of original people, a world we have lost, and they are since losing. The only part we took in tribal customs as college boys in Shillong was to participate in the archery competition of the Khasis: a natural sporting instinct of youth, which went with gambling with the prize of copper coins to the winners, and the privilege of swearing against the ancestors of the losers.
When my brother Kersy was ready for school at age seven, we were both sent off to an English boarding school in Darjeeling district for the rest of our school education. Founded in 1877, named after Queen Victoria, in 1931, it began to admit two percent Indian boys. My brother and I were the only two Indians, later joined by two more. A good public school was the best thing that our father did for us. It gave us good education, good masters, the tradition of a House system of Everest climbers (Mallory, Irvine and Kellas), and, not the least, competitive toughness and discipline, which Indian homes, or most homes don’t offer.
In a house system named after the three Everest climbers, Mallory, Irvine and Kellas, we found ourselves in Mallory House. Then the first seed dropped of future mountain passions and pre-occupations. In 1933, we were excited to witness the Cyldsdale reconnaissance flights of the first flight over Everest. In my last years in school, I ended up as a Baden-Powel scout and as Vice-Captain of Mallory House. In the latter capacity, I was the notional ‘keeper of Mallory’s compass’, donated to the school by Mallory’s widow. I was then moved by Arthur Mee’s account of how it was retrieved by Odell from the last camp on Everest, 1924, at twenty seven thousand four hundred feet and at Mallory’s written request retrieved from his tent. His disappearance on the last slopes of Everest was for my generation an everlasting inspiration. In later decades after Independence, the compass had a history of being lost and found in Victoria School. As a scout I was first introduced to the beauty and mystery of the Himalaya on a trek to the Singalila ridge, between Darjeeling and Nepal. From twelve thousand feet at the age of twelve, I gazed in awe on three of the highest peaks of the world, the massive throne of the Gods of Kanchendzanga, the distant summits of Everest and Lhotse, and also Chomolhari in distant isolation to the east in Tibet. I must have caught the mountain infection then, one of the best things in my insignificant life.
In my early days in Victoria, I was a choirboy, in cassock and surplice. Besides singing hymns, one of my unofficial assignments was to pass slips of paper from the boys on one side of the aisle, to the Dow Hill sister-school girls on the other; too young for romantic ideas of my own then. I learnt then as a schoolboy of ten to fifteen that work was also a matter of trade and barter. The enterprising could buy the studious. Some of us among the former raided the maize fields of hill farmers, kept some maize in our desks, and traded one or two for difficult mathematics homework. It was a private trade which flourished, and was never detected by our masters. In those simple days, I had no idea of the school implications of the enterprising buying workers. We had no trade union of mathematics workers.
The first seed of my attachment to History were sown by my House and History Master, V.C. Prins – also our leader in boy-scouting in the hills – and my Headmaster E.C. Hessing. They dipped me into ancient Greek and roman history, also European history and some Indian history. The ancient Buddhist mound of the Paharpur monastery near our home in central Bengal also stimulated my historical imagination beyond books. So history was the intellectual framework with which I viewed my later contemporary world – the Indian world after ‘Independence’, the western world after the end of imperialism and decolonization, the Chinese world since Mao, and the Islamic world of fundamentalism and terror; as also the American fluctuation between isolationism and economic cum missile empire. Whatever my wanderings into politics, economics, the sociology of development, and environmental science, History remained the window of my world perspective, the long conditioning factor of nations and societies.
The most memorable masters of my school days were the usual “characters” of marked idiosyncrasies. In my case, perhaps those of others too, the violent idiosyncrasies of my Science and Art masters helped to make me poor in Science and a failure in Art. Our science master, Nugent, was huge Irishman who, finding himself constricted in a small, congested Laboratory with some twenty smelly boys, would vent his claustrophobic anger on us with a meter ruler, with the physical aggression of a wild elephant pouring down on us; the escape from which was a timid request, “Can I go to the toilet sir?” To which his reply was, “I don’t know whether you can, but you may not!” Hardly conducive to the quiet search for the secrets of Nature in science. Despite the huge, aggressive science master Nugent, I found I was genuinely interested in Science later in life, as the great revealer of Nature and the Universe in our times.
My Art master was a mean little Portuguese, who did not hesitate to violently deface one’s early artistic expressions, and in the craft’s class even used carpentry tools to hit students to get the frustration out of is little, unmarried life. In the eyes of the boys he was also “billu”, the “worm”, than which nothing could be meaner. After post-dinner homework sessions, when he was on his way at night, some boys would lie in wait, for him behind bushes and trees and try and frighten the wits out of him. As in Nugent’s case in science, we had no sympathetic nurturer of latent artistic talent too. In later life, I boasted to friends of an unbeaten art record. I sat for three art exams a year for seven years and failed in all twenty-one. I think I retained some aesthetic sense in later life, despite the “worm’s” aesthetic vasectomy.
Till 1939-40, the larger world had no impact on us. We lived in a shell. When World War II was declared in September, 1939, it seemed like a distant repetition of World War I. I remember the first impact of the wider world on the tennis court in the remote Santahar, the fall of Paris, and the prospect of the victory of Nazi Germany. It seemed like doom. That was like a first wake-up call. It was not till years later that I came to learn that Einstein opened up the atomic world beyond Newton’s apple and gravity, and that Freud had opened the hidden, complex world of the human subconscious, and how love gave way to libido, sex, and Lady Chatterley, or the futurist worlds of Picasso’s art and T.S. Eliot’s, “The Waste Land”. These were then on the dark side of the moon, though all were products around 1921, the year of my birth, the seminal decades of the century between 1905 and 1930.
We were the last generation of Macaulay’s children before Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ of freedom, the products of the safe shell of Pax Britannica, and an English education by Englishmen, rather different in style, content, and values of later English education by Indians; more of that too in later days of ‘Swaraj’ and its problems for the people of India, and the memories of the ’Raj’ by the older generation. It was a major transition experience of my time in India, and a somewhat painful one for others of my generation too. We were a bit smug, a bit superior, expecting to continue as such. We were blissfully unaware of the very different world of harsh and unpredictable realities and complexities which would teach us lessons of the Twentieth century life later. The harsh transition in the first five years of my adult life from a peaceful cocoon to a wrenching Bengal famine, the violent Calcutta communal killing, to war, the Partition of India and the loss of home, was quite stunning.
In the first decades after Independence, with the thrust of Hindi and the vernaculars in a strong Swadeshi sub-continental Babel, I had a slight Macaulayan complex, like others of the pre-Independence English-knowing generation, till I got a better appreciation of Macaulay’s larger heritage to India. In the Indian Penal Code, he gave us our first modern law book nearly two centuries ago; followed later by others in the Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Evidence Act, still the basic trinity of the Indian judicial system. Although he betrayed both arrogance and ignorance for his most remembered, “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia”; let us remember his eloquent speech in the House of Commons as early as 1833. He was the first to recognize a future ‘India’, that “the public mind of India may expand”, to achieve that concept “with a capacity for better government”, and “with European knowledge demand European institutions”. He looked forward to such a day: “Whenever it comes it will be the proudest day in English history”. And that was long before Indians shared the concept of India and a modernizing India.
His inheritance to India of the English language was the educative base of our later Westminster style democracy, our Constitution, our science and technology; with the latest leap of IT on the global stage as an English-knowing people. It was the start of a rising flood of distinguished Indian writers in English – Tagore, Nehru, R. K. Narayan, Nissim Ezekiel, Salman Rushdie, and a spate of recent internationally acclaimed writers. Not least, as an inter-state national medium of communication, an indispensable link binding Indian minds together, and unknown since ancient Sanskritic days. So Macaulay has yet to find his true place in modern Indian history, and my generation’s complex can abate. We helped India’s modernization, besides knowing at least one vernacular language. Also we were among the first two generations with a sense of Indian and other histories, as distinct from history as mythology. We were the last youthful generation of the Raj, and the first idealist one of Swaraj.
University and World War II: The Real World
After 1939, two happenings brought me into the real world. The first was my going to the Allahabad University for my post graduate course in History; the second was my joining the Indian Army; then, the Japanese swooped down to the Indo-Burma border with lightning speed after Pearl Harbor. Both the happenings need some elaboration.
I chose to go to the Allahabad University for two reasons. Firstly, it was reputed to have the best faculty of History, in India. Secondly, it seemed to be a nursery for the All –India services. For the first time I was in the real Indian environment, and that too Hindi-speaking. It so happened that my companion in the hostel in the next room, N.B. Menon from Singapore found the U.P. Indian environment a more significant change than I, after Raffles College, Singapore. He wore white clothes, a white pith hat, knew no Hindi, and was immediately called “Guard Sahib”; as the guards of the British Indian Railways, also wore white uniform and white pith hats. His distinctive popularity spread fast in the hostel and the university. Being a person with a smiling face, a happy temperament and sense of humor, his popularity grew. But both of us were ‘odd bods’ in this environment and became friends, then, and ever since. Later, he was to join the nascent Indian Navy, and after the war, the Indian Foreign Service.
Half of the History faculty did not come up to my expectations. The Head of Department, Sir Shafaat Ahmed Khan showed more arrogance than learning, as “the youngest knight of the empire” at forty-two, and as the possessor of a limousine. “As none of you have seen six thousand rupees, in lump sum”, he boasted, “go out and see my limousine”. His field research in Modern Indian history was the East India Company. His teaching was as petty as his temperament. Another famous professor of Medieval Indian history – famous as the author of Indian history books from school to university – seemed to find elation in drifting to the stories of Bourbon mistresses. Yet another was absolutely mediocre. Dr. Beni Prasad and Dr. Tarachand were the two real scholars and the only stars. The History department’s reputation exceeded reality, at least in my eyes.
Anand Bhawan, the home of the Nehrus was nearby, and of easy access in those non-security days. Jawaharlal Nehru was a distinguished neighbor, and we could see other nationalist leaders there, such as, Kripalani, Maulana Azad (with the rich diction of a scholar in his speeches), and others. Subhas Chandra Bose was a powerful orator. My first view of Gandhiji at a public meeting was almost spell-binding. Over 70 then, he seemed to have a strong, rubbery chest. A vast, restless crowd was calmed in a minute by his soothing appeal. “Shanti! Shanti! – Peace! Peace! ”. He seemed a model of stark simplicity in dress and in speech. As a ‘Mahatma’, a great soul, he was the moral master of the Indian masses, but a world away from the real politick culture of Churchill and Viceroy Linlithgow. He could have stepped out of the ancient India into the modern Indian politics, an enigma to the Western World. Years later, after his death, Einstein was right when he said: “In time to come, it would be hard to believe such a man walked the Earth. He was one in a millennium.”
These were the heady days of patriotism and passion with the pre-Independence Leaders. But, when we met the Student’s Union, the lesser patriots clad in ‘Khadi’, that illusion vanished and the reality became stark; a fore-taste of things to come. It was my first glimpse of the Indian political game with other people’s funds – of which I was to see so much more in later life – and it did not warm the heart. I must have been one of the few students who defied the boycott and strike at the University gates to prevent student entry. I walked through the cat-calls and the jeers of the fellow students, but no one physically obstructed entry. I have never been able to shed my disdain for men who posed as patriots, but were patently after power and money. As a rule, they were also poor in other student accomplishments – in studies and games. For them, agitation, strike, and going to jail, were romantic escapes from honest, hard work and a preparation to be useful citizens. That generation of student leaders would have later served India better if they had done just that. Khadi-clad patriotic eloquence in the Union Hall often ended in selfish office-seeking and embezzlement of the Union funds – precedents for future political careers. The politics of the Students’ Union was to me the real precursor of post-1947 politics; after the eloquent voices of Nehru and the Azad died out in the years ahead.
I now realize that I had even then come to terms with such hollow populist nationalism at the gates of the Allahabad University, and I have never changed since. It is strange how through the changing times and circumstances, we retain the grains of the old timber of which we are made. Years later, Maurice Zinkin spoke of the theory of the unalterable type, which applies to ninety-nine out of a hundred of us. And despite Alvin Toffler, as individuals, life seems to be a play on the same basic themes, in the same style over the years. We are like salmon going up and down the same waters.
Thanks to my friend Menon, whose uncle in the then Malaya knew the Nehrus, I was able to be present at Indira’s wedding to a local Parsi, a Gandhi. Later, that surname and that personality were enigmas to the world. Some said, that she passed off in later years as a relation of Mahatma Gandhi; an excellent PR tag for the illiterate Indian masses. She was decorated in flowers – no jewels – in keeping with the austere Gandhian times, which was later discarded. But Jawaharlal, the father showed no happiness at his daughter’s marriage; a foreboding of times to come and split loyalties for India, between a father in power and an independent husband with rare political integrity.
What amazed me then and since, in this distinguished historical haven, so close to Nehru and other nationalist leaders, was the total lack in all those leaders demanding ‘Swaraj’ or independent governance in the previous two decades, to learn from the well-known History Faculty of the Allahabad University, the lessons of ‘Swaraj’ and governance, good and bad, in pre-colonial centuries. Here were these distinguished national leaders living in the imagined aura of the glorious Indian past and mindless of historical realities for the future ‘Swaraj’, after the British left. Such patriotism seemed no more than collective, mindless ego and euphoria; the most telling consequence of which was that independence in 1947 was a mere “transfer of power” from the white British hand to the brown Indian hands, with the same laws, administration, police and centralized governing ethos of the colonial British, and with the same gulf between the Raj and the people. Did ‘Swaraj’ mean, having British colonial systems and laws in Indian hands? Were there no lessons – positive and negative – learnt over the two thousand years of recorded Indian History?
As a consequence, the people of India were to learn later the lessons of the hopeful and imagined Swaraj-to-be, which led to the Emergency in 1974 and bankruptcy in 1991 with bad governance and low economic growth. At that time and before, Nehru was aglow with the promise of Soviet Communist deliverance of the masses, despite Stalin’s inhuman purges. When that vision met the harsh realities of Stalin and Commissar Dom, he went aglow with the pink socialist ideas of Harold Laski and the London School of Economics. Here was the leading Congress mind, obsessed with unproven and alien Western ideas, unable to learn from Indian historical scholarship of the realities of Indian Swaraj in the pre-colonial times.
Later, in 1947, he gave me an autographed copy of his famous, Discovery of India. I found, that he had not discovered the real historical India. It was a mushy, general appreciation of India’s past culture. He, like the other political leaders of the time, failed to see that besides culture, the Indian people in past centuries excelled in private trade and manufacture also; that, in the twenty of the twenty-five centuries of recorded history, India was weak in good centralized government. Surely, major lessons for the Twentieth century Swaraj. Many political and non-political Indians fondly believed that India was ready for a true democratic Swaraj, because history spoke of a few small republics at the time of the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago, not sustained since; and because of the ancient ‘Panchayati’ system of customary village governance of local natural resources of water, forests, pastures, now destroyed by centralized governments of the Raj, and intensified after 1947; elsewhere, in Asia too. C. Rajgopalachari was the only exception; he alone had the prescience to see, that “India was a government-less civilization” for most early centuries. In the words of Matthew Arnold, “they bowed their heads before the storm. And let the legions thunder past”, resuming traditional life and managing local resources in customary ways.
Much of this will confront us in later pages in future time, and so devastatingly.
After university, I wanted to sit for the ICS examination, the career of my choice; but the British Indian government closed recruitment in 1942 for the duration of the war; a momentous decision for me. With my younger brother in the army and with the Japanese in our eastern frontiers, I too chose to join the army as an Emergency Commission Officer for the duration of the war. This was the first taste of the ‘school of life’. After being commissioned at the OTS, Mhow, I was considered good enough to be an instructor there. In my youthful enthusiasm I chose to go to an ‘operational area’.
For the next three years I came to face two major and harsh realities. Being posted to the Fourteenth Army on the Burma front, I returned to the Bengal I knew, to see with horror the emaciated human figures of the infamous Bengal Famine. The killing in war was of fit uniformed men. This was the slow, hungering death of emaciated women, children and men. Here, I was secure, uniformed and well-fed with a smug, happy childhood in this same province, now experiencing the stark horror of thousands of my fellow Bengalis in this inhuman plight. It was not a failure of the rains, or a shortage of crop production; it was sheer incompetence of the Bengal government. The world may not have known its extent and horror, but for the courageous editor of the Statesman, Calcutta, Ian Stephen. He wrote: “The sickening catastrophe was man-made. So far as we are aware, all of India’s previous famines originated plainly from calamities of Nature. But this one is accounted for by no climatic failure; rainfall has been generally plentiful. What the Province’s would be had drought been added to Government bungling is an appalling thought.”
There was then an unknown Bengali child, who also painfully witnessed this famine, and who was to make this, his life’s first lesson in humane development; an economist-to-be, deeply affected by the human suffering, before cold books of Academia. His name was Amartya Sen, who went on to be a bright professor in the Delhi School of Economics, when I knew him; and more distinguished later at Cambridge and Harvard, ending up as Nobel Laureate. If only more economists learnt from the real life experiences, besides official data; sometimes dubious, sometimes cooked, as in the Bengal of the Raj then, and more strikingly after Independence.
A brief reversion to an inconspicuous, inconsequential military life: having opted for an operational area, as the expression then went, I was thrown in as “cannon fodder” like others, without doing the normal term at my regimental center in a peace station. I found myself flung like a little stone into the Arakan, in the Burma theatre; considered to be one of the worst theatres of war in World War II. Even before the Japanese out-generaled and outfought us in the battle of the Arakan, some insidious psychological malaise seemed to hit even seasoned British troops from other theatres of war, after the crossing of the Brahmaputra . Malaria, dysentery and thousands of poor, famished Bengalis, in a hot, humid climate, seemed to create a demoralizing climate of despair. We knew of a few hundred British deserters in the hills of Assam, when it was not heard of in other war theatres. For them, it must have been so alien, demoralizing and deadly, even before facing the enemy. Fighting a war in Europe was on home ground; this was a tropical hell.
The Arakan battle was a bloody mess. The Fifth Division was totally cut off, and the Seventh Division was cut to pieces, leaving the general in charge, I was told, in his pajamas, in command of only a section of ten men one morning. I found myself in motley retreat to Chittagong; a narrow escape from becoming a dreaded Japanese prisoner of war, possibly worked to death on rice water, on the notorious Malayan railway. If anyone cared to ask a junior officer like me his impressions of war, I could sum it up in one word – chaos; far from the ordered battle plans of the General Staff.
General Slim came on the scene as Commander of the Fourteenth Army. Without the aristocratic cool of Lord Alexander in the early retreat from Burma, unlike the flash of ‘Monty’ of the North Africa fame, Slim was calm, methodical and a confident soldier. Against the heavy odds of a “forgotten army”, he built up forces and military resources in the north to meet the Japanese with a long line of communication from Rangoon, and harassed by his Chindits behind the lines in Burma. At the bloody and hard battles of Kohima and Imphal, he stopped the Japanese advance into India. It was an example of good planning and brave execution with very hard fighting.
My humble task as a modest Staff Captain, was to help organize troop movements to the north. One little, but unprecedented incident happened, which illustrates the human uncertainties of war. An Indian cavalry unit was to proceed north at 2000 hrs. I was caught in an unprecedented dilemma. The unit was there, ready to leave, but no CO, or a single commissioned officer! I had to take a decision, irrespective of what may come. I sent for the Indian Subedar-Major, and told him, that he had to move north at 2000 hrs in command of the unit. Without batting an eyelid, he took charge and the unit moved.
Returning half an hour later, after a few drinks, the British Commanding Officer was mad at me for separating him from his unit. He fumed and threatened. I calmly told him, that I was merely following the Army Commander’s orders, and the consequences would be his. I heard no more of it afterwards, perhaps too embarrassing for the ‘Brits’. I have never heard of any case in military history of an entire unit being sent into an operational area, without a single commissioned officer! Nine years later, in peace time, one of those Indian officers recognized me in Poona. Exasperated, he expressed his recollection in abusive horror. I could not help being amused.
Just three other anecdotes: When I was Station Officer, an innocent Indian jawan came to my office, saying he could not bear the bombardment at Imphal, and that he was going home on leave! Very honestly, he took out a grenade from his pocket and put it on my table, relieving himself of government property before he went home! I was touched by his innocence. Like me, he was just a “cannon fodder”, doing his farming in a remote village a year ago. He took a salaried job in the army, and to his surprise, found himself in one of the fiercest battles of the World War II. He was ignorant of the military law, and was unaware that he was a deserter from an operational area meriting a court martial. I decided to let him go in honest innocence; quite a contrast to the flagrant dereliction of duty of that British Cavalry CO.
The next strange experience was to meet a few Indian prisoners of war from the INA led by Subhas Chandra Bose. They were wrapped in the rags of old teenage, no uniforms, fed on rice water, unfit to be put into battle in that condition. It seemed unprofessional soldiering on the part of the Japanese. I had mixed feelings for the INA men, mixture of sympathy and respect. They may have made the wrong or right choice, but their intentions and integrity were no worse than mine.
The last anecdote happened three decades later, when I visited Churchill’s War Office underground in the White Hall, London. I made it a point to study his war maps in his war room, and found not a single map of the Burma theatre; what better confirmation that we were in that “forgotten army” of World War II. When we emerged, I was asked by an Englishman to kindly step aside and give my impressions in a Visitor’s Book. I told him, that I would record my confirmed complaint, as a relic of that “forgotten army”, which I did. At that time I also remember thinking Churchill’s telephones and metal lamp shades were antique. We were in a new age of slick gadgets.
I believed then and still do, that the Congress party decision to launch the Quit India Movement, or rather Gandhi’s in 1942, and not share the responsibility of power in a global war against fascist militarism was a national mistake. To start with, the ‘Quit India’ move achieved nothing; only the imprisonment of the Congress leaders, a sort of later Non-Alignment. It deprived the future leaders of India of a vital and necessary training in governance, in military and international affairs preceding Independence, which was so badly needed later. That experience could have made them more realistic, better prepared for the shameful military debacle in NEFA in 1962, and most importantly, in working with the Muslim League in a process of sharing power with common objectives, which may have avoided the terrible Partition of India. In my humble view, the real partition of minds came as early as, in 1942; even when the Japanese – with fifty years of imperialist war in East Asia, which the Congress party should have known – were at our doors. It was the second major mistake of the pre-Independence Congress, after the lack of the sharing of power in 1937, in the provinces with the Muslim League, under the Government of India Act, 1935. Both contained the dragon seeds of the Partition and the subsequent Indo-Pakistan history.
The war was for me a re-education in the university of life and death; a re-education of military campaigns I had studied earlier in history but in reverse. No clear battle plans of the history books, as at Waterloo or Trafalgar. From the other end, as a humble infantry and staff officer, it was a mixture of sheer chaos, human infirmities, racial prejudice, and famine, at one end, followed by good higher military planning and strategy, and relief of victory, at the other, with a score of little lessons in commanding and being commanded. I came out wounded, flown strapped to the floor of Dakota to a military hospital in Calcutta. And the last lesson of all - I learnt to drink alcohol. I went through the war without touching alcohol. I was so happy on VJ day; I drank a magnum of beer, and passed out to have my second longest sleep in life. The longest for three days and nights was after getting a dose of morphia in a field hospital, after my injury. That was a unique experience, free of acute pain, a joyful, imaginative slumber at the bottom of the sea. That morphia dose was the best sedative and pain-killer of my life. I had no idea then, that it would become a cult addiction in later generations in a variety of drugs.
Reduced to Category ‘C’, unfit for military operations, and with a limp, I ended my days in the army in an easy, half-day job as a member of the Air Priorities Board, Calcutta, allotting priority flights to red-tabbed seniors flying between South-East Asia Command and Europe - the anti-climax of the injured.
War is a wild monster, but the climax of World War II, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has left an existential question for all future time. Why did man have to use the ultimate, Earth-destroying power, far more deadly than any weapon, to secure the defeat of Japan? For once a big global question penetrated both individual and collective global minds. It was to leave a long deadly train of nuclear proliferation. I remember asking myself, even if the American government feared heavy losses in the Samurai defense of the homeland, could not America have demonstrated to Japan a minor nuclear explosion off-shore, to warn the Japanese Emperor and government of its tremendous implications beforehand? Asians also asked themselves, would the nuclear weapon have been used in Europe, in the same Western civilization? Was the Christian conscience confined to Christian societies, as in the case of Vietnam, and lraq later?
It was a climactic moment of remorse for millions of us in this century, and beyond imagination. There were stories of Einstein’s regret in writing that fateful letter to President Roosevelt, setting the nuclear chain in motion in the Manhattan Project, in the fear that the Nazis might get it first, which was not the case. Later, the vast scientific community questioned its own public role. Were they highly qualified slaves of ruthless power? Later, the philosopher, Bertrand Russell organized the Pugwash Conference on both the sides of the Iron Curtain, to attempt to discuss freely the issues of nuclear control, inspection and disarmament. Linus Pauling and two thousand American scientists signed an appeal for a nuclear test ban agreement. The most significant ‘Mea Culpa’ of all came from the father of the Manhattan Project, Robert J. Oppenheimer: “physicists have known Sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose”. In my own humble case, as an insignificant relic of World War II, the unforgettable impact came when I read the description of that cataclysmic event on a Japanese boy: “The sun burst in our faces.” Words stop after that. Something inside silences all debate on this existential question. We will have to live with its terrible consequences.
That epochal question to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities seemed to find a slightly delayed answer in that American social anthropologist’s revealing book, by Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, first published in 1946. Among many insights into the Japanese culture, it revealed that, (a) the Japanese have a unique and remarkable capacity to accept failed systems which damage their very sensitive self-respect, for example, militarism of the past; and (b) the word of the Emperor was final and unchallenged. Ruth Benedict wrote: “Until August 1945, Chu demanded of the Japanese that they fight to the last man against the ‘enemy’. When the Emperor changed the requirements of Chu by broadcasting Japan’s capitulation, the Japanese outdid themselves in expressing their cooperation with their visitors”. If only Washington could have read the book two years earlier. The Americans then, as in Vietnam and Iraq later, were unable to understand other cultures.
Most mankind is callous, perhaps blindly foolish too. The Stockholm Conference in 1972 was on the Human Environment. Barry Commoner then wrote: “Yet in six hundred pages of conference documentation, this gravest, most fearsome threat to the human environment – nuclear war - is not named even once”.
From coming out of the cocoon of a peaceful childhood, and in the first five years of manhood, learn the future real politick of the Indian political class in the university union; to then, looking into the jaws of horror and death in famine and war; to learning hard decisions in commanding and being commanded; all of this was unusually compressed in my adult life’s early education. Neither my forefathers, nor my children and grand-children have known it. Those like me were privileged by fate to have this multiple education so early. Yet more was to come in the university of life, in the most turbulent of centuries.
Interlude to the Civil Service
All the while in my war service years, my mind turned to a preparation for the Civil Service when the hostilities were over. Quiet hours in a basha and in a military hospital were spent reading books to prepare for that life. One of them was David Lilienthal’s, The Tennessee Valley Authority. The concept of the multipurpose development of a shoal river basin fascinated me. I thought that, that was the sort of thing to which I could devote my life. So, when I got two months of sick leave after my injury, I limped into the office of the then Chairman of the Electricity & Water Power Commission in Calcutta. They were planning a similar venture for the Damodar Valley. The Damodar was eastern India’s scourge, like the Hwang Ho in China. I told him, I would be prepared to serve during my sick leave in any capacity which he thought fit for me, and that I was on Army pay, and wanted no money for it. He was somewhat taken aback by the directness and the terms of my offer, but was good enough to say, that he would refer it to his Secretary in New Delhi, and would let me know “in forty-eight hours”; unbelievable in post-1947 India. Two days later, I joined him as his Special Staff Officer, the non-technical body in the entire Commission. I wondered if an Indian officer could ever have done that.
During those two months, I was in on the early planning of the future Damodar Valley Authority (D.V.A.), and names like Tilaya and Panchet Hill, later came back to me as a nostalgic memory of my two happy months with the D.V.A. Fifteen years later, I was sad to see the first dream of a multi-purpose river valley project in India vanish into thin air, and be reduced to a mere electricity-producing authority. The aspirations of ‘Sirkar’, which wanted the D.V.A on the lines of the T.V.A, were incapable of surmounting the parochial inter-state rivalries and suspicions between Bihar and Bengal. Linguistic States were too much for the wider development concepts of inter-state river systems, even in Nehru’s days. Nehru, for all his moral authority, was unable to achieve what Tito achieved in Yugoslavia, though Yugoslavia was a smaller problem. The D.V.A was an early part of the learning process of the said reality, which invests Indian politics and Indian government. They are the areas where dreams become illusions soon. And, it was especially evident, when decades later; Nehru’s dams – his “temples” of development – were open to serious questions. The dam-builders could not see beyond their engineering, also driven by the politico-engineer’s belief that the larger the outlay (hence, the ‘big dams’ mania), the larger the political and monetary fall-out.
Then, the call came, for the pent-up war vacancies for the I.C.S in 1945. There were preliminary selections in Madras, and an appearance before the Public Service Commission in Simla; then months of waiting in army service for the results.
Eventually, I was assigned to Bengal. Bengal was then, a Muslim League governed province, and all of us, Central Selections, from the three League provinces - Bengal, Punjab and Sindh – were turned down by these governments, as they said, that Pakistan was round the corner. Nawab Mohammad Ali Bogra, a friend of the family, and the then finance minister of Bengal, assured my father, that I had nothing to worry. Pakistan was round the corner and I could walk into the Pakistan Civil Service or Foreign Service then. My traditional father, who counted so much on knowing the right people in the traditional way, thought I was quite theoretical when I said, that I could not serve a government state which was based on religion – an outdated theocratic principle. He only learnt when, two years later, he himself was squeezed out of East Pakistan as a non-Muslim. The personal friends of old, including the Nawab of Bogra, in the high places were of no avail. Since then, he became a shell of his former self, living on the memories of the better days, in the pleasant shade of the memories of the banyan tree, which was the old ‘Raj’. When that shade went, it took a large part of his self-esteem, as a broken, abandoned man in retirement. In him I saw what the ‘Raj’ meant to the upper classes of his generation. After fifty years of independence, our fathers are not to be scoffed at for that.
For me Pakistan was out, and I bided my time in the army till my demobilization came in 1947. By then I was offered a post in the newly-formed Indian Foreign Service. I was called at the External Affairs Ministry to meet Sir Akbar Hydari, the Secretary General. When asked why I wanted to join the Foreign Service, I told him frankly, that my only interest in the Foreign Service was Central Asia, and I saw the service as a means of getting there. He said, “You are a funny man. Your colleagues’ first choice is Washington, and their second choice is Paris. You want to go to Lhasa”. These were the early signs of a Western orientation of the Indian foreign policy, to the neglect of Asia and India’s neighbors. No one then bothered about the Trans-Himalayan Central Asia. In due course, after a discussion with Harishwar Dayal, I found myself posted as a Trade Agent to Gyantze in Tibet. It was rather informal. In those days, the Foreign Service was like a small club. I think I got my posting on the strength of two earlier treks and a climb on Lama Anden in Sikkim – all I could show of my meager expertise of the Central Asia. But, my imagination was full of the old Shangri La, the Silk Route, the Early Everest story, and the early Pundits of the Survey of India.
So, I returned home eager to go to Gyantze. I was met with the silence of doom. Was I mad? Did I not realize it would mean a life of exile for my wife and our newborn first child? How could they – plain’s Indians – be taken to thirteen thousand feet, on the Tibetan plateau; especially a newborn child? It was like my mother’s earliest visions of darkest Africa, in my brother’s case, when my father suggested the Indian Forest Service for him! I was made to feel crazy and a cad. I gave in to ordinary family sense on both the sides. Later, when I was in Tibet in 1957, after the Chinese Liberation Army had taken over, and in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled and all the links with Tibet were severed, I looked back and wondered where I might have been if I had followed the road to Gyantze in 1947-48. But, a streak of regret lingered. I had missed a decade of adventure. More of the Himalayan region was to be a major preoccupation of my life, but not as an official.
After Independence the new Indian Administrative Service was formed, and after all the convolutions since 1945, I found myself in it at last. Jai Kishen Pandey, our family Pundit, was pleased to know his astrological forecast from my horoscope had at last materialized; I was to be a Hakim or magistrate, and in his own home-state of Bihar! My parents too felt the old wish fulfilled, and my in-laws must have been relieved not to see me on the ‘crazy’ road to Tibet.
The course of training at Metcalfe House, Delhi, was no more than a picking up of pre-1939 threads with not such bright staff. There was a bit of Indian history and economics, pedestrian course in Criminal Law, the old horse-riding and some new motor mechanics, with some pompous general lectures from the Government of India, officers thrown in. The world had changed so much since World War II began, and yet the manner of selection to and the training in the top Civil Service had remained basically unchanged. After all, 1947 was only a transfer of power from white colonial hands to brown Indian ones. The post-War world and Independence hardly made any difference. When Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel visited us, we wore the new style formal high-collared Jodhpur coats, a mark of our new ‘Indianness’, which was only a token change. They spoke of the new times; we listened, but the training went on as in pre-war days, blissfully innocent of the qualitative changes the post-War world and the post-Independence India were to bring, specially the fundamental change in the relationship between the civil servant and the new political masters. Pre-1947, the Civil Service was the government. Neither Nehru, nor Patel, nor the I.C.S seemed to give enough thought to this fundamental change in attitude and functioning, and what was required from both, the political and the permanent executives in free India. It was to have major consequences later as ‘malik’ and indigenous relationship modes.
On one occasion, I put the same question to three members of the Union Public Service Commission, who came to Metcalfe House in 1948: “Why did we revert to the pre-1939 system of academic tests only for the All-India Services, when in most countries of the world, new selection methods based on psycho-analytic tests were being used in both the civil and defense services?” The Chairman, a senior I.C.S. man said: “What was good enough for me thirty years ago is good enough for these chaps.” Not implemented, as I saw later, in practical work in the district and the Secretariat. The second, an educationist said, that the modern selection methods were very expensive. He had obviously, never heard of cost-benefit analyses. He betrayed the static conservative mould of education in India, the subsequent lack of my faith in training, and development in the governments in India. The third could not care less about which system was used. These three responses to this one question reflect in essence, the reason for the lethargy and failures of the Indian administration since – ego-conservation, lack of analytical result-mindedness, and sheer indifference. Commissions and committees may deliberate and recommend, but till they can devise ways and means of dealing with such behavior characteristics, their pages will only pass into oblivion; as did those of the Gorwala, the Appleby and the Administartive Reforms Commission. Indian bureaucracy, in the mass, is as conservative and as cramped as a Hindu widow; as unchanging and as exclusive as the Hindu caste-system; as rigid as Islamic fundamentalism; as mobile as the Indian bullock-cart; and as formidable a barrier to sensible change as the Himalayas.
The 1947 and 1948 batches found the I.A.S. course dull. I had never heard any I.A.S. man talk enthusiastically about it in the next twenty years. I have not known such a record in Business Management. I learnt the lesson of an absurd attachment to hierarchy in odd circumstances, and it roused my youthful indignation in those days, on a mountain holiday with some civil servants. Our Vice-Principal gave the impression of an emancipated man from Balliol. He was keen to join me on a short trek to the Rohtang Pass in Kulu during the Dussehra holidays. I explained that I would be traveling inter-class from Delhi to Pathankot. I had the utmost admiration for him when he agreed to do likewise. He was after all, an Ex-Deputy Commissioner of the Raj.
When we arrived at the station, it was impossible to get inter-class seats, and only just possible to squirm sitting accommodation on the floor of an overcrowded second class compartment. While my Vice-Principal sportingly sat beside me in a seething mass of compressed humanity, his resplendent ‘chaprasi’ on the platform, could scarcely look at this inexplicable display of new egalitarianism, much less comprehend it. For him, it was a lapse into a new lunacy, occasionally expected in foreign sahibs, not in Indian sahibs who should know their society better. This, I thought, was the temporary triumph of Balliol over India, and very temporary it was to be. But, till then, full marks to the Ex-Deputy Commissioner sahib. We spent the night to Pathankot in discomfort and squalor on that hard, oscillating floor.
Arriving In Kulu we met a well-known Punjabi Deputy Commissioner on holiday too. He decided to accompany us to Manali and the Rohtang. I found him most knowledgeable and interesting on flora and fauna, one of the versatile old types. But, at Manali our values began to part. Although on holiday, he acquired a retinue of a Sub-Inspector of Police and two constables. My first gesture of implied protest was to insist on carrying my own rucksack, as I prevented a constable from carrying it for me. By strange coincidence, many years later, I saw the Principal of the Manali Mountain School walking down the Beas near here, clad in high altitude climbing wear, followed by a porter carrying his rucksack and ice-axe! At a height of six thousand and five hundred feet, it was ridiculous. But it was evidence of old behavior patterns again! Even sport prevented our officials from carrying their own small load in the hills.
As we went on to Rahla, I was annoyed to find the Punjab Deputy Commissioner dragging reluctant policemen to beyond nine thousand feet, in their cotton, plain’s clothes. He was on a private holiday and had no business to drag an official retinue with him to higher altitudes without warm clothes. His rank and status were more important than the comfort of the policemen. On the way up to Rahla, we even seemed to be ascending in order of seniority! To make matters worse, at the Rahla Dak Bungalow, these two D.C.’s expected me cook, while they sat on status, with their legs cocked up above the fireplace. The I.C.S. knew nothing of the equality and spirit of mountain climbers. The mountain ways of my youth could not stand it. (A prelude into a more serious conflict of responsibilities for the lives of men on high Everest – between I.C.S. man, the President of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF) , and my friend, Mr. Gurdial Singh, the chosen leader of the first Everest expedition in 1959-60. The bureaucrat President of the I.M.F., in a chauvinist style, insisted on using Indian high-altitude equipment, non-existent then, but intended to be produced by Indian ordinance factories. Gurdial was prepared to try Indian equipment, but insisted on proven imported equipment. He asked the crucial question: “Who will be responsible for the lives of men on the mountain?” The arrogant bureaucrat President replied, “I am”, sitting in Delhi!)
This was the moment of open rebellion for me at Rahla, below the pass; I cooked my own food in my old army mess tin, ate and went to bed. Their lordships were left stranded, shouting helplessly to minions in the dark to do something about their food. To make my indignation clear, I set out alone to the Rohtang pass the next morning. They returned by 11 a.m. from wherever, and I stayed on to enjoy one of the most delightful sunny siestas I have ever had; sleeping nearly all day on the Rohtang, at thirteen thousand four hundred feet, drinking in the silence and beauty of those heights between Kulu, Spiti and Lahul.
When I returned to Rahla late in the evening, they were somewhat contrite and expressed their anxiety about me. The Rohtang Pass, “the field of the corpses”, had claimed victims before and since. My response was cool. The Punjabi Deputy Commissioner remembered it eighteen years later, when I was on a public sector board with him as a Chairman; but, he never understood why I behaved as I did, because he could not think outside the ‘sirkari’ culture, even on a private mountain holiday. That was the beginning of a life long divide with what I called, “the culture of the Sirkar”, carried into the Himalayan Club and the Indian Mountaineering Foundation days, between my culture and the official culture of the Sirkar in the mountain world at least, if not in other worlds too. It will be a recurring theme of these pages in the wider sphere of governance and the relations with the people.
District Days: Reversions to Indigenous Style
By the end of 1948, I found myself posted to Muzaffarpur, in the Tirhut division of North Bihar, as a fledgling Assistant Magistrate. On my first courtesy call on my Commissioner, I made the horrible faux pas of a mistaken identity. As I entered, I saw a man at a table, in the verandah of the Commissioner’s house. I thought he was the P.A., so I asked to see the Commissioner. He just said, “Yes”. I replied “No, I want to see the Commissioner.” Then, with just a trace of authority he replied, “I am the Commissioner”. I apologized, but how times had so quickly changed. I had last seen the Commissioners in pre-War days, and they could never be mistaken for their P.A.’s. Now, the casual shirt and chappals heralded the new egalitarian age; an age when the appearance of simplicity and austerity was the badge of virtue in government. Soon, I was to see that khadi, which Nehru had earlier called the “the livery of freedom”, was the badge of an assumed patriotism. It concealed every human aspiration, from noble, selfless service to the crudest plain exploitation, with layers of humbug between. Soon many jokes became current among the people about the ‘khajwa topi’ – the white khadi cap, and the early recognition of the MLA, for whom it was “Yeh le le, woh le le” (Take this and take that).
If our earlier training was outdated, my training as an Assistant Magistrate was a model of complete indifference on the part of my seniors. They neither saw nor supervised; neither advised nor encouraged. I did spells in various musty departments of the Collectorate; learning by doing. My guide and trainer was the senior clerk in each department, full of low-level knowledge and cautious experience. I never knew a day’s guidance by a senior; I never saw my Collector’s face. The wardship – the personal ‘guru-chela’ relationship – of the British ‘Guardians’ could have been a myth vanished overnight. Not for me was that earlier tradition of sipping tea or riding with my Collector; all the while eagerly imbibing the wisdom to be one of Plato’s philosopher kings, till the time came for me to be one. The model of the Collectors, I had known and admired in my Bengal boyhood was sharply replaced in this, my first taste of district life, by an invisible non-entity who had sprung from the grassroots in the same district, and over a period of twenty years had come up the slow, tortuous ladder as the Sub-Deputy Magistrate to the Deputy Magistrate to District Magistrate in Muzzaffarpur. To him, that Zila crown came after a long, slow crawl; not by two steps of a crown prince in six or eight years. Besides, he was said to be hard of hearing, and what with all his disabilities, the distance between us went beyond deafness. We never spoke. He was aloof in his reputation of having that Indian characteristic, of being a good but useless man.
Though the district departments were dull, I was very excited and nervous to find myself as a young Hakim at last, even though I was a magistrate with third class powers. There was an immature feeling of importance sitting in a magisterial chair in that stage of youth, just out of boyhood, even though the court-room was too small to swing a cat, and too dingy to lend atmosphere to importance. The first meeting with the technicalities of the law made one nervous, but there was the dependable Peshkar at hand to tell all the silly little things one had to do. He held my hand with care, and I was appreciative. The cases were trivial, but enough as a beginning for my inexpertise. By the time I became an S.D.O., the court had lost importance. It became for me a sink of cooked-up lies on both sides; a meaningless procedure and a waste of time. More than fifty years later, when India had lost faith in the Police/Judicial system, I mentioned this to a High Court Chief Justice. He was indignant, and justified their meticulous work under the Indian Evidence Act. When I asked him the average conviction rate in Western democracies, as compared to the Indian average of only six percent after the charge sheet, he said, “over seventy percent”. That proved my point. His Lordship then went on to the Supreme Court.
Soon, there were local elections, and I found myself in charge of a polling booth in the interior of the district; a dull two or three days in which one only had to ensure that the voting was fair. But, it was memorable for one telling incident which left its stamp on me about rural Bihar society ever since. On the first morning of the poll, a local Mahant zamindar asked me to tea. Not wishing to bias the voter in his favor by this apparent ploy, or that of his henchmen, I agreed to drop in and have tea with him after the election was over. That afternoon a man came loudly wailing to the booth. It appeared that he was Harijan; he had heard that a Hakim was in the vicinity, and he came to plead helplessly that the Mahant, who was to be our host, had forbidden him to draw water from the local well. I knew of no law then, by which I could give the poor man redress, so I naively fell back on the Hakim’s pleasure! I sent word to the Mahant, that I would accept his invitation to tea, only when he allowed the Harijan to draw water. I thought this might work. I was totally mistaken. On the third day, we drove past the Mahant’s house to the H.Q., neither side relenting. This was my first lesson in the iron orthodoxy and cruel obscurantism of Bihar village communities. There were more lessons to come.
We missed the old six-month settlement training in the village; the first real-life link between the city-bred civil servant and the life, problems, and people of the village. I learnt that Bihar’s last settlement work was done in the 1980’s! We were only expected to learn more recent manuals and law books at district headquarters. This was the new bureaucratic age of babugiri, a pre-occupation with papers, not people; an unproductive way of life for its own sake. The immediate hurdle then, was to pass the last examination of our lives in an examination-ridden society; the ‘departmentals’ as they were called. These were written tests, with and without books, in criminal and revenue law. They were presided over rather cursorily by a Member Board of Revenue, one of the senior-most officials in the state. The invigilators were middle aged, Provincial Service officers, who helpfully gave notice of the Member’s occasional coming. The result: mass cheating. How could one expect better of the sons, when the fathers were so brazenly outdoing them? It was another sign of the new times: permissiveness, humbug and fraud, in that order. One of my colleagues, asked me about a question from the Evidence Act. I told him the sections to look up. He then had the nerve to hand me the Evidence Act to turn up the sections for him! A future IAS Secretary to the Government! Here, I drew the line in mild anger, telling him he could damn well do it himself. I do not remember, whether we had then given ourselves the State motto: “Satyameva Jayate” (Truth alone triumphs). But later, I reflected that here were the future officials feverishly passing an exam in order to administer the laws of land “without fear or favor”, but with plain cheating. It was one of my first recollections of changed times.
With the ‘departmentals’ behind us, soon one of the I.A.S. colleagues got the independent charge of a sub-division. He too was an eager young one, who believed, that he was following in the tradition of Philip Woodruff’s, Guardians, a book not yet published, but with something of its spirit still lingering in our minds from the old days. On one of his visits to the District Headquarters, he told me of his amusing first disenchantment. Our dear old Collector of Muzaffarpur, came to Hajipur for the annual inspection of the S.D.O.’s office. From the past knowledge, we gathered that these were occasions of the first importance. It was the most important day of accountability in the year; the day, when the senior, put down his wise, witty or scathing observations in memorable words, to be quoted later in service get-togethers, as prize observations to be emulated by the young when they were district magistrates and commissioners.
My S.D.O. colleague had cleared all arrears and got everything faultlessly organized for his first inspection. Meeting the Collector at the Station, he expected to go straight to the inspection. His old Collector thought better and decided to sleep the afternoon in the Inspection Bungalow. A night of tortuous waiting followed. The next morning the S.D.O. presented himself again, but found the Collector in no mood to inspect. When asked, he casually dismissed it by saying, that he had asked his office superintendent to do the job. The young S.D.O. was amazed. Never was such a thing heard before. How could an I.A.S. officer be inspected by the Collector’s office superintendent? Unprecedented problems of status, protocol, and awful embarrassment! He decided that he would depute his office superintendent to be inspected. So, the vital system of inspection by the high level minds was quietly relegated to the low-level head clerk. The Collector then signed.
The result was that the reports got longer; they deteriorated in quality, and no one took them seriously. The purpose of intelligent inspection was reduced to a routine run-through. To my surprise, this habit had spread, without so much as an informal suggestion from government, to all the districts, and even in the neighboring states. Inspection and good supervision, the key aspects of good administration of the Raj, vanished in the first three years. In that period, I never knew of an inspection by a D.M. or I.C.S. Commissioner.
If some day, some one were to write about the deterioration in the district administration after 1947, the quiet relegation of the high-level inspection system to a low level routine, should be one of the main starting points. It became a low-level, inspection-less government. Again, it was a reversion to a character pattern; a permissiveness or laxity which kept the form and destroyed the substance; an exercise in humbug, and an administrative fraud. But the story sounded funny then. We failed to see or anticipate the beginnings of administrative erosion, lack of integrity, and effectiveness then.
This was quite a contrast to Tom Trevelyan’s account in the late Nineteenth century of a district officer’s daily life in Raj days (The Men Who Ruled India, by Phillip Mason): “He rises at day break, goes straight from his bed to his saddle. Then gallops off across fields to visit the scene of dacoit robbery; or see with his own eyes the crops of a zamindar who is so unpunctual with his assessment have really failed; or to watch with parental care the progress of his pet embankment.” He returns to dispatch boxes and papers. “The verandah is full of fat men in clean linen waiting for interviews. They are bankers, shop keepers and landlords, who have only come “to pay their respects” with ever so little a petition as a corollary. Brass dishes filled with pistachio nuts and candied sugar are ostentatiously displayed. They represent in the profuse East the visiting cards of the meager West.” Then, in the afternoon, he works in the courts. Trevelyan adds, the value of responsibility at an early age, “the obligation to do nothing that can reflect dishonor on the service…the example and precept of his superiors, who regard him as a younger brother than as a subordinate official.” That was the answer to his question, “whence comes this high standard of efficiency and public virtue?”
At Muzaffarpur, the district Collectorate fascinated me as an institution jointly fashioned by the Government and the people, an expression of the Indian ‘mela’ or fair. It was perhaps a Greek philosopher who said, that he who descends to the market-place need not go to school. A comprehensive enough education lies in places where men congregate and do business; not “far from the madding crowd”, but in its very midst. The Collectorate, that focus of administration and affairs in each district in India presents a picture of musty offices, Colonial Courts, and ramshackle stalls, a real relic of the East India Company and the Nineteenth century carried into the Twentieth century days of parliamentary democracy, and in as good a state of preservation as an ancient monument, only less imposing and less aesthetic. Yet, despite the hoary associations, for those who come to the Collectorate to petition, litigate, give witness, or take a loan, there is, here, the varied life of the bazaar; occasionally the liveliness of a mela, something of the education of the market-place, and always the age-old relationship of government and the governed, at the grassroots in India.
All the various problems of ownership and possession of land, its registration, its change of ownership, its quarrels and partitions – all the many transactions of increasing millions seeking their small share in land from the same overburdened acreage. Behind those dirty stamped, ragged and badly written papers, pushed through antique counters into indifferent hands, lies the deep story of the struggle that goes on the soil of India. Here one sees some scrambling for challans at a window; there, a group hanging on the lips of their lawyer; and all around, the intrigue, animosity and rivalry of town and village; being wrapped up in insoluble litigation. Life at the Collectorate goes on from ‘tariq’ to ‘tariq’ (dates), at the convenience of the magistrates, and also the connivance of the lawyers.
The heart of the Collectorate is the Treasury. Every day, there is a constant passage of people to and from its counters to make or receive payments. Here the ‘Kashtkar’ deposits his land revenue on a challan; here, the litigant pays his court fee; here, the pensioner receives his pension; here too; the contractor receives payment – who knows how deservedly! Constantly, the blood of social life, money, is being pumped in and out of this simple accounting organization, iron-barred and well guarded. The district treasury and the sub-treasury are the primary fiscal units in the country. Millions of peasants may not have seen a bank cheque, but they know well a treasury challan.
To emerge from the stuffy atmosphere of courts and offices, escaping from masses of paper, from rigid court procedure surrounded by rapacious chaprasis, one steps out happily into the fresh air where people freely move about, commingle, sit, or lie down, talk, discus, eat, drink, or make small purchases, with no sign of impatience with delay; as if doing all this was one great national pastime. Beneath the expansive shade of the Pepul tree, tea and sharbat stalls, cater to the needs of thirsty clients, and thirstier lawyers! Not far removed, a group is eagerly clustered around a black-coated figure; the briefing for a cooked case. There are many stalls for the sale of forms, stationery and stamps, with a few typists in the corners or under the trees, knocking on clanging keys of aged, rusty machines Рthe common secretariat of the public who come to transact affairs, civil and judicial. Here petitions are monotonously hammered out in the clich̩d phrases of traditional petition writers for a small fee. These are meant to be the magic wordy keys to the hearts of impersonal bureaucrats.
Men from the villages have to walk many miles to the district headquarters. So, there are mochis (cobblers) to mend worn shoes in the Collectoratre compound; and whilst hammering in a few nails or putting in a few stitches, they glean the latest news of the town, though that can be better done at a greater leisure on the nai’s (barber) brick, not far off. The lawyer attends to the mukudma (case), the mochi to the shoes, and the nai to the unnecessary hair. To meet such omnibus social service needs, a roadside hakeem cum mountebank also has his place in the Collectorate grounds. On a piece of jute sacking, he spreads out small potions of life-giving and disease-destroying medicines. Besides the hakeem – seeming, ironically, like one of a kindred profession – a taxidermist has erected his tent, and displays gruesome exhibits of his skill. What trade he expects or gets here few can say. No gathering in India, in town or village, is able to resist the itinerant tamashawalla, and occasionally the feats of monkeys and bears are displayed before a large crowd in the shade of the Pepul, not far from the Collector’s office; a welcome relief from the deadly business of litigation or the tiresome one of petitioning authority.
But the cycle of life must go on, and the supply can only be where the demand is, whether for the services of the Government, or the lawyer, or the chaiwala, or the mochi, or the nai, or the taxidermist, or the tamashawalla. The Collectorate, which provides all these in the true Indian tradition of the mela, is a conspicuous example of the promiscuous community gathering, which, it has been in our national genius to create; at least, since Aurangzeb’s prodigious ‘bazaar-army’ moved with tradesmen and artisans, bhistis and courtesans, and followers of every description to serve the varied needs of men. The Collectorate’s versatility was that of a court, a bank, a market, sometimes a theatre, for the humble peasants’ needs at the district headquarters. As a people, we just like gatherings, and the district Collectorate provides one excellent example how we do it, serving many purposes. We surround dull, austere official business with the atmosphere of mela and tamasha.
The time soon came for me to get my first independent charge of a sub-division, an I.C.S. /I.A.S. man’s debut. My entire past was a preparation for this moment. Soon, I learnt that I was to be posted to Madhubani sub-division, in Darbhanga district, on the remote Nepal border. It was considered to be a problem sub-division; a punishment posting. The favored ones got sub-divisions in South Bihar, not too far from Patna, the capital. Being consigned to the remote border and the notorious Kosi floods, the report of the posting was also accompanied by an explanation for it.
The explanation was that I had failed to pay courtesy calls in all my months in Muzaffarpur at the durbar of the leading Congressman of the district, a close confidant of the Chief Minister; later to be a minister in Bihar’s many governments. At the time, he had no official status in government, though he was popularly regarded as the man behind the throne. I saw no reason to attend his durbar. This too, was a precursor of the new times, and a hang-over from our history; the formal durbar of the earlier Kings and the British rulers was now continued in the informal durbars of Indian ministers and political leaders. It was to be a part of the political bureaucratic culture, and to that extent, this too seemed to be a reversion to type. In his book, Nasser (Penguin Press), Robert Stephen quotes Heykal in a conversation with Nasser: “I still say that the Arab mentality is reverting to instinct…We are still tribesmen. We draw guns on each other and then we shake hands and embrace as if nothing had happened.” These ‘durbars’ were the breeding places of sycophancy, nepotism and favoritism. Indian power systems began to acquire the traits of the traditional Jajmani system of patron and client, each pursuing the other for mutual personal power and gain. You had to be somebody’s man; an independent person was the odd man out, and he suffered the consequences. So, I went to Madhubani gladly; but not before an astrological influence which came to accompany the political – another continuing characteristic of Indian life.
I went to meet my new Commissioner, en route, a good orthodox South Indian Brahmin, before I took charge. When I told him that I would take charge on Thursday, he flatly refused to let me do so, as it was not an auspicious day at all. When I explained that I had the orders of government, it made as little difference to him as if was a family matter. So, I deferred to his authority, both governmental and astrological, and took charge on the following Monday, which he considered to be auspicious.
One traditional trait of our people seemed to follow another to indicate a quiet, slow reversion to our pre-Raj past. There was the departmental exam cheating by officers, aided and abetted by supervisory senior officers; the social and power polarity of the Mahant and the Harijan; no basic settlement training in village revenue administration; the erosion of the vital Inspection System; the ‘Jajmani Durbar’ of the new Neta, and a superstitious Commissioner. I lived through all this, in what were later considered the halcyon days of Nehru. How soon we returned to type, to our pre-British Raj ways!
Madhubani I – Famine and Flood
There was pride in taking charge of Madhubani sub-division. It was the largest in Bihar state with a population of thirteen hundred thousand, the size of many districts in India. Later, it became a district. It had known distinguished predecessors in the service. There was Grierson, the philologist; S. Lall, Assistant Secretary-General at the U.N.; W.G. Archer, an authority on Indian art and a Curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the notorious Bakshi, who, during the 1942 disturbances, found himself a beleaguered district magistrate in Bhagalpur, and declared himself the Governor of the district! He was in my time the senior member in the Board of Revenue, and as whimsical, as he was senior.
He told me a wonderful story of how, when he was in Madhubani years ago, he received a rainfall report from one of the Thana officers of thirty-five feet, seven-and-a-half inches for the previous twenty-four hours! When he went to inspect the Thana later, he told the thanedar, “you must have had a lot of rain, but how did you get ‘thirty-five feet, seven and-a-half inches’?” The thanedar explained that he had earlier received the government’s instructions on installing a rain gauge. It was about a yard long and a yard wide in very small print. Too much for a thanedar to read, but he got the relevant portion, which said that the gauge should be installed in a place where it could collect the maximum amount of rainfall with minimum interference. So, in his discretion, he thought that the best place would be under the eaves of the Thana building, just where the rain was channeled in torrents; hence, thirty-five feet, seven and-a-half inches. Apparently, there were no repercussions from the metrological department; again, an indication of worse to come after 1960 in the form of unreliable data, and questioning by climate scientists using such data from reliable local sources.
My first experiences in Madhubani gave me a good idea of the ethos into which I was moving. Let me relate three or four of them. When I broke journey at district headquarters at Darbhanga to pay a call on my district magistrate, he painfully confided in me that the D.I.G., C.I.D. had a dacoity committed in my sub-division a few months earlier; that he himself had enquired into it; and that he had incriminating evidence of it in his iron safe. It appears that the D.I.G. got his son married to the daughter of a local Mahant-zamindar with vast lands, but could not wait for the Mahant to die in the normal course for the son to inherit the property. An armed section of police was deployed in the vicinity on the pretext of anti-dacoity duty, and they ensured that the diabolical job was done. To any outsider, this would be an almost unbelievable story, but I was moved then by the integrity of the district magistrate, and subsequent experience of Bihar would induce me not to put him beyond the bounds of belief. This particular district magistrate was no ball of fire, but as humble and moderate as a man could be expected. One would not normally expect him to get involved in any delicate and troublesome matter. The D.I.G. was no chicken to reckon with in terms of his powerful connections, and the old D.M. was on the verge of retirement – in no state to hurt or be hurt. Yet, I could see, that he managed to summon up courage and integrity from some deep unsuspected well within him. He was very concerned. I could sense that his quiet sense of decency rebelled against this foul thing perpetrated by a powerful police official himself. The D.M. soon retired, and nothing more was heard of it; a forewarning of a judge’s remark decades later, of the “police being criminals in uniform”.
This was plainly the power of government used for murder by a government official. It could have been done in India’s feudal past two or three hundred years earlier. It was a shocking eye-opener to me on the eve of my first charge of a sub-division in Nehru’s regime. I knew then that I must be tough with the tough. This was our long-inherited tradition. Later, I found there was no lack of scope to be tough, with dacoits, with notorious criminals, with lawyers, with recalcitrant village leaders, with local politicians, and with my officers too. Integrity and fairness were not enough. I learnt toughness, and courage paid. Our people had always respected this in men in power. Gentleness, respect for the individual, and the rule of law seemed terribly foreign concepts in the society of Madhubani, which perhaps was a microcosm of the society of North India, if not the other parts of the country.
In my first few weeks I was conscious of people testing me, trying to know what sort of person I was, and what were my likes and foibles. As a Parsi, and as an ex-army man, I did seem a rather strange animal in North Bihar then; beyond the recognizable caste parameters of that society. Theirs was an old Indian way of dealing with authority. Once a major liking or foible was discovered, this was cleverly pandered to. Soon, one was in the hands of those, who were only too ready to do the pandering. This must have been as old as Kautilya. They discovered to their surprise that my heart was with mountains. This seemed strange, and somewhat foxed them. A lot of good things in life could be produced to cater to a man’s weaknesses; it was hard to produce a mountain in the flat Gangetic plain. But, they tried a number of tricks to find just that - a human chink in my strange armor which might serve their ends.
I was discretely given to know that my predecessor was a very popular man because he held gay parties every Saturday night at the S.D.O.’s house, and it was added softly, that some ‘gentry’ in the town provided for it. The S.D.O. merely had to be its presiding deity. I must have listened with something like Victorian disdain, and they drew a blank.
The, one morning, a man came and tied his cow to a peg which he dug in my garden. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied very respectfully, that the milk from the cow was for my ‘honor’s use’, and that he would be very happy to leave the cow at my disposal. Rather ungratefully, I asked him to take it away. This was too old, too simple and apparent a device, the first little trap for the new mouse.
One evening, some professional men of the town came to see me. I had no car then, only a bicycle. They offered to drive me through the town to see what Madhubani was like. I, inadvertently accepted. Later, I discovered that they were the Saturday-night revelers of the previous S.D.O. This was, I think, a device to parade me before the town as their ‘creature’ too, or one about to be in their bag. Passing a provision store, I asked them to stop, in order to make a trifling purchase. As I was about to step down from the T-model Ford, the doctor was outraged that the S.D.O. would go into the shop to make the purchase. This was just not done! The shop-keeper should be summoned to my house to be told what I wanted. As I needed only a few toilet articles, I later sent my peon for it. I was amused at the feudal notions of even the professional people in a sub-divisional town in North Bihar in 1949; more reversions to traditional ways of people in power.
The elite of Madhubani society hungered to know two basic things in my case, “whose man I was”, and which caste did I belong to. They learnt from the traditional grape-vine of domestic servant and chaprasi, that my wife and I spoke Gujrati. Absurd as it may have been, they sprang like a metal to spring to a quick conclusion, that I was “Sardar Patel’s man”! Now, this suave doctor asked about my caste – a question, which I had anticipated. Being in brahmanical Mithila, I said that I was a Surat Brahmin. Between being Sardar Patel’s man and a Surat Brahmin, I was made!
Soon after taking charge, I found myself flung into relief operations for the Kosi floods. The physical impact of the huge engulfing Kosi water flowing down from Nepal was enormous. It was like an inland sea covering hundreds of square miles, with only a few hamlets on high ground like islands. The Kosi was an annual scourge, creating one of the country’s worst endemic regions of malaria. It isolated thousands of people in remote hamlets, and kept them bereft of succor, almost totally cut-off from the outside world. Whole families lay stricken on damp floors with malaria, dysentery, and malnutrition. I saw father, mother and children lie limp and helpless on mud floors without another to help. And this was a recurring annual tragedy, for which neither the people of the state, not the nation had a conscience.
Lord Wavell, the then viceroy of India, was the first to bring serious governmental attention to it in 1944. Five years later, I found the governmental effort still very meager and the outside public response totally absent. Not a single minister of the Bihar government or a single secretary cared to visit the Kosi area during my three seasons there. Only once, before a expected visit of prime minister Nehru to the district, did the chief minister fly over with me, and then, he let the cat out of the bag of his motives by saying, “What shall I say if the P.M. asks me?” His concern was with the P.M.’s possible questions, not with the miserable plight of the people of the Kosi region who were dying of neglect, and corrupted by meager supplies of sugar and cloth by way of relief. Yet, he was considered to be a great man. The impact of seeing human misery on the scale of the Bengal famine, and now in the vast Kosi floods, in first seven years of my working life, left the mark, the cross of poverty on my mind for the rest of my development years. It became a life-long concern, in and out of government.
During my three years there I launched a four-pronged attack to relieve the misery of this annual tragedy, with the means available then. First, with the help of my anti-malaria officer, we attacked malaria with extensive D.D.T. spraying, and with the widest distribution of mepacrine tablets. Second, my officers and I toured every Thana extensively through rain, mud and flood water on foot, bicycle and boat. The conditions were appalling. Third, I introduced outward motors on country-craft which could, hitherto be punted only about eight to ten miles a day. On many a day I shared the punting with my boatmen. It was a good exercise to while away the slow hours over vast waters. But, to bring relief by such slow means was ineffective. I was strongly advised by a senior I.C.S. official not to try outboard motors, because “machines in this country don’t work!” They did work and speeded the journey of a whole day in one or two hours. Fourthly, I tried to deliver the limited relief supplies through as honest and as effective agencies as I could, to the needy directly; a collaboration of sub-deputy collectors with a few zealous local leaders. I think it worked remarkably, because the officers were without fear, the local leaders in two limited Thanas were well chosen, and the whole operation was personally supervised and accountability received.
I first learnt in the Kosi that our people had no obligation towards what were Sirkari supplies, as in riots, they had none for Sirkari assets. Even the most well-to-do in the village would not hesitate to put out his hand with the poorest for a few seers of relief sugar. Twenty years later, some young friends working in Hoshanabad district, M.P., told me that they had the same experience. Sociology was markedly absent from the training of young civil servants then and since. Government resources are fair game for everyone. In later years, I found this too a national phenomenon. When there is a lack of self-reliance, the will to work, and enterprise; the people live off the public resources through political means, and socialist democracy in India has been largely an unfolding of that process in a sea of corruption. All public resources were fair game for private greed; more so for those, whose hands could dip into public coffers.
Between the wet monsoon seasons in the Kosi area, there were two other major preoccupations in my Madhubani days. In this land of contrasts, drought and flood were sometimes separated by just two days. One day we were digging wells to water parched lands; two days later the country boats were out taking relief to flooded, isolated people. Before my second Kosi season, there was widespread drought and near famine conditions. After Independence, this was the first touch of the harsh winds of famine in India in North Bihar in the summer of 1950, and Madhubani seemed to be the heart area. Suddenly, this remote, forgotten sub-division on the Nepal border became national and world news. Life magazine’s correspondent came up to write about the fascinating life line by which relief supplies were maintained from Calcutta port to the capital Patna, and then by river-craft, truck, bullock cart, and country boat for yet another two hundred or more miles into the remote villages. There was then no bridge over the Ganga. The state supply department had done a magnificent job. Life’s correspondent flew with me from Darbhanga to Patna to take serial pictures of that precious yet precarious life line. It was a small two-seater Beachcomber. The pilot encouraged the correspondent to take the ‘joy-stick’, and as he pulled it out or pushed it in, we made some steep ascent and descent over the wide ‘Ganga’; enough to make me suggest that he ought to stick to photography.
The near-famine also attracted the B.B.C. I remember telling the B.B.C. man, that I had seen the Bengal famine in 1943, and the recollection of what I had seen, haunted me in those creeping days of drought. But by the time the B.B.C. man arrived, I felt confident in assuring him that relief supplies had arrived just in time. Using nothing, but my past experience of famine, and my instinct, I felt that real famine had been averted by just a fortnight. There was the usual controversy over “starvation deaths”, but for people living below the poverty line in prolonged malnutrition, it was casuistry to argue the cause of some alleged deaths, as press and politicians tended to do, and still do in the case of farmer suicides.
It was such a major event of the year as to find a place in the B.B.C.’s Christmas broadcast that year. There was a sense of relief of a great calamity averted. Such a thing happened again in Bihar in 1965. In both, B.D. Pandey of the I.C.S. played a notable part. In 1965, the threat being larger, there were many voluntary agencies in the field, notably led by Jaiprakash Narain. But I would endorse Alan Berg’s verdict for the whole of Bihar, 1965, as for North Bihar, 1950: “In the final analysis, the victory was clearly that of the government of India and the local officials”.
Yet, the public of India hardly knew, that they had just avoided another Bengal famine, the first in free India. Where were the local politician and the local leadership? In 1965, a headline in the Hindustan Times declared: “Power politics while Bihar starves”; the Statesman wrote: “They (the politicians) think of nothing else except the elections…They have no time to think of drought or the starving millions.” But the 1965 comment of a British observer quoted by Alan Berg summed up the attitude to drought, famine and flood in my time too: “It is the story of a human wasteland, where the rich care not, poor dare not, and those in office fear not.” My personal experience at times like this, have shown that only a few officials – able, dedicated and from the Centre and the State – who have mainly saved the day; the conscientious men like B.D. Pandey, the then Secretary, Supply of Bihar.
With the exception of a man like Jaiprakash Narain, local leadership is at best, apathetic, at worst; they are parasites on relief supplies. They use relief for political end. One such politician, a local MLA, thought he would serve his purposes by wanting to come on tour with me. His marked facial resemblance to a vulture was a coincidence! I agreed to let him come with me in the jeep. My tours were normally Spartan, often without the usual accompaniment of a chaprasi. On that hot summer day I decided to test the MLA’s mettle and shake him off for good, by having nothing to eat, and only water to drink at a few brief stops at a Thana. In Madhubani, the well-to-do ate like elephants. Sugar for example, was not poured in spoonfuls, but in fistfuls. I have never seen such mountainous helpings of rice and curds, with repeat helpings in the bargain. At the end of the day, his acute hunger prompted him to say that he was surprised at not having even a meal while on tour with the S.D.O., and that he had eaten more dust than food that day. He never asked to be taken again.
In the early weeks of the impending famine I feared that the relief supplies may not reach the needy. Those were the early democratic days when bureaucracy began to experiment with local committees of netas or leaders. I found most really “cared not”, and that the supplies tended to be diverted to fellow caste men and their lackeys. Relief was used as a political instrument by men who had till recently claimed to be followers of Gandhi, and were now the party men of Nehru. In the process, there was a real danger that the poorest would be lost, and the governmental effort wasted.
When my ICS Commissioner visited me, I told him, rather than taking such a risk, I would take the responsibility of channelizing all relief supplies through my few sub-deputy collectors. I was more confident that at least much of the supplies would reach the really needy. I was a bit shaken by the response of an ICS man, and this was to linger as an omen of the new times in the administration. He said, “If you succeed, well and good. If this leads to trouble, it is your pidgeon.” Already the ICS, the inheritors of the Guardian’s tradition, began to trim their sails to possible political winds. He was a perfectly nice man and a good officer, but there was something in our Indian make-up, which made even the good quail before an adverse political wind, even in near-famine conditions; yet another example of a reversion to type. This was impressionable on a young officer like me. I did not forget. Others too have since come to know it.
Here was another trail of reversions to type, to pre-Raj times, and a foreboding of times to come. The first policeman, a D.IG., “a criminal in uniform”; the pursuit of “whose man” and caste in the power set-up; traps to detect the human weaknesses of officers; the indifference of the political rulers to human suffering in the annual Kosi floods; and the fall of the ICS Commissioner from the “Guardian” ideal of the Raj. How soon those reversions to type were apparent in the first five years after so-called Independence of the people of India. Were we heading for a desi feudal colonialism penetrating the Indian society far deeper than the Raj?
For me, these reversions to type, and those at the end of the last chapter, were clear signals of the shape of things to come. The traditional rot was settling in at the roots in what the people considered to be the halcyon days of Nehru. These were the signals of the later failures of the Nehruvian State, as will be seen in the subsequent chapters. Bihar offered the first significant indications of what was to follow in the governance of the rest of India till 1990. Later, it became India’s Central Africa.
Madhubani II – Work Choices before State Planning
In the midst of my duties I found myself trying to discover my people in Madhubani, culturally. I seemed half a foreigner, and they sensed it. My values and my ways were rather different to their own. If I cycled alone in sun and rain on tour, they somehow thought it odd, unbecoming an official, and a bit crazy, perhaps. For me, it was convenient, effective and enjoyable. I could travel where and when I wished, unencumbered by a slow chaprasi. I could talk to anyone anywhere and communicate better with people, besides being relieved of the bother of looking after a chaprasi on my Spartan travels; they were neither trained, nor used to such a life. Even more, it gave me great joy to be out alone in this green land under a large blue sky, an un-oriental value among those with power and means. If I walked from Thana to Thana at night, I was mistaken for a Harun-al-Rashid. Once, an ‘S.D.O.-missing’ call was sent out in Benipatti Thana in the west of my sub-division; only to be cleared next morning when I walked into Jainagar thana in the north, near the Nepal border, a night’s walk away.
I tested the response of the people with a variety of ideas. I need mention only a few in contrast to each other. One was a Career’s Advisory Scheme for the local High School boys. I was the Chairman of its Managing Committee. But, the idea seemed too sophisticated, and the response was the sort of passive silence which authority meets when it is not in tune with the local people’s minds. On the other hand, I found most enthusiastic responses to simple Gandhian schemes, like canal or road-building. At first, I wondered whether the response was to a kind of Gandhian idea in a Gandhian period (Gandhi had died recently, but his memory then was yet alive), with all its aura of simple virtue. Soon, I came to the conclusion, that it had nothing to do with the Gandhian ethos. Their minds found it difficult to respond to anything sophisticated and modern; they could more easily respond to the simple and elemental, and there was nothing closer to it in their minds than simple earth-works for the public good. Soon, I plunged into these, to the deliberate neglect of my judicial work.
In my tours of the western thanas of Madhubani in the drought days, I was impressed by a widespread and popular demand for water in an arid belt running almost diagonally from Jainagar thana in the north to Benipatti in the west. I came to learn from the people that there was once a King’s Canal dug by an Englishman of that name, and a manager of the Darbhanga raj, about half a century earlier. On my cycling and walking tours, I actually saw faint traces of the old alignment, though it had been completely silted up by then. The people turned to me, as they have done traditionally for ages, to the “mai-baap” (parental) Sirkar to re-dig the canal. They said that the yield in this dry belt was a third of that of the surrounding lands. I was presented with what came to be commonly called a “felt need” in later days, when community projects were the rage up and down the country; only, this was a real felt need spontaneously expressed by hundreds of people in the villages; not the one conceived in the political and bureaucratic minds of a distant Secretariat, or even those of local netas.
My response was to tell the people and their local leaders, that if they wished to have the canal, I would do my best to give it to them on two conditions: First, they must not ask me to go to the government for funds, because I would spend my entire tenure there in paperwork for it; Second, those able to work should dig, and those not able to work should contribute grain to feed the workers. The concept arose out of common sense and practicality, not out of Marx; though I was soon dubbed a “Socialist” by local the Congressmen of Nehru’s party. It was then, after independence, a conservative party of the centre. They used to say that Nehru talked Left and acted Right. The few Socialists then were to the Left of the Congress, with the image of a bunch of agitators. In my district, the Socialists were said to have tenuous links with dacoits; just a touch of Robin Hood, though I did not hear of the poor benefiting from their activities. Their main leader was said to be the best marksman in the district. For a Civil Servant to be called a Socialist at that time was a distinctly dirty word. It is amusing to recall it in the changed circumstances of Nehru’s daughter’s party in the early seventies. In retrospect, it is interesting not only to see the nuances and meanings through which Indian Socialism has passed, but also the difference of image and style between national leaders and their wordy resolutions at Lahore, Avadi and Bangalore; and the real-life associations of the local Socialists in the minds of the people. In those days the distance was wide – between Jaiprakash Narayan, a highly respected non-violent Gandhian and a humanist revolutionary, and the local red-capped netas of North Bihar, who were alleged to consort with dacoits, even in Nehru’s halcyon days.
Giving thought to the prospect of the King’s Canal, I knew that the only time I could count on the voluntary labor of the people, was in the two hot months between the Rabi harvest, and the Kharif sowing in April and May. Time, therefore, was the major constraint. Food for the workers was the next. I tried to get the help of the Irrigation Department, but without any response. So, I used my local amin to align the canal, as far as possible, along the earlier alignment; the only cost to government was eighty four rupees, then. I saw from the map that all the rivers ran from north to south. In the absence of the Irrigation Department’s help, I thought that if I take the canal out of the Kamla river near the Nepal border, pass it into another minor stream in the South-West, and dig at a fairly even depth, not only would the water flow down the natural north-south gradient, but it would also save the central parts of the sub-division from the Kamla floods by draining off surplus water into the arid belt. This was my amateur operational strategy based on nothing more than common sense and good intentions. I was too inexperienced then to expect an official backlash for the neglect of “the proper channels”.
The organizational strategy was to call a meeting of the local thana leaders of all parties; a unique combination of Congressmen, Khwaja topees or white caps, as the people called them, Socialists, Lal topees or red caps, a few Communist sympathizers without badge of recognition, and a few feudal landlords who were too hard-headed to be ideological at all. Besides, in the eyes of the people they had their own intrinsic status, not needing any symbols. I told all of them, my two conditions and got their agreement. Along the entire length of the canal the owners or occupiers of the land offered it voluntarily. I never heard one word of protest, much less litigation in a highly litigious society. Then, I organized them for work into sectors along the entire twenty-five mile length of the project. I took advantage of this strong, popular local demand to tell the leaders that if they failed me, I would tell the people, ‘who’ had let them down. In the view of the coming elections in the next year, this seemed a very real threat. Those were the early days of our democracy, when, whatever the sensitivity of our local politicians, an honest official could still claim the goodwill of his people in his own right. I used none of my officers for this task. This was to be my own private madness.
D-day, when we began work, was one of the happiest and proudest days of my life. Motoring ten miles out from my Headquarters in my pre-1939, V-8 Ford, I arrived at the central part of the canal alignment. Work had already begun. To their surprise I joined in the digging quietly – no ceremonial turning of the clod by a VIP, no speeches, no fanfare; just real digging like the others. Then I went from sector to sector joining in the digging, giving the people the feeling that I was one with them in the project; one with the humblest diggers; an ally in the flesh. There was tremendous enthusiasm for miles along the alignment. The enthusiasm of the people spread like fire along those twenty-five miles of remote countryside. It attracted the headlines of the state papers in Patna. The people in these remote villages were proud of this sudden recognition in the wider world. This went on for three days. Mithila is normally so fertile; the soil does not compel hard farming as elsewhere. This was perhaps the first time that so many had labored so hard and so long without payment by government or the Darbhanga raj. It was a spontaneous, voluntary effort sustained by the raising of local grain, the only resource.
After three days, the initial collection of grain tended to dry up in a number of places. I could not expect poor farm labor to work without grain. They had already performed a Herculean voluntary effort under the hot sun. I found my appeals to the leaders not very effective. The areas of real weakness were those entrusted to the local landlords. I had to be hard on them to cough up more grain for those who worked. One particularly recalcitrant fellow drew my anger, and, beyond a point of control; I was driven to use my umbrella on him. The show of force worked; more grain was forthcoming.
But, it was hard to sustain this slinging match for long on all fronts. I was aware of the men thinning out, of leaders getting listless, of grain supplies dwindling, of enthusiasm waning. The summer days were getting hotter and drier. Would only our sweat flow into this half-dug channel? All I could do was to drive out each day, then cycle along the canal bank, and throw myself into the fray in sector after sector, encouraging here, driving there, day after day for forty-eight days. Then, the canal was virtually dug, somewhat imperfectly in parts; but it was a visible canal for twenty-five miles. We had exhausted ourselves. I sustained myself all those days in the villages on sugar water, returning home for a late evening meal. They were very hot, lean and hard days.
Then we rested, waiting for the first rains in June, to see what would happen to our imperfect handiwork. For me these were awful days of suspense. Had we worked in vain? Had I inflicted all this hard work on poor and trusting people only to be left with a dry canal? The good news came one day that water was flowing down the canal in the north. I dashed there, and saw liquid happiness flowing down the canal and in the eyes of our people too. As the monsoon weeks went, the water rose. There was a sense of having fulfilled a purpose larger than ourselves. We had overcome the enmity of village feuding, the wasted rivalry in litigation, the silting of fifty years; but most significant of all, the age-old dependence on the Sirkar. In the extravagant classical imagery of Hindu legend, my people compared me with Bhagirath, who had brought down the waters of the Ganga from the Himalaya. The fact was that the collective effort of the people in their thousands performed that feat in real life, like the legend of Bhagirath. With no external resources, they had dug a canal of twenty five miles in forty eight days. It was, on an average, about fifteen feet wide and about three or four feet deep, or roughly eight million cubic feet of earth work. And all this was years before the Bhoodan, the community projects, and the Five Year Plans. I like to think that it was one of the first sparks of self reliance in the new India, and that in a state with the worst attributes of the Sirkari culture.
A little later, I came to hear that the Irrigation Minister of Bihar wished to censure me for the unauthorized digging of the canal. Oddly, I, a junior civil servant, felt protected by the goodwill of my people against a powerful, elected representative of the people. Better judgment prevailed, I think largely that of my Chief Secretary, L. P. Singh, and I never heard of it again. L.P. Singh was a big man, both, in Patna, and later in Delhi. I regard him head and shoulders above any other civil servant I have known. Bihar was fortunate in having such a Chief Secretary in its early years, but even he could not stem the rot later on.
Some moths later the Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, came to Darbhanga. He came to see the situation after the near-famine was averted. He came to what was then the headwork of the King’s Canal in Jainagar thana. This was recognition of the highest, in the land for the work of a few moths ago. As was to be expected, he drew the masses in thousands; he addressed a very large gathering in one of his usual speeches. I felt that my natural place was not on the pandal with the ministers and the officers, but with my people in the open sun. I must have seemed an odd person standing out there, among thousands of peasants in the sun, in the queer sola topi of those days. It drew Panditji’s eye, and the sight of this one isolated individual standing with such a topi among sitting peasants must have irritated him. He shouted at me over the mike rather rudely in Hindi, “Eh topiwala, sit down”. I was indignant and shouted back I would not. My D.M. and Commissioner on the pandal were taken aback by this response. Someone told Panditji, that this odd individual out there had organized the building of the canal. So, a minor incident was averted between the great Prime Minister – what a god he was in 1950 – and his puny official on his first charge. Panditji went on with his speech. After seeing him off by train at Jainagar, I returned by road to Madhubani late in the evening. On the jeep ride back, I was deeply happy for this single exceptional recognition of the work of our people by the Prime Minister himself. I saw the buntings come down, the local netas relaxed with their feet up on the tables, general signs of reversion to the lazy past.
The earlier censure move of the Irrigation Minister was obviously an expression of the parochial envy in a typically bureaucratic culture, which was too blind to see the virtues and the results beyond it. It was ironical that the censure move was ultimately followed by an appreciative letter to the District Magistrate, Darbhanga, from the Chief Secretary, Bihar, in which he said that the Prime Minister had publicly commended at Patna, the work done in Darbhanga district, adding, “Will you also convey the honorable Chief Minister’s congratulations to Moddie for the very good work done by him in Madhubani sub-division, which created a favorable impression on the Prime Minister?” The irritating man under the topi was not only saved but redeemed.
Censure of some sort, however, I could not ultimately escape. I had knowingly neglected my court work for flood and famine relief, and for the King’s Canal. Considering, I had limited time and limited human resource, my priorities were obvious. I felt good being closer to humanity and action. Besides, I considered court work a waste of time; ploughing through false evidence on both sides, never reaching the truth; merely going through the motion of judicial procedures on the basis of concocted evidence; and arriving at pompous judgment based on a Law of Evidence, which had no relevance in the district courts of India in criminal matters. The whole procedure was a meaningless mime in which I had lost faith. The censure of the District Judge on my work was conveyed in the nicest way possible by my Commissioner, orally and with tongue in cheek, as if to suggest to me that he appreciated my reasons for giving my court work low priority, but was constrained to go through the motion of conveying the censure as a matter of duty. I took it sportingly in the same spirit.
For me, life reverted to normal too, with a return to the court. I must have kept spilling out inconsequential judgments, to the quiet amusement of our village litigants and their witnesses; a daily spectacle in every district of India, of our people making asses of pompous officialdom. One case, however, stands out in memory, as it gave me an opportunity of making a bold gesture for justice for the weak against the strong. Perhaps, I was playing the role of the ‘Guardian’ again, and how good it was to play it when the opportunity offered.
I came to hear that a certain Mahant had had one of his concubines murdered, and no one dare do a thing. In those parts then, a Mahant had the powers of life and death, virtually legitimized by his spiritual position in the community and strengthened by his material powers as a rich landlord. He was almost like a petty medieval pope, a rustic Bogia. I often found that as much as I was at sea in getting at the truth in the courts, I was on firmer ground among the people in the village. There, they do not, perhaps, can not easily lie in that situation. There are local constraints and the lawyers have not got at them. There is a greater degree of dependability of evidence in the village. I toured in the area of the Mahant, and found a prima facie case against him; but no one dared move. I gave orders to the police to investigate. The complaint came to my court. Knowing the limitations of the court, where, nevertheless, local power prevailed, I was determined to deny the Mahant bail, perhaps the only punishment he would have known.
My small sub-divisional court was never so packed as on the day the Mahant first appeared, after weeks of absconding. The compound outside too, was crowded. For the people, this was an unbelievable scene; their unchallenged pope, whose very frown was command, was in the dock on trial. The Mahant was a fat, coarse and lascivious-looking man. Never did I take more care to write a judicial order as in the case of his bail petition. I had to make it proof against appeal and rejection by the district judge. In the event, he spent three chastening months in jail custody, before the trial went to its later stages. The Mahant’s divine right of life and death was shattered. I acknowledge, my judgment may not have been unbiased, but it was based on local people’s evidence, not the cooked evidence of the litigants and the lawyers. To start with, I had made up my mind outside the court. But again, it was a case of common sense in a good and civilized cause against the book of rules, and the harsh power situation, inappropriate to the desired ends. And for this, I was quite prepared to take another judicial censure. In my youthful ardor, I believed that I had struck a small blow at the old tyrannical feudal power, for the new secular, civilized government.
Madhubani was the heart of traditional Mithila, and nothing was so conspicuous its representation, than its famous Saurath Sabha. The Sabha was an institution by which the Maithils arranged marriages, en mass. Thousands became guests of the villagers of Saurath for three days. It was the custom for only men to come; no women. During the three days, there was a hum of consultations between the prospective parties to arrange suitable marriages. When tentative links developed, they went to the Panjikar, or the astrologer, to confirm that the match would be astrologically auspicious. When this was done, the Panjikar issued a patra. The groom-to-be, with his in-law male members, was then whisked away to the girl’s home to be married, and to return to his home only three days later. No opportunity for second thoughts!
My problem was to provide quotas of dhotis and saris for marriage parties, in a completely remote rural area, for thousands of people who were away from their homes, and beyond any homestead or family identification. As ration cards would have led to malpractices, I decided to accept the authenticity of the Panjikar’s patra, which I knew, would command respect of tradition and custom to avoid malpractices; and against which I could be reasonably sure that authorized quotas could be issued. It was a case of cashing in on the sanction of tradition to implement a modern rationing system in a completely rural area, among thousands of migrant marriage makers. Sometimes, I wish, administrators and planners in India gave more thought to using those parts of our tradition which have social sanctions behind them, and which are likely to be more honored than the alien modernizing zeal of the elite, disclosed by the sociologist, F.G. Bailey.
Living on the Nepal border, one could not be unaffected by it. Two things intermingled here. The first, nurtured a dream to find a route to the Southern approach to Everest, which no one had yet done, and the second was the Nepalese independence struggle against the Rana regime.
After the Chinese Communist regime took over in 1949, I knew the northern route to Everest would be closed indefinitely. No outsider had been within sixty miles of Everest from the south. There was the southern route to the Khombu Glacier to be explored. Sitting so close on that border, I was in an ideal position to attempt it. Having expressed the desire to the Bara Hakim of the Nepal district across the border, he very kindly arranged for me to visit Khatmandu as a State guest to secure the necessary permission.
In November 1949, my wife, our two-year old son and I, set out from Raxaul and Amlekganj – the two rail-heads. From there, we had to walk over two low passes of about six thousand feet, into the Khatmandu valley in two days. The Ranas had deliberately kept this physical gap in their communications with the outside world. But, ideas cross such gaps very soon. I found them in such a panicky state that they even searched our baggage for newspapers, political dynamite in their eyes. After waiting on the Rana Prime Minister’s pleasure for four days - putting off each day for one reason or another, including the astrological - my wife and I were given audience in the Singha Darbar Palace on the fifth day. There was Mohan Shamshere, the last of the Rana rulers and his strikingly handsome son, Vijay. I explained my purpose, and they, very kindly, gave me permission for the journey, in the next May. I was surprised by their consent. Nepal had been a strictly closed country till then. I had no official sponsorship, and this was probably the first time the Rana regime had given any foreigner, the permission to penetrate so deeply into Nepal with a mountain expedition. Even the powerful British Government had not secured such permission in the early decades. I do not know why I was so favoured. The recommendation of the Bara Hakim could not have been enough. It is possible, that in their nervous state of a possible Nepalese overthrow movement hatching in India, they thought it advisable to have a friendly district officer on their vulnerable border. But my thoughts were on Everest, and this was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Back in Madhubani, I wrote to my Chief Secretary, and to the Prime Minister of India, Nehru, asking for a small party of four, including an officer of the Geological Survey of India and/or the Botanical Survey. I was asked to submit a proposal, which I did promptly. I received a response a year later, asking me to appear before a scientific committee of the Government of India in Delhi. Nevertheless, I went ahead with the formation of a small private party of four on our own resources. One week before we were to leave, the other three had to drop out for different reasons. Alone, I gave up and ate the gall of disappointment. By the time the G.O.I. responded a year later, Shipton had already led a reconnaissance to the Khombu Glacier in 1951; preparatory to Hunt’s first successful expedition to the summit itself in 1953.
The thrilling ascent of Everest and the role of Tensing – a naturalized Indian – as a summiteer brought mountaineering too to India the ‘Sirkari’ way. Nehru and the Government of India. took pride in Tensing’s achievement, and the H.M.I. was started in Darjeeling, India’s first Mountain School, with the blessings of Nehru and Dr. B.C. Roy, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal. Nehru’s romantic sense of adventure was touched. Tensing, a sick, neglected Sherpa of Bhotia Basti, Darjeeling, suddenly became a national and world hero. Government provided the patronage and the funds. Indian mountaineering, a thing confined to about half a dozen Indians before, was now launched for thousands in future. In later years, border security needs provided its rationale. Hunt’s flag and that Darjeeling Sherpa on the top of Everest did far more than my humble, lone efforts with the G.O.O. before Shipton blazed the way. C.D. Deshmukh was right again: “In India, unless these kinds of things come from the highest level, people don’t take very much notice”. And, of course, nothing succeeds like success. I had none to offer, only a puny effort to reconnoiter the new south route to Everest. Before, 1953, neither Government not people cared a damn about such an effort. No wonder the early Jesuits tried to convert the royal emperor in China and his highest nobles first! This was the old pattern.
The Nepal border operations provided yet another example to show that things mostly happen when the top levels of government want them to happen. When the “rebels”, as they were called made their bedraggled assault on the Rana regime, the Nepali’s administration in the “terai region” across the border totally collapsed. No writ ran beyond the district headquarters. Even earlier, our international frontier between Bihar and Nepal was an ideal area for dacoits. They just had to commit crime on one side of the border and escape to the other side, till the incident became a matter of the past. When the Nepal district administration collapsed, insecurity was rampant on both sides.
Then an order came from Delhi that we could penetrate up to fifty miles into the Nepalese territory to patrol the area, to root out dacoity and provide security. Dacoity was a rather normal feature of the Northern parts of my sub-division. The police seemed incapable of even apprehending the dacoits. People said they were in league, that it was a business of sharing the spoils, the counter system later. We seemed o be in a state of utter importance.
When the Delhi order came, I thought I would try out an idea. I told my Commissioner, who had now moved to the border, that my hypothesis of the important police/dacoity situation coincided with that of the people – the local police and the dacoits were in league. To prove or disprove it, I suggested that in the present border emergency, when orders had issued from the highest levels in Delhi, he might issue direct instructions to the D.I.G. Police, to see to it that the dacoits were apprehended. If they were, then my hypothesis would be correct; if not, it would be incorrect. The commissioner gave orders, and, even to my surprise, the leaders of the dacoits were apprehended within forty-eight hours! For months and years, earlier, they seemed inapproachable. Thirty years later, a Chief Minister in U.P. thought fit to resign as he was important to arrest the notorious dacoit gangs. In recent years, it is the norm, the alliance between the authority and the lawless.
When I arrived to take charge in Madhubani, an unknown person from strange parts, I was met at the station by large numbers of people, including the second officer of the sub-division and some leaders of the community. When I left, there was no one. The formal farewells had been gone through earlier, garlands, speeches et al. Apart from getting my desserts, this too, is a feature of life in our society. When those with official power cease to have their use, they are as good as dead; not even the courtesy of farewell. When you ascend the gaddi, high or low, you are the cynosure of all eyes, and your predecessors’ defects suddenly come to light and you are the new redeemer. Then it is your turn to become a predecessor, to be no more than a bygone figure. It must have been so in the times past. Not to speak of us – inconsequential men of humble office. After the death of Akbar, the Jesuit, father Xavier, saw how the great emperor was taken to his grave simply by a very few mourners; no pomp and ostentation. In his surprise he wrote: “Thus the world treat those from whom no good is to be hoped nor evil feared”. The Holy Father did not quite understand India. This may be said of most of the departing men in office in our society. They are then, the past.
As my departure train left Madhubani station, I stood at the open door of the compartment to take a last look at my bungalow, my home for the last three years, go past. I knew a deep feeling within me, that Madhubani had given me, and I had given Madhubani, the best, and the most fulfilling years of my life so far. I did not know then that this would be the first and last time I could play the role of Phillip Woodruffe’s, ‘The Guardians’, for 1.3 million people; I was under thirty. As a historian, I sensed that, the role combined that of Plato’s philosopher- king, and the making of the Roman state and empire. In that context, Rome was a magic world. In the coming years I was to realize that the Indian governing class was no Rome. It was the best part of the British dream in the making of the Indian Empire. Was there a new Indian core inspiration beyond Nehru’s personality, beyond Ashokan symbols, and a desire to restore the composite Raj of Akbar with Muslim and Hindu mansabdars? Or, were we to see reversions to cultural types, as new the Asian and especially the African societies have shown in the next decades? Externals change fast; internals linger for long periods.
State Headquarters Days: Signals of the Future
After three years of near famine and floods, I was in need to recuperate. I went back to the mountains; this time to explore the source of Ganges in the upper reaches of the Satopanth glacier, and to enjoy Smythe’s famous Valley of Flowers, the Bhyundar in Garhwal. I had just returned from the Satopanth to Badrinath en route to the Bhyundar, when a telegram awaited me from the Chief Secretary, Bihar, instructing me to return immediately. Smythe’s promise of the Valley of Flowers never materialized, and for this I could not forgive the Bihar government; more so, after the anti-climax of my return to Patna.
Back at Patna, I reported to the Secretary, Supply Department, to which I was now posted. The secretary was at a loss to tell me why I had been recalled by telegram. As far as he was concerned, there was no need for my precipitate return! But governments, at least in India, are hydra-headed. Later, I learnt that my hasty recall was at the instance of the Chief Minister. It was reported that my predecessor as Textile Controller of the state, was collecting sizeable amounts of money for his minister, a rival of the Bhumihar Chief Minister, the number two man in the state cabinet, and the leader of the rival Rajput caste faction, though of the same Congress party. So, the party or personal interest reflected in Bhumihar and Rajput in terms of caste was the criterion, not the public interest – a great gulf between public interest, law and the political/cultural mind-set. This was revealed in F.G. Bailey’s “Stratagems and Spoils”.
Each society has its own forms of corruption. In India, corruption is a widespread sociological phenomenon with deep roots in tradition; it is only used as a temporary moral one by rivals in the game. It has been a part of the Sirkari culture for centuries past, going back to Kautilya and the Arthashashtra. When Dr. Bernier, the famous French traveler wrote to Colbert, the Finance Minister of Louis XIV in Mughal India, he summed it up then: “My lord, in Asia the great are never approached empty handed!” And the great set the same example to successive rungs of subordinates down to the patwari in the village. There shall be more on public corruption in the later decades and chapters, as it spread like water hyacinth in Indian political waters.
I found, both, the Supply Department and my Secretary dull. After all the routine noting on files, what we were actually doing was to merely allocate a certain quota of cloth issued to the state once a month by the Textile Commissioner of the GOI at Bombay, to each district. To do this the Textile Controller made a monthly journey to Bombay, which could have been done by post, or quarterly, to save cost. My predecessor’s journeys was alleged to be Mughal lavishness with district wholesalers meeting him with gifts at each train stop, and with hospitality at Bombay by the State’s agent befitting a Mughal mansabdar. Files went up the hierarchy to the minister and then down again, and by an establishment of three officers and a dozen clerks, which could have been done by one officer and two clerks. We really dealt with pieces of paper, and had the vaguest of ideas about business. I think, most of us only knew the four main varieties of textiles – superfine, fine, medium and coarse. We had not the faintest idea about their manufacture, which was none of our business, or of the nature of public demand, which should have been. We were only exercising a little routine authority at a time of shortage, an example of the ‘control Raj’! Three centuries earlier, India was the world’s leading textile producer and exporter, with the finest muslins and silks. In the post-1947 Indian Control Raj, we blundered for decades till hundreds of cotton farmers committed suicide, the heart of the industry in Bombay closed down, putting lakhs of workers out of jobs; then setting up a National Textile Corporation, which itself went bankrupt, leading to decades of mismanagement of the country’s most precious real estate in the heart of Bombay, not resolved even in 2000.
But, the people of India have their own ways of dealing with pompous upper officialdom. When my wife and I bought some fruit in Patna market in 1951, we got it in a paper bag which looked familiar. The paper was a government order in original, which I, as Textile Controller, had signed to all district officers a week ago! Apparently, the clerks of the Secretariat had business links with Patna kabariwalas; and so much for the custodians of government papers.
Indian bureaucrats, whatever else they lack, take their limited labors very seriously, and devoid of humor. This too was in contrast to many officers of the Raj, as evidenced by the following entry in the journal of the United Services Club in Calcutta:
Form of Daily Service for Use in Government Departments
Let us pray:
‘O Lord, grant us that this day we come to no decisions,
Neither run into any kind of responsibility,
But, that all our doings may be ordered to establish
New and quite unwarranted departments; For ever and ever. Amen’
Hymn:
O thou that seest all things below,
Grant that thy servants may go slow,
That they may study to comply
With regulations till they die.
Teach us, Lord, to reverence
Committees more than common sense;
Impress our minds to make no plan,
But pass the baby when we can.
And when our tempter seems to give
Us feelings of initiative,
Or when alone we go too far,
Chastise us with a circular.
Mid war tumult, fire and storm
Strengthen us, we pray, with forms.
Thus will thy servants ever be
A flock of perfect sheep to Thee.
And whilst “controlling”, we shared a universal belief in government that every trader was dishonest; that a mistake of two or three dhotis or saris in a retailer’s stocks could only occur by trickery; and that all social virtue was with us, the public officials doing public good, self-righteously believing, that shortages, black markets, and even inflation were due to wicked traders. Our so-called Controls totally neglected the vital need for higher productivity in farm and factory, in good public infrastructure, in an expanding credit system, in good demand management, and, not least, bureaucracy’s own rising consumption of taxes and borrowings later.
It was not till I became a Sales Manager in the market later, did I realize how wrong we were; that traders are, as a class, no less dishonest than government servants, who, in fact, have far greater opportunities for intellectual and other forms of dishonesty; and that the average Indian shopkeeper is actually a rather bad accountant of stocks and his main concern is with profit margins. The average shopkeeper was far less conceited than the average official; in most cases he had far more traditional courtesy; and in some sways – especially as victims of the arbitrary assessment of commercial tax officials – he was more sinned against than sinning. He was not a model of probity, but nor were most officials who arrogated to themselves the custodianship of public morals and public good just by virtue of their office, rather than their economic intelligence and performance.
In this connection the story of my old collector in Muzaffarpur is not without relevance. Now, as textile controller, I had come to believe that there were rampant malpractices in his district supply Office in Muzaffarpur. Rather than correspond, I chose to inspect personally. The same collector who took no notice of me as his new assistant collector four years ago, now felt generous enough to invite me to dinner. As he was nearly deaf, it was a silent affair at two ends of a long table! After an inspection of his district supply office, I had reason to believe that his invitation to me was meant to be a gentle gesture not to be rough on the issue, with his district supply Officer. He was a good man, but a weak one. I think he intended to protect his staff. And this is how the eggs of corruption and inefficiency hatch everywhere in India. Far from being threatened, corruption is protected even by good men, who by the nature of our society do not find it in them to take action against culprits. The hard choice lies not so much in dealing wit corruption, but with people, so we take the soft option of leaving them unhurt, whatever happens to the public interest. The permissive, protective instinct of the joint-family permeates nearly all organizations; and, of course, there was no distinction between the public interest and that of the Jajman and his minions. I was to learn more of this at the highest political and administrative levels some decades later, by which time we had acquired a sauda government in a sauda society.
At Patna I found myself the Secretary of the new state I.A.S. Association. As the successor service to the I.C.S. there were joint annual dinner meetings between I.C.S. and I.A.S. officers and their wives, but the I.A.S. was looked upon as second-rate progeny. There was an air of supercilious adoption. At the all-India level, the I.C.S. even refused to have a joint service association to protect the integrity and interests of the service. Whatever the merits of that separatist decision, the Indian I.C.S. in most cases failed to give their successors a fraction of the training and development, which they received from the British. There were exceptions, like my Chief Secretary, L.P. Singh. In some cases, their intellectual integrity itself was in doubt. In my time in Bihar, ministers hardly interfered directly with those regarded as honest civil servants. A thing called “mind-reading” had begun. The first “mind-reader” of ministers’ minds I heard of in Bihar was an I.C.S. Secretary.
In 1947, the Indian I.C.S. began with a tremendous reputation of one of the world’s elite administrators, a cadre which received the open, powerful support of Sardar Patel, the Home Minister on the floor of Parliament; and yet the history of the next twenty years showed they were a dying race; dying not because the cadre was to die out by 1987 when the last of them retired, but because of two cardinal faults of character long before that time. First, they failed to provide the required leadership after independence to the new administration in what may be called a collective sense of integrity in the services. They failed critically at the Centre and States to get the better political leaders of those years to accept the autonomy of the permanent executive as an impartial element, yet loyal to the policies of the political executive in power – the basis for good governance in the Westminster model. Many colluded with the new ministers for sectional, short-term interests, instead of helping them to see that they could get the best out of the services with impartial advice and a reputation for good government. “Mind-reading” grew. The cause of good was lost. Far from stemming the process of the reversion to type, the reversion to traditional weakness, groupism and intrigue, the I.C.S. mistakenly segregated themselves from all other cadres of government. Second, they failed to train and create a succession: a critical failure of any good management. Fifteen years after I left the I.A.S. I asked an old colleague about the service. His reply was: “Don’t ask about the service. There is no service left!” For this, the I.C.S. officers were primarily responsible, with their embedded importance as omniscient generalists in a world getting increasingly scientific and technical. Instead of “the steel frame”, at best the I.C.S. was a shrinking girder. They were at the helm in 1947 and enjoyed absolute security under the Constitution, but they failed those outside their limited cadre of four hundred shrinking members.
I know only too well, on both sides of the fence, that a few I.C.S. men were worthy of a place among the finest public servants a country could have, but they were too few. L.P. Singh was later turned out of Bihar almost overnight. H.M. Patel’s leaving in 1956 over the LIC affair was only a conspicuous milestone in what was a steady deterioration over twenty years, during which professionalism went out of service. Two decades later, when Ashok Mehta, one of the better politicians and the Chairman of the Indian Institute of Public Administration, Delhi, approached me to become its Director, I said: a) I was not looking for a post; b) I wanted a Committee to go into all aspects of senior administrative training on a modern professional basis, dealing with major administrative failures of the post, as a prelude to changing the course of IIPA. He dismissed the idea. The IIPA, like the government, could continue in the same rut. He was merely looking for a man to fill a post, the continual limited pre-occupation of the Indian governments. The public interest can be damned!
So, once again, there was a reversion to the past, to a subtle courtier ship, which eventually became Indira Gandhi’s notorious “commitment”. Many years later, one notable I.C.S. victim of the political amoeba, which I predicted in 1952, would feed on the administration, and which the I.C.S. helped to grow, cynically alluded to this specious thing “commitment”. Many years later, one notable I.C.S victim of the political amoeba, which I predicted in 1952, would feed on the administration, and which the I.C.S. helped to grow, cynically alluded to this specious thing called “commitment” by saying, “Unless you are committed you are omitted!” But by then the politician’s notion of commitment was only the Jajmani idea of a client-patron, a cultural prison in modern times.
In my few years in the I.A.S, I had had a good innings, no complaints, much job satisfaction, more than usual recognition from the Prime Minister, and the Chief Minister, and yet knew in my bones that the conditions of the future would not be those for which I had made this my life’s chosen career. I was thirty three. I had seen the signals. I began to see the shape of things to come. The time for decision was ripe. A few more years and I would be too far gone to have the courage to change. For three months the decision went back and forth in my anguished mind. By night I decided to go, by day I decided to stay. When I consulted four seniors in the service, including two I.C.S. men, to my surprise they offered no reason at all for me to stay. It left me wondering about their reason to stay. This came to me as something of a shock. Thirteen years later, in his office as a senior Secretary of the Government of India in Delhi, one of them said about me to another colleague: “This fellow saw the light a long time ago”. Perhaps I did. The owl had to find another nest.
An experience in Patna was an indicator of the mindless planning under specious titles and slogans, which was to follow in the next decade and a half; and it flourished particularly under Nehru’s Karta-like blessings. In the late 1950’s, he once said that the foundations of the village progress were to be laid on the panchayat, the cooperative, and the school. No one, not even Nehru, seemed to heed C. Rajagopalachari, who in a flash of insight summed up past governance. He said, India was “a government-less civilization”. Hundreds of governments came and went. Customary village management looked after the basic natural resources of lands, water, forests, pastures, and social sanctions. That was the “government-less civilization”. But, as I saw in my Allahabad days, those who demanded Swaraj did not care to study the realities of pre-colonial Swaraj.
What should go into building the panchayat, the cooperative and the school, seemed to be no one’s business – neither sociologist, nor economist, nor educationist nor planner? As for the bureaucrat and the politician, this brief statement was a policy, and this was enough. Only overheads and budget outlays followed. The men made so much of change in the building of a new India, but cared not what the stuff of change required. The later lessons of the first showed that the people of India got schools, but not education; and cooperatives got Sirkari and corrupt, but not true cooperatives of the local people. They got hospitals, but not health care or even medicines. In fact, the caste-ridden power systems tried to capture both. We created costly shells and neglected the spirit and purpose of good governance. Productivity and cost-effectiveness have been totally foreign words in Indian governance till the I.T. age.
In 1951, Bihar was probably the first state in India to introduce a Panchayat Raj bill, but had failed to implement land reforms, fatal for the future. I happened to meet three or four MLAs whom I knew in the corridors of the legislature, and I asked them the purpose of the bill. To my surprise, I received no reply. Nehru had pronounced; they blindly accepted. To relieve the embarrassment, I took it upon myself to suggest to them that, perhaps, their intention was to revive ancient India’s panchayats as a form of local government. “Yes, that is the intention”, they all agreed with ignorant chauvinistic pride. Neither they, nor anyone else realized that there was a world of difference between the ancient panchayats, which were oligarchies of elders in the village with all the sanctions of custom; and the new panchayats, which would be elected by political systems, and would lack any real sanctions in contemporary village society. In later years, sociologists were to show, and bureaucrats were to realize, that the local power group of the village with its dominant caste was to capture power through these very instruments of the panchayat and the cooperative, which in the dreams of Nehru and the Congress, were intended to be instruments of liberation from the feudal caste and landlord structure, with a widening of opportunities for the weaker sections in the village. But superficial labels and slogans seemed to suffice, and ambivalence to prevail. Objectives were specious; realities were different. Bihar was later to become India’s Central Africa; the disease of bad governance spreading most in the Hindi-speaking states, the consuming belly of India.
The same pattern of events was repeated with greater fanfare and at a cost of hundreds of crores to the country in another dream, the Community Projects which were rapidly spread over every district of India, the so-called key to the rural millennium. In the excited imaginations of Nehru, S. K. Dey and many others, this was to be the key instrument to uplift rural India – agriculture, irrigation, education, public health, family planning, the whole gamut, but with the old Revenue – the Police oriented administration! The imagination coined a fine, inspiration slogan, “Destination Man”. It only ignored the crucial human element, sociological Man in the Indian Village. The instrument for this many-splendoured Utopia was the poor and inadequate Village Level Worker, with bad officers and worse clerks above him. Soon, with reports, returns, and visiting officialdom, community projects went the way of Sirkari failures. The thana-village oligarchies thrived on Sirkari resources, as they done through history. Within a decade the excitement died down, reality set in, and imagined destinations receded into blurred horizons.
In the immaturity of our approach towards so many social problems, the Indian official and the political mind seems to plump for one simple answer or slogan to complex problems; like the magical mantram of the earlier pandits. I have often wondered if this trait is a part of make-believe, or a tendency to shirk hard mental work, while giving expression to a basic aspiration in our make-up. Whatever the roots, here lay the basic cause of the later “systemic failures”. By the time of political “commitment” and political opportunism (1970 to 1990), the rich farmers were subsidized and the small ones left to mounting debts and starvation deaths; enterprise, public and private, was strangled by controls; GDP growth rates remained low below four percent per annum, and by 1991 the treasuries went bankrupt.
But to revert, in March 1952, it was dark for me. My judgment of the future compelled me to give up the career of my boyhood dreams. And yet, in the days when I settled into my new management job in Bombay, I felt a strange sense of being a free man, bereft of dubious Sirkari power and status into a freer world. Basically, I had given up the path of power for one of persuasion; a new ‘P’ which was quite foreign to the I.A.S. culture, of the three ‘P’s of “partner, position and power”. Somehow, the oppressive weight of that false culture fell away from me. While, externally, it offered so much to do with public good and a wider responsibility, inside its daily life, it had to do so much with status, lassitude, ineffectiveness, with suspicions, disregard and distrust of people, with violence, with corruption, and with the promotion of the personal interests of bureaucrats and politicians for much of the time. There was an element of much illusion in a little reality, where power systems believed realities were on paper. For the coming years, I enjoyed a private freedom and happiness away from this government world, doing a humble job with humble people in bustling real-life markets. I consoled myself with the saying of an early philosopher who once said, “If one cannot do a big thing, one can find happiness in doing a small thing”.
In 2005, I came across this post-script on Bihar.
In 1947, Bihar was then considered one of the four best governed provinces. However, in the Times of India of January 23, 2005, Amod Kant of the I.P.S., and a Bihari himself, had this to say of his home state: “Once the shining glory of ancient India, Bihar today is a state where anarchy runs supreme. The problem No.1 is infrastructure, it’s almost non-existent…there is a lurking sense of fear and insecurity…it was not possible to achieve much there because of systematic failure”.
R. S. Sharma, a historian, spoke of “Casteism, crime, criminals, illiteracy and unemployment. The majority are illiterate even now”. Shatrughn Sinha, actor and an MP from the state said: “This is Bihar today – lawlessness, poverty, fear. Two out of every five persons here are living below the poverty line. The only industry that flourishes is kidnapping and extortion. There’s fear psychosis in the entire state…The land of Buddha is being seen as a land of buddhus”. And Rajiv Gandhi, the Chief Executive of Comma said: “Bihar is the heart of India’s darkness! It is the repository of all that’s wrong with India – bribery, corruption, lawlessness and cruelty”.
In the recent times, this has been the land of Dr. Rajendra Prasad and Jai Prakash Narain. North Bihar has India’s richest alluvial soils, and South Bihar has India’s minerals. Its long misrule since, has reduced it to India’s Central Africa, and part of the thugee India of the early British Raj, which, to their credit, they wiped out in six months. After Swaraj, Bihar’s malaise has gone on for nearly sixty years. For its people, the state has withered away. For its rulers, they are the predators of the State and its people.
Bihar was only an immediate pointer to the wider shape of things to come. In addition to the signals of the earlier chapters, this chapter clearly showed me the following:
The dominance of caste in politics, despite the miasma of Nehru’s national secular version;
No political will to discipline even the brazen corrupt. Rivers of corruption needed to be damned at all levels, to be diverted to irrigation channels of one’s own party, caste faction, vote bank, and self. Yet the assumptions of self-righteousness of the Sirkar, and the wickedness of the trade at that time!
The failure of the Indian I.C.S. to give the same training and ethos of guidance and support to the I.A.S., the successor service; which they received from their British predecessors. Nor any interest in Government or the IIPA for the sound training and reform of public servants.
As a consequence, the new Jajmani concept of ‘committed of omitted’!
The failures, even in Nehru’s time of the basics of Swaraj governance in land reforms, panchayats, cooperatives, schools, and community projects – Nehru’s basic institutions; and the precedents for the Rajiv syndrome post-1985, of eighty five percent failure of public services in the Nehruvian state.
Introduction to Markets: A Contrast
On one of my Textile Controller trips to Bombay, I was invited to tea by Taya Zinkin. She had earlier visited Madhubani as the Guardian correspondent during the famine threat. Her husband Maurice Zinkin was also a well-known I.C.S. officer with a brilliant academic record in Cambridge, and the author of an official note in 1945-46 when he was only an Under-Secretary in the Finance Department of the Government of India. The note apparently answered the critical question: Could a future Pakistan be economically viable? It seems that his answer was it could be; enough for small-minded Indians to interpret that and dub him "pro-Pakistani”. The truth was the opposite. With his broad liberal mind he was an admirer of India and especially Maharashtra where he served in the I.C.S. pre-1947.
Over tea the Zinkins came to know about my disappointment and disillusionment with the government and the I.A.S. Zinkin not only asked if I would like to join the then Lever Brothers, India, where he was a senior person, but also arranged for me to meet the then English Chairman, and three senior Indians. One of them was Prakash Tandon, the future first Indian Chairman of Hindustan Lever. I told them that I had not yet made the final decision to leave the I.A.S. and asked for three months to decide. They gave me one month. On the last day of that hard-to-decide month I sent a telegram of acceptance.
My colleagues in the I.A.S. jumped to the conclusion that I was going for “a gold-mine”. That “gold-mine” turned out to be exactly the same salary I was getting in the I.A.S., not a rupee more; a transfer from a spacious District Magistrate’s bungalow (my next probable posting) and a spacious garden to a small outhouse of an ex war-service I.A.F. friend in Mahim. I remember that on first night there, my wife wept. I had no material reason to console her. Once again, my traditional father thought I was mad, like my refusal of prospect of Pakistan's top services by Nawab Mohammad Ali of Bogra. No sensible Indian ever resigned from India's top service then. There was even a question in the Bihar legislative assembly to why I had resigned. I knew that my Chief Secretary, L.P. Singh was very disappointed. I was not in Patna to know the government's answer in the legislature. Nor did I care.
Friends asked if I resigned because of political interference. My answer was a categorical no. I said that I resigned because I saw the shape of the things to come in India’s politics and government, and I thought I could not live with it. I have never regretted that decision. In the later years, some of my old I.A.S. colleagues thought I saw the light earlier. In the later years, some of the I.A.S. made "gold mines” for themselves in a Sauda Sirkar.
But here I was in a Mahim outhouse, with an income in real terms and a life-style in the city of Bombay well below what I would have got as a District Magistrate in a district; forsaking a career of an imagined ideal in my past for a totally unknown future which I may best describe as the market, without any knowledge of that market. I think, I took the leap – which I may not have done in most other companies – because of the caliber and the integrity of a few men I met at the top. I virtually put my confidence in their hands. I was yet to know this would be regarded as one of India's top five companies for the next fifty years, when the most famous organizations and governments would have a precarious life. So, modestly, I entered the world of professional management, business, and Unilever, India.
As for the next decade, my life would be in that unknown market, with professional management leaders who inspired my confidence, and with Unilever, India. Perhaps, I should dwell a bit on them, as a contrast to my past in post-1947 government. Together, they constituted a team of very different characters and talents. Zinkin had a mind, and wrote as clear as a mountain stream. As most men of integrity, and he was one of them, he also had his regional biases as an ex-I.C.S. man – Maharashtrians were ideal and could do no wrong; Punjabis, he put at the bottom of the scale in India. Often, in management appraisals, as his ‘number two’ later, I had to intercede in order to, (a) judge a man objectively by his performance; and (b) judge him fairly. I found that he never hesitated to change his mind, given the facts and the evidence. He was one of the few who could change their mind against innate prejudice.
Prakash Tandon was perhaps the most unique Indian I have every known. His mind could penetrate the heart of people and problems. He, later as the author of Punjabi Century, a classic sociological work on the Punjab in the previous century, could write in a beautiful, disciplined style. He had a sense of word, and, as an accountant, was a good calculator. He put me through the discipline of writing quarterly reports six times, demanding clarity and cogency; a contrast to the neglect of any kind of training by my I.C.S superiors in the government. And, unlike the two I.C.S. officers who carried their Sirkari ways into a private holiday in Kulu, in the same Kulu valley, on a tour, Prakash Tandon showed a remarkable contrasting sensitivity. He asked me to get for him from a tree on a near hill, a branch of colorful autumn leaves for his Swedish wife: "being from a northern country, she will appreciate it". In that one small incident, among so many, I saw into the heart of that aloof man, who was later, considered to be the doyen of Indian professional management, in both private and public sectors. Tandon was an austere, aesthete monk in a business suit, my boss and lifelong friend. There will be more of him later, in a crisis.
Then, there was Steve Turner, Technical Director, and later a great Chairman. He too was a man of great integrity, and no respecter of rank or color in forming judgments on people. In later years, when I was the head of a Marketing Division, he told me that he was going to Calcutta and would "play hell" into my branch manager there, on an adverse report of the Finance Director. When I explained the facts of the situation, he did not hesitate to send for the Finance Director, and though a senior Englishman, told him in my presence: "When I ask for facts I expect to be told the whole truth". Turner was a big man.
None of these were like most senior officers I had known in the districts in the government. They were all men of integrity above everything, men who were exemplary leaders, men whom I could like, admire and trust. Such men taught me by example and practice,
· that integrity was basic;
· that on-the-job training and development of managers was fundamental for good succession building, and for good results;
· that management appraisal had to be fair, based on performance, and a part of management development;
· and, that there were rewards for good performance;
All of the above, I had totally missed in the Sirkari culture. They were the basic professional values in any good organization.
As, after 1947, Indian political and public opinion held MNC's under great suspicion, considering them the new exploiters after the empire, I may say just two things out of my experience in Unilever India. It was, during the World War II years, when Britain's survival itself may have been in doubt, that Unilever was the first global MNC to decide on a global policy of "national managements" under Lord Heyworth, the then Chairman; a liberal, for-sighted decision. By 1961, India proved to be the first with an Indian Chairman, a largely Indian Board, and a policy of an All-India Management, irrespective of caste or community. The latter prejudice on caste or community, even the Indians could not shed in the later management of an independent India. I also found that whenever the Indian management was firm with a good case, Unilever London always went with the decision. Later, Indians took leading positions in Unilever companies abroad, even on the Unilever Board.
A decade later, being close to Prakash Tandon, the founding Chairman of Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, I was fortunate as a professional manager to be a part of the founding of India's first, and still leading IIM, with such people as Ravi Mathai, its first Director, and Kamala Chowdhary. Here was a new kind of Indian institution, with no Sirkari sickness and no Jajmani system – a first-class nursery of first-class managers. The future of India was to lie with such IIM's and IIT’s (Indian Institute of Technology) in the next generation. They were modern examples of India's traditional talent in business. No one speaks of the Academy for All India Services in Mussourie, in the same class.
The markets all over India taught me about the Indian traders, about whom I had virtually no experience, not even as the Textile Controller of a state; an experience I have described earlier. Hindustan Lever had pioneered one of India's leading national distribution systems, which, even in the deleterious Control Raj, produced systemic successes, not the "systemic failures" which Dr. Man Mohan Singh used to refer to in the later decades in government systems. Although, being independent businessmen, the wholesalers and the retailers were not my subordinates, our relations were functional, courteous, and not without humor. After the working hours, some of our wholesalers, then hereditary banias, would invite me to their homes, and consult me about their sons’ future education and career. To my surprise, they wanted some of their sons to be respectable professionals. In short, there was a business cum humane relationship of mutual respect. The market taught equality, mutuality, and team work; not hierarchy and bureaucracy. Besides, it also taught us that they and we had to serve consumers and customers, the ultimate masters, not the ultimate victims of the government, as the Indian people have been before and after Independence.
The contrast of the two systems can best be shown in an amusing anecdote, when H. N. Bahuguna was the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in later years. He was my junior in Allahabad University, and a budding politician in that breeding ground of the University Students Union. I asked for an appointment after 9.00 p.m., after his working hours, as I was merely paying a personal call and had no official business with him. When I met him that night, I experienced a unique situation, one, which would not be seen in other countries at that level. Chief Minister Bahuguna put his arm on my shoulder and steered me through some three hundred village visitors on his lawn, scattered in groups, in a way which gave us complete privacy and no interference. Bahuguna, with his PRO at his heels, boasted of his great performances, of raids on traders in those shortage and black market days of controls. After a while, I told him that his “antics” were not only doing no public good, but were worsening shortages and black markets for consumers.
He asked me what I meant by "antics". I told him such raids were futile, and, in fact, made it worse for the public by creating more shortages and higher prices. As an ex-university buddy, he spontaneously came out with a most revealing political statement, “Moddie Sahib”, he said, “yeh to dikhane ke liye hai”! These brave raids were for show, whatever the cost to the public, and so was nearly all Indian politics. Back on my book shelves, I had a book by a leading sociological scholar, Politics Is Theatre. So, for show, for theatre, India's-poor millions had to suffer the shortages, black markets, and malnutrition of the Control Raj for the next forty years, and in so many issues of public importance, especially job quotas and reservations for under-privileged castes. The Five Year Plans were also a part of politics as theatre. H. N. Bahuguna was a transparent witness to Indian governance and politics after Independence.
A small, but later, a significant contribution to the market was the hard, pioneering opening up of the rural market even before official planning began in the first Plan after 1956. To go beyond urban markets below the thirty thousand population-level, I instituted a system of ‘satellite marketing’ with sub-wholesalers, a monthly distribution system, and a sharing of commission, especially for the huge lagan-festival demand of the poor rural sector. All those around – salesmen, wholesalers and retailers – seemed against it: "Sahib, wahan kuch nahi hai", or there was no money or demand there. I explained this was not a ‘sirkari hukum’ or an official order, but a business experiment, a trial for a year to see the results. They could drop it, if they saw no future business prospect. Three decades later, the rural market contributed forty per cent of the turnover of this and the other companies. This was also a small start through rural marketing, of what decades later, was referred to as the gap between India and Bharat, or the urban and the rural India.
My English Marketing Director, Zinkin was most amused that my market research cost only four annas a season, for two astrological almanacs from Benares and Jaipur, to tell me the marriage/festival auspicious dates of high demand. At the end of the year, he was surprised to see on a graph, the symmetry of the auspicious dates and the weekly sales graph. For the next forty years rural markets were opened up by companies like HLL and ITC originally, followed by many- Indian businesses. In that period, rural business rose to about forty percent of the turnover of such companies. It was a pioneering contribution, which preceded, and later, rode on the wave of the Green Revolution. If only government agriculture and infrastructure rural development policies had followed suit during and after the Green Revolution. It is now recognized, especially after the 2004 elections, that Bharat has been neglected by all political parties.
Perhaps, I might use this chapter for a brief account of a marketing jaunt to Tibet in 1957, and the end of centuries of the Silk Routes, when no one thought of it as a market. I came to hear that lakhs of rupees worth of our company products were trickling into Tibet over the Sikkim passes, with no marketing effort on our part, and no inter-government trade agreement. Asia has always had ways of its own. The Chinese PLA in Tibet had a long, costly line, of difficult communication to Tibet to maintain their army, and meet the local population’s needs. They hit on a simple, superb stratagem, without the need for inter-governmental trade agreements. They introduced the Kuomintang dollar, the only coin in the world then said to be four-fifths silver.
Indian traders responded with characteristic alacrity, not seen in the 'control raj' at home. In a short while, all conceivable goods, consumer, consumer durables, trucks, explosives – you name it – crossed the fourteen thousand feet Nathu and Jelep passes into Tibet on mule trains. There was no motorable road. Silver gave the Silk Route one last gasp, before the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, when the gates of border trade were closed.
I decided to go and see for myself; a mountain urge beyond trade. I was encouraged by my old friend Jagat Mehta, at the China desk, later the Foreign Secretary. As there were only two ways, a trader's or a pilgrim's permit, I opted for the former. I wrote to our agent in Gangtok, Sikkim, to arrange a mule and a muleteer for me; I would walk. When I arrived in Gangtok and enquired about the mule arrangement, the Agent prevaricated. He shyly disclosed he had arranged twenty mules. He was taking advantage of a sahib-type, who also knew the Political Officer, Gangtok, to send his mule train in, for greater security, under my leadership. When I met Apa Pant, the P.O. for my permit in English, Hindi, and Tibetan (which I still have as a souvenir), I thought I would amuse him with the story of one mule becoming twenty. Apa Pant saw no humor in it. In serious official style, he advised me to take all twenty mules saying, "One mule no status, twenty mules status".
So, for the glory of the official India, I led a train of twenty loaded mules through the gates of Chumbi in Tibet en route to Yatung. In the flat Chumbi valley, to my surprise, I found I could trot on a mule, as I could on a horse. But trotting, with one's backside rising in the saddle, was not an Asian custom. When the fun-loving Tibetans of Chumbi saw this amusing sight, Chinese oppression was temporarily lifted; they laughed and ran alongside, and every time my bottom rose above the saddle, they spanked it. I was so happy to give them this unexpected joy. That evening I was amused to think of the prospect of myself as India's official Trade Agent in Gyantze, less than a decade ago. Quite a contrast!
But, to revert to the market, I found about a hundred enterprising Indian traders in Yatung; similar to India, the shops were on the ground floor and living quarters on the first floor. When I stayed in one of them, I found they turned on All-India Radio punctually at 7.15 a.m. every day. Hindi film music came on, and I thought this was nostalgia across the Himalayan passes. The truth dawned at 7.30 a.m., when Bombay silver prices were broadcast. One Indian shopkeeper stood out singularly. He was a suited Punjabi, with a paperless steel desk, apparently doing nothing. When I asked him his business, he coolly said, "Automobiles". When I told him I saw none, except Chinese army trucks, he told me how he operated. He said that he bought Tata trucks in Siliguri for Rupees seventeen thousand each, had them totally dismantled and carried over Nathu La, and then reassembled in Chumbi at a cost of Rupees ten thousand a truck. He then sold them to the Chinese PLA for Rupees thirty seven thousand, making a net profit of Rupees ten thousand on each; a neat thirty seven per cent profit without tax in Mao's communist China; a superb bourgeois performance so coolly done in a bourgeois style!
When I met the Chinese Commanding Officer and asked him about their import policy, his reply was: "You bring the goods, and then we tell you policy". This was my stupid bureaucratic legacy. No Indian or Tibetan trader probably asked that question. To my surprise, I saw no Tibetan children between the age of six and sixteen years in Yatung. I was told by Indian traders that they were taken away to China for "re-education"; in reality as hostages for the good behavior of their parents. As the Chinese refused to allow me to go along the Lhasa route, I spent two days in a Tibetan monastery between Yatung and Phari, which the earlier Dalai Lamas had built as a safe retreat for themselves near the Indian border, when the Chinese became too aggressive. Its beautiful traditional paintings were over-pasted with old Chinese newspapers, a sign of their violent vandalism in Tibetan monasteries elsewhere.
Times have changed. When I crossed the Nathu La alone in 1947, and again on this trip in 1957, there was only a mule path all the way from Gangtok over the barren rocky pass; and my 1947 photograph shows a telegraph line of the British days to Gyantze and Lhasa across the pass. When the pass officially reopened for trade in 2006, there were pictures of both, the Indian and the Chinese army men in fine uniforms, a wide motor road, barracks, customs facilities, a bank, an Internet cafe and an ATM; and the prospect of motorized trade exceeding Rupees twelve thousand crores a year. Gone were the days of the Silk Route mule trains, and of the solitude on those cold misty heights.
In 2003, over four decades later, I was invited to address the ‘Bengal Chamber of Commerce’, India's oldest chamber of commerce, on its 150th anniversary. My subject was, ‘East India: Twenty first century Silk Route beyond Boundaries’. By then, Lhasa was on the international tourist route with shopping malls. A rail connection with China was planned. My address aimed at promoting trade and tourism in the "New Look East" policy of the Government of India, and to stir the governments of the Eastern India to open up that fascinating prospect in a relatively unknown world between the Bay of Bengal and the Pacific. For their amusement, I happened to mention that, as a one time Executive Vice-President of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in India, I was the only man in all India's chambers, who had led one of the last trading mule-trains into Tibet, at the end of the Silk Route days.
Trade would eventually outperform diplomacy, as the market world overcomes ideology, as China had done since Deng's days in Mao's China. There in lies one of the major issues of this century, the globalization of trade in goods, services, technology and capital for a more equal, more prosperous, and a more peaceful world; an area in which, the diplomacy of the governments – as in the other areas of the governments – had limped far behind people’s expectations. There are few subjects more important to humanity in this century than the opening and widening of markets, and through it, the removal of poverty and social conflicts. If sanity prevails, the making of truly global markets will be the central feature of the twenty first century.
As this chapter is on Markets, I shall jump twenty-five years ahead in my life to tell of another kind of market-making experience, and one not usually associated with commercial markets. It is about marketing Intermediate Technology (IT), and about the markets for the German development projects in the developing countries. I was in the midst of my retirement farewell in London in 1976, when these new calls came.
At first, I was surprised and honored to receive an unexpected visit from Prof. E. Schumacher, the father of the 'Small is Beautiful', Intermediate Technology, and Buddhist Economics. He came to ask me to head his Intermediate Technology operation in India, which was then languishing with the Gandhi Peace Foundation. If there was a clean slate to write on, I may have accepted. I told Professor Schumacher that I felt privileged by his offer, but I was a mere professional manager, he was a philosopher of a new significant movement, and his partners in India were the last of Gandhi's fading tradition of such causes.
I believed that the Intermediate Technology ardents in Europe were doing a half-baked managerial job, and their friends in India seemed primarily interested in attending international conferences. The poor, for whom this IT was meant, quietly discarded their products like smokeless chullhas, because they were half-baked products. I told Professor Schumacher that the same poor were buying private sector watches, cycles and radios, because a complete manufacturing and marketing job was done on them at affordable prices, without state subsidies, and these products were on the market shelves, easily available to customers. Intermediate Technology products failed to achieve any of these.
So, very sadly, I had to regret. I could not see my freedom of professional management with the Gandhi Peace Foundation having other traditions; and with their past approaches which also debilitated the Khadi Gram Udyog movement – bureaucratized, subsidized, and non-professionally managed. This was the fate of the only Gandhi legacy retained after 1947. The offer honored me, but I really could not accept. The passion for Intermediate Technology died down in the next twenty years, and the new raging I.T. which caught on globally was the Information Technology. What a pity that a great idea died out due to lack of total professionalism, and a false impression in western development circles that they were on to a technological revolution for the poor of the world. In India the culture of good intentions, lack of technological innovations, ignorance of marketing in a viable business and a strong belief in subsidies led to mere conference talk. India was hugely given to commissions, committees, and conferences, especially international to the attraction of conferences abroad.
It was interesting to observe two inspiring people like Gandhi and Schumacher, birds of a feather in ‘Small is Beautiful’. Both had beautiful ideas, humane and extraordinary. Schumacher, the thinker failed to find his Bell, the entrepreneur implementer. Gandhi achieved his main purpose of Independence, but it was marred by Partition, communal riots, and corruption. He was a unique genius with simple symbolisms, like the Satyagraha, the salt, and the charkha. His few simple belongings had symbolic meanings too, his watch (punctuality for unpunctual people), his steel-rimmed spectacles (the deep Seeing Eye), his Khadi dhoti and sandals (poverty). Neither Schumacher, nor Gandhi built practical, sustainable institutions. Sarojini Naidu's classical remark to Gandhi, "Bapu, you don't know how much it costs to keep you in poverty", has relevance in the case of Schumacher's Intermediate Technology; a promising investment which never took off. Both were learning examples for the organization men and the makers of markets. Dreams, symbols and ethics are not enough.
Gandhi's central objective was political Swaraj; Schumacher's was "the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, in short, of finding the Right Livelihood". His Buddhist economics was based on simplicity and non-violence. But incomplete works like the then smokeless chullha did not serve one of the simplest human needs – efficient heat without smoke for the poor. So, it was put aside by the "common man" quietly. It did not meet the "common man's" market needs for simplicity with effectiveness. Incomplete simplicity and low cost cannot make good the absence of the central market truth of total cost-effectiveness to the customer. Good intentions, in Buddhist or any other philosophy, are not enough, especially for the poor. It was a central lesson with so much talk of Intermediate Technology, and with unctuous subsidies!
My second unique experience was how to make and market development projects for what was called, the Third World in the 1980s. About the time Schumacher called on me in London, I received an invitation to meet the GTZ top management in Frankfurt. The GTZ was a unique public sector company, the only one in the First World in development aid, under the then West German Ministry for Economic Cooperation. The other was KFW for financial cooperation. As the Germans are addicted the Technische, it was called the Germany Agency for Technical Cooperation. Perhaps, the word and the emphasis on ‘Technical’ gave it its limitations. Development aid projects go far beyond the technical. They told me, they were looking for an Asian and an African consultant. They found me, but in my decade with them, they did not seem to find and forgot about the African one.
The world of consultants has immense bio-diversity. So, on my first day, I asked the Chief General Manager if he would care to walk with me in a nearby park. Surprised, he asked if any papers were necessary. I said not at all. So he, Dr. Helmut Sinn, my GTZ liaison person, and I, took to the park. In that fresh, informal atmosphere, I explained that I did not wish to function as many other consultants do: study a problem, write a paper, and leave. I wished to function as a catalyst to help find answers to difficult problems through the GTZ managers themselves. The questioning, the approaches, the analysis of development and organization problems would be mutual; but the responses should emerge from the GTZ managers. This would demand much of their time. I was asking for permission for that time and that approach. To which the General Manager, Dr. Elshorst replied, "And who will keep a control on you?" I replied, "Dr Sinn, my contact man”. It was immediately agreed. That was the beginning of a happy association over a decade, in which I shuttled between India and Germany two or three times a year.
I shared with my German colleagues some basic organizational problems, between broad policy intentions and the far-away recipients of development projects in distant continents, mostly at the village level. The first was a triple bureaucratic problem, steering projects through two government bureaucracies, one in Bonn, and the other in recipient countries, with the GTZ bureaucracy in between. How could such projects have clear objectives, simple designs, and be understood and acceptable to the local beneficiaries among the poor of the world? How best to decentralize project managements in hundreds of locations in forty countries? Those were the days of elusive "integrated" and "sustainable" projects, both foreign to departmental bureaucrats, with the problem of sustainability at the other end of the long chain in local communities and local administrations in varied cultures. Sustainability alone, involved a social alchemist's skill, far beyond all three bureaucracies and their technische. How then, to get good periodic evaluations of the essentials of performance?
The last, was a headquarter problem at the top of the GTZ in a new, confused computerized system, in fact three computer systems! As they were all focused on the General Manager for Finance, this very likeable person invited me for lunch one day to resolve one of the usual bureaucratic problems of scores of reports for the top management to plough through periodically. I told him I would have only two questions to ask on each of these reports. First, have any of them been of any use for the top decision-making in the last year? The second, have any of them offered useful information for such decision-making? If the answer is no in both the cases, scrap the report. Result: thirty five percent of the top management reporting and its huge costs were cut that very day; a good, clear example of my desire for decision-making by the GTZ management itself, with the consultant as a simple, effective guide.
Steering simple peoples' wants for health, education, farming, forests and water through three bureaucracies, vested interests, and corruption at the receiving end, was a Herculean task, sometimes even unforeseeable. Just a few examples: A rural development project in Almora district, India, was undone by the personal envy of a young I.A.S. District Deputy Commissioner, who wanted to acquire the grander house of the German Project Leader! The incidental fact, that the German was old enough to be his father, and that the Indian Deputy Commissioners had official allotted houses, made no difference to this local mansabdar with Mughal instincts in the late twentieth century. The German leader was so fed up with the young Indian officer's frustrating pettiness; he had the project wound up. Who could imagine that international development aid could stumble on such little stones?
Then, there was a major forestry project in Kalimantan, Indonesia, one of GTZ's pride projects. In Indonesia's military dictatorship, it was not unnatural for several generals to be involved, even in forestry. Years later, I came to hear that the project ended in a huge corruption scandal. The generals were involved in a scramble for huge estates; somewhat distant from the original objectives of the project, and a fundamental error in its marketing implementation on the ground. What does one do with governments which claim to be sovereign and sensitive? In this case, the major myopia was in not seeing and working with the ‘target groups’. Years later, with the lust for timber wealth, Kalimantan went up in smoke, which polluted the atmosphere of the region for years. It became a serious environment threat as far as Singapore and Malaysia.
GTZ had hit on the reinvention of a small German airship for developing countries lacking transport infrastructure. They were experimenting with it in a small West African country. I persuaded them to try large countries like Indonesia, a country of far flung islands, and India, especially in the Himalayan, the North East, and the coastal regions; regions with poor infra-structures. To my great surprise, two German GTZ managers suddenly descended on me in Delhi, asking me to help get appointments for this at top levels of the Government of India. I had no previous information. On questioning them, I found even the German embassy refused to help, as the GTZ in Frankfurt had not routed the proposal through the German Foreign Office and the Delhi embassy. I explained that my intervention, in the face of the embassy's refusal, would be more damaging. They took the next flight back. So much for technische alone! Yet another brilliant idea that went on the rocks due to the lack of prepared marketing for customers, and, inevitably, through "the proper channels" in both the bureaucracies.
Despite such failures, the decade was a fruitful and happy one. Being lovers of mountains, senior German colleagues joined me in the Kumaon and the Himachal hills to discuss both local projects and the wider GTZ policies. At the beginning, in about 1980, I anticipated GTZ's funding from the ministry in Bonn would be curtailed in the future years. I did not convey my reasons, as I saw the Chancellor's new Ost Politick policies would divert a lot of money to the East Germany, reducing the amounts available for the less developed and poorer countries. When the reductions actually materialized in the next two years, my advice to find new 'third party' markets had to be heeded, if GTZ's turnover was to be increased to bear its overheads. The Head of Division I, the largest division, said at a meeting when I was present, "It took an Indian to tell us our government's funding would be reduced!” again, the limitations of technische alone.
But, the acceptance of that fact, and the need to find new marketable products on payment in the Third World seemed to be a challenge which the GTZ could not meet. It simply was not marketing-minded, just as the Intermediate Technology was not Marketing-minded. Did the development aid money always have to come from the exchequer? Perhaps, that is why, it too has been dying a slow death. It is no longer one of the world's challenging tasks. The West has been caught up in Islamic Terrorism, with all its military, economic and civilzational consequences. In one of its hot spots, Afghanistan, I recently read, there was only one doctor for seven thousand sixty-six Afghans, but one US and NATO soldier for seven hundred forty two Afghans! Development Aid is becoming an isolated UN responsibility in the extreme cases of genocide and famine as in the Central Africa. It has been a fading cause in the West.
The politics of the Bundestag and the Ministry for Economic Cooperation brought an international consultant to the GTZ, Saatchi and Saatchi. Most of its past experience was in advertising! It seemed an utter stranger to the complexity of the developing world of the poor people, who hardly registered on the advertising screen. I kept my distance. Two years elapsed, and Saatchi and Saatchi did not seem to make any great impact on the GTZ's fortunes. Like most Consultants, they came one day and left on another. I felt my time was over. Rather than formally terminate my agreement, I took the same General Manager, with whom I started on a walk in the park, to a lovely walk in the Taunas forest. I told him that I did not wish to embarrass him with a formal termination notice for personal reasons. This was my last visit; I would cease to come. The contract would quietly lapse. In the later years, I kept getting personal letters from the earlier GTZ friends. It was amazing to find GTZ's preoccupations with the same issues and problems a decade and more later. If intelligent, educated humans are at the top of the biological chain, we seem to be slow learners; especially in organizations, even more in the political and the bureaucratic ones.
The fifty years since 1955-56 have seen a slow but reluctant, grudging change from Controllers to markets. More of it shall be dwelt upon, in a later chapter in the story of the bankruptcy of the Nehruvian control state by 1991. It has been a painful, prolonged, retarding process of the Indian people, the grudging emergence of open markets from the paralysis of political ideology, Jajmani, and corruption; a viciously strong combination, retarding both, the economic and the human resource development.
The debate between Adam Smith’s markets and Mao’s markets with scores of variations in between has gone on for three and a half centuries, and will still go on. The latest realities are seen in the Europe, the nursery of old colonialism, and the nursery of economic globalization in the top one hundred companies in Europe; the shares of revenue are almost equally divided between 37.5 per cent in the home countries, 26.6 per cent in the rest of the Europe, and 35.9 per cent in the rest of the world. There is the future message of the markets, and the call of the economic globalization. All human development will depend on how the governments, the international institutions, and the people respond to that message and that call. Twenty first century leaders will have to manage narrow political constituencies and global economic ones, with inherent contradictions. Human societies are messy soaps.
Markets, not battlefields, could be a major field for international statesmanship in future, for both the rich and the poor. The more markets spread with cost-effectiveness and infrastructures, the more they grow to embrace the poor beyond earlier limited market boundaries of the rich. It is the best test of poverty reduction, with investments in education, employability, and health. This does not mean grossly unfair markets, as in the international agricultural trade, in the recent DOHA round of WTO, with the grossly unfair OECD high farm subsidies of the rich Western farmers, rising from one hundred eighty two billion dollars in 1995 to three hundred billion dollars in 2005, the one-way demand for the opening up of the markets of the developing countries, on the one hand; and on the other, the policies of the developing countries to keep food prices low for rising urban populations, with the lack of land reforms, and low agricultural investments and productivity, which has lead to the silent and tragic phenomenon of farmer-suicides in thousands. It has been called an "Asian trauma" in India, China, Indonesia and Thailand. The correction of such grossly imperfect markets is a major challenge for the national governments and the WTO in the coming years. Markets can be as good or as bad as other human organizations.
For the last two and a half centuries, the making of markets has been the subject, not only of widespread debate, but also ideological conflicts, since Adam Smith and Karl Marx, from free markets to state markets, with variations in between. In his recent book, How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, E. S. Reinhert debunks many past economists’ ideas on economic development. In The Other Canon, he suggests, the real aim should be a focus on creating middle income societies. Unlike India post 1991, in which liberalization and middle income societies largely grew in the thirty percent of the urban areas, the larger target is in the seventy percent rural areas, largely neglected in Indian planning. The making of this large middleclass is really the making of a national market for such, and the reduction of poverty to less than ten percent of the total population.
For the tool box for the making of this mass middle class market – rural and urban – Reinhert’s suggestions are:
· Spreading of education;
· Lending strong support to the agricultural sector, with restraints on export of farm products;
· Recognizing wealth-creating synergies, for example, high productivity, patenting, temporary monopolies and oligopolies, tax breaks export bounties, and low credit rates;
· Maximizing the division of labor through a diversified manufacturing sector and checks on the power of landlords;
· Attracting foreigners to work in certain target areas with their added investments, specialized technology, and marketing skills, on a global scale.
So, the making of large middle class markets seems to be the latest central focus of economic development, to which the Indian Planning Commission and the Indian government should give a policy focus. What has actually happened is touched on in the next two chapters, and it has been far from making of the mass middle class markets in a regime of control, corruption, and to the benefit of only ten percent of the population, largely urban, by 2000; with the chief beneficiaries being politicians, bureaucrats, contractors, and fly-by-night businessmen in league with a Sauda System.
In the context of the centralized socialist Nehruvian state, a brief, factual witness to his major ideological issue of the twentieth century is the World Watch Paper 72 in 1986 – just three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall – The Changing Role of the Market in National Economies. It showed a valuable factual contrast between the centralized and the market economies. The comparisons are in terms of Productivity, Equity, Energy and Environmental factors, all more specific than hopeful ideologies which have had serious flaws. They are revealing. They affect the efficacy and the sustainability of economies and societies. A pity that India is almost totally excluded.
The first criterion was the land productivity. In the four major Western market economies (USA, UK, France and West Germany), land productivity was five metric tons, on an average, whereas in five centralized economies (Soviet Union, East Germany, Yugoslavia and Poland), it was only 3.2, with the major Soviet Union only 1.4. In labor productivity it was seventy metric tons per worker per year, in the four Western market economies, but only 8.2 in the case of the four centralized economies, in a workers' Raj. Similarly, eight Western countries averaged 12.5 mega joules per dollar of GNP, whereas eight centralized economies averaged a highly inefficient 33.5 mega joules, with worse environmental results.
Equity may be gauged in such things as equity ratios, average income of the poorest, and the Human Development indices of longevity and infant mortality. Equity ranking shows no clear advantage for either group. The index ratio for nine Western countries was 6.5 and for eight centralized economies, 5.5. But the average income of the poorest twenty percent (in 1983 dollars) was only 1990 on average in the centralized economies, but in the Western market economics and Japan, the average was 2851. Even the twenty percent of the poorest were forty three percent better off in the market economies. The proletariat of the Socialist states was far poorer, besides being less free.
Life expectancies in the Western market economies were seventy four to seventy seven years; in the centralized economies they were significantly lower between sixty four to seventy two years – an important deficiency in this Human Development Index factor.
Oscar Lange, a theoretical socialist of our time, theorized that the state ownership of the means of production (centralized) would end motives to pollute; a kind of environmental Mother Theresa. Why did he assume in an ideological bias, that the state should contaminate its own public resources? In The Spoils of Progress (1972), Marshall showed that environmental pollution problems were then common to both economies. Since then, the record of the centralized economies has been found to be much worse. Even beyond highly inefficient use of energy, the centralized economies have a disastrous ecological history. According to Goldman, "the rape of Lake Baikal shows that public greed and lust can be as destructive as private greed and lust", and with no countervailing free public opinion. The Aral Sea has dried up. There has been the unprecedented nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Climate change in Siberia is causing extensive permafrost melt underground over fifteen hundred miles in the Siberian Tundra, threatening the future collapse of extensive human habitations and structures on the surface in this vast stretch of territory. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany was found extensively deforested and polluted; the same happened with Poland.
Sulphur dioxide emissions in six Western economies ranged from one to eight kilograms per one thousand dollars of GNP. In the Soviet Union it was nineteen kilograms, and in our East European countries it was then twenty eight to forty kilograms. Resource use has been ecologically blind and criminal in the centralized economies, with no public opinion or free media. The World Watch paper concludes: "One strong attraction of market policies is that they provide a countervailing power to governments”. Centralized economies are deaf and blind masters, not excluding India and many other developing countries.
The real world is for more complex than these two divisions. In Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (J. Baumol, R. E. Litan, and C. J. Schramm, Yale University Press), the authors broadly divide Capitalism into four forms: First, the centralized, state capitalism, where the market decisions are primarily in government; Second, the oligarchic capitalism, in which the bulk of power and wealth is in the hands of a small section of societies; Third, the big corporate capitalism and; Fourth, the wider middle class entrepreneurial capitalism. These are not exclusive; blends change over time and place. The Nehruvian state in India till 1991, of which, there will be more in later chapters, seemed to have the worst mix of state capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, and a weak controlled, stifled corporate capitalism; and the mix was supposed to add up to Socialism Indian style.
The Behemoth Sirkar from the Outside: Realities
In July 1948, when I was trekking to the Rohtang Pass with two I.C.S. officers, earlier mentioned, I happened to have a few moments alone with a local Kulu road worker. In the course of our brief conversation, one rhetorical statement of his struck me, "Sirkar se kaun bara hai (Who is bigger than the state)?" How we underestimate the common sense of the common man at the base of the pyramid. Bigness implied power, ubiquity, and a behemoth organization. The great Rajaji, one of the giants of the independence movement may have said that "India has been a government-less civilization", which may have had much truth in it in most of the past millennia, but the British had, so few of them, created the most centralized state India had ever known, bound by the famous "steel frame" of the administration, and loops of the railway and the telegraph steel. That Behemoth was to grow far more in the decades to come, and in Indian style, as was natural, beyond the expectation of any of us in 1948. The behemoth described in the book of Job in the Bible, was a great beast. When we were then dreaming of Nehru and his generation of leaders waving magic wands of Swaraj and planning to take us to our "Tryst with destiny", it was the latest of our long mythological memories for a new Mahabharat of Development.
The behemoth became the ubiquitous "Control-Permit-Sauda Raj", controlling every aspect of life and enterprise of the people, but unable to govern them. It paralyzed itself with four C's – communalism, castiesm, corruption, and crime – the catalyst of which was the politician-bureaucrat nexus. So the expected positive aspects of Secularism, Socialism and Planning of the Nehruvian state were largely overcome by these four C's. Apart from the historical fact that, by and large, we Indians do not have the civitas or public will to govern ourselves. Our other talents perform better abroad, when others hold the ring. With dependence on centralized governments we seem to have lost local social capabilities, so necessary in a real democracy. The pretensions of the Sirkar went far beyond its capabilities.
After a decade of the Market in 1962, I was suddenly posted to New Delhi as the Company's Representative, later Resident Director. On first being told of the change, rather casually by Prakash Tandon, the new and first Indian Chairman, I was not happy to leave my job as the Marketing Controller of one of the three divisions. I had no reason to believe my performance was low. Only the previous year, it was appreciated by Turner, the last British Chairman. For a man of Tandon's quality, it was a clear failure of communication. It was not till I read Beyond Punjab, the Hindustan Lever days in his trilogy that I came to learn the source of the decision was from no less than Lord Heyworth, the Chairman of Unilever, the father of "national managements" in multinational companies. It seems he saw beyond anyone else, that in future the big decisions in business in India would lie in Delhi. So corporate relations with the Government had to be created and managed there.
At first, I tried to see myself as a corporate diplomat. Although I had never lived a life of cocktail parties, I found this was a rage in Delhi then, among top businessmen, foreign diplomats, and top government officials. Although I thought this was the most useless form of socializing and a waste of valuable time, I let myself experience it for the first two months. Then, I made a firm decision never to give or go to cocktail parties. Contrary to the popular view, that company representatives in Delhi were there only to get a range of licenses and permits in the killing Control Raj, I decided that my major role would be to try and get changes of liberal economic and budget policies, and leave it to my subordinate staff to chase the unavoidable licenses and permits. On both the objectives, there had to be integrity; not a rupee would pass under or over the table. I was quite prepared to pay the price of delays and follow-up over long periods. One has to do that for every job in India.
As in previous chapters, I will proceed from the anecdotal truths of witnesses to our times to their wider public implications. A month before the Chinese push into Tawang and the NEFA, in October 1962, I was on a family expedition to the Kolahoi area in Kashmir, and a guest of the governor, Bhagwan Sahai, in transit through Srinagar. On return, I found myself in discussions with Governor Bhagwan Sahai, a very able public servant; my friend of IIM, Ahmedabad's early days, Vikram Sarabhai, the pioneer of India's space research; and two other such high level Indians. I was shocked and surprised to hear the views of this top level of Indian society smugly assuming the Himalaya had been, and will be an impregnable shield against possible Chinese attack from the north. These were the topmost experienced, knowledgeable professionals. What could be in the unreal minds of the politicians and the bureaucrats in Delhi? I was constrained to tell them, especially as an ex-Army man, that I had crossed six passes in the Central Himalaya on the Indo-Tibetan border in 1959, and also earlier the Nathu and Jelep La in the east; and that there would be no serious difficulty in bringing thousands of troops over the passes, especially from the easier north side, beyond the main Himalayan divide. In fact, India would have far more Line-of-Communication problems reaching the Indo-Tibetan border from the south, beyond that high and steep central Himalayan divide, which would be further accentuated without the infrastructure of the later Border Roads.
Six months later, I met Vikram Sarabhai on an IAC flight. He remembered, and was good enough to admit then, after the ignominious November 1962 tragedy in NEFA, that I was right. It revealed to me the utter ignorance and complacency of the top level Indian minds on Indian strategic problems, and even India's geography on the ground.
The strategic mindlessness has been a characteristic of the Indian leadership – political and bureaucratic – from Nehru on. The fact is that, beyond the unreal Brahmanical Jagatguru role that Nehru and India tried to play on the world stage in the smug days of Non-Alignment, till now India has no strategic mind, no coordinated military structure at the Chief of Staff level, and the less said about the militarily ignorant and complacent Babus of the Defense Ministry, the better. The National Defense Council hardly functions, and the Chiefs of Staff were not its members, only invitees. Indian political leaders are pathetically ignorant of military affairs, and senselessly afraid of military leaders. Parliament dismisses the Defense budget in less than ten minutes, unable to debate the national and the international security issues. The media and the public opinion are equally ignorant, and unconcerned, except in the foolish, national, sentimental, knee-jerk reactions against Pakistan, as after the terrorist bombing of the Parliament in 2001. It seems to me that an unhistorical nation can never have a sound, long-term strategic mind, especially, one given to mythology, and not history; one which is constantly involved in fighting its own little internal Panipats of community, caste, and political party; a deep cultural weakness of dissidence; indifferent to outward strategic policy.
As a consequence of the humiliating debacle in NEFA in 1962, Indian politicians and the Indian government suddenly woke up to the need to quadruple the defense budget in February 1963. It coincided with Hindustan Lever's national management plans to enlarge the business in India, especially in Foods and Detergents, and, as important, to dilute Unilever equity and enlarge Indian equity. Plans had been made and agreed with the Government of India, including the issue price of the share to Indian shareholders at Rupees thirty-five each. The 1963 Budget suddenly changed the economic and market prospect with far higher taxes to meet that quadrupling of Defense needs. India had been spending only rupees three hundred crore a year on the Defense budget in Nehru's complacent previous decade.
The H.L.L. Board had to meet on a Sunday, as the new equity issue was to start on Monday. It decided sadly, but rightly not to go ahead with the issue, as the share prices would fall. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister hit back at this MNC as an attack on his budget. In a brief and summary car drive with Morarji Desai from the Finance Minister's office in the North Block to the Parliament House, Chairman Prakash Tandon told me later that day he had taken "the worst beating of his life"; he was told by Morarji that H.L.L. had no future in this country. Prakash was shattered. This first Indian Chairman had spent the previous year or two in conceiving expansion plans, in ‘Indianizing’ H.L.L. equity in long negotiations between Unilever and the Governement of India. All this was shattered by one angry minister in ten minutes.
To add to his torment, Prakash's daughter, Maya, was to get married in Bombay in a day or two. He was in a painful cleft stick between the family, the company and the public affairs. He asked me whether he should stay in Delhi. I advised him to return to Bombay for Maya's wedding. Heavens wouldn't fall in the next three or four days.
In his absence, I thought over the matter, and believing in the integrity of our case, I decided to meet Morarji Desai himself. Unfortunately, still worried in Bombay, Prakash came on the line. I could not conceal my move from my Chairman. When I told him of my decision and appointment with Morarji, there was a distinct silence, then a faint OK.
Next day I met the cold, steely-eyed Morarji. I told him to kindly consider only two honest points that I had to make. I explained the circumstances of the Board decision, and assured him that this was not hitting back at his budget at all. First, H.L.L. intended to go ahead with its expansions in due course. Second, if the Board had gone ahead with its earlier decision to sell shares at rupees thirty five; it would have been a fraud on the Indian shareholder, as the market would drop after his budget, with higher taxes. There was an icy pause. Then, I asked him if he would be good enough to accept my plea to support our proposals when the papers came to him. He replied with a low "Yes". I thanked him, picked up my briefcase, returned to my office, and sent Prakash a brief fax. The Board in Bombay, and Prakash in particular, must have been very relieved to receive it. I received a brief appreciation. Lord Heyworth's earlier judgment had been put to a crucial test in my first year in Delhi, and he was to prove so resoundingly right in this critical case.
The next years in Delhi were an uphill struggle in trying to make changes in the government policies; especially in the threats to India's future oils and fats depletion; in the need for a modern processed Foods industry; in introducing fiscal benefits for India's R & D; and, in my ASSOCHAM capacity later, to lift the desertification of Indian industry in Mrs. Indira Gandhi's early years of populist socialism. I can only convey the main essentials of each in a low time, referred to in India's economic development, as the "Hindu rate of growth", the GNP growth was only three to four per cent per annum; with the world's most notorious reputation for bureaucratic paralysis, and the world's largest poor people; but with the specious Five-Year Plans, a formidable boomerang on the gullible Indian people – political and economic. This was not a part of a Socialist Gospel, with input output analyses for end results. It was the ad hoc, arbitrary assertion bureaucratic power, and was totally and irrationally indifferent to the interests of the people. This was feudal dadagiri on the baseless assumption that a bureaucrat always represents the interest of the state and the people, and on the basis of an ideology which destroyed millions of people in Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
In the fifties, India was one of the world's leading exporters of oils and fats. By the late sixties, it became the world's leading importer. And therein hangs a tale of three decades of neglect. Per capita consumption of oils and fats already low at 3.5 kilograms per year in 1950, shrunk to 2.5 kilograms by 1975. India was heading for an oil famine, but the amazing blindness of Indian governments was the failure to see food and nutrition of the Indian people beyond the two middle class cereals of rice and wheat.
In 1959, a very perspicacious Chairman of Hindustan Lever, Steve Turner sounded a strong note of warning for the coming shortage in his AGM speech, "India's Future Needs of Oils and Fats", and suggested what might be done to increase the production and the availability. He struck a note which was missing from India's food policy in all the first four Plans, when he said, "Fat is a food...Weight for weight it provides two-and-a-half times as many calories, two-and-a-half times as much energy as food grains". The Indian plans relegated oilseeds to a very low level in their priorities, and never really regarded it as a part of the food problem. As a result, there were no increases in the yields of ground nut and other oilseeds between 1950 and 1980. In this, even the much-vaunted Five-Year Plans were useless.
Turner made four major suggestions to meet the future needs of six hundred million people. Firstly, he suggested concessional imports of soyabean oil under PL-480, which followed in the next decade. Secondly, he suggested the incorporation of indigenous cottonseed oil in vanaspati, which at that time, was only four percent out of a total potential of two hundred thousand tonnes. The oil was lost by farmers traditionally feeding the seed to the cattle. He hoped thereby to increase the availability by another one hundred fifty thousand tonnes. This was almost done by the mid seventies. Thirdly, he suggested new crops like the oil palm Oil Indian soils; and lastly, he suggested the more efficient extraction of oils with solvent extraction plants, to avoid the national waste of ghani crushing.
As a follow-up, H.L.L. led the industry to undertake a long-term groundnut extension farm programme, extending over a decade and covering over twenty five acres in half the states of India. Over a period of time, this extension work demonstrated that, even with the existing technology and without any Green Revolution high-yielding varieties, it was possible to increase ground nut yields anywhere between twenty five percent and eighty percent. However, this good example was not followed up by most state governments. Fats were not treated as food, and yields remained relatively static between a national average of seven hundred forty five kilograms per hectare in 1960-61, and seven hundred twenty kilograms per hectare in 1969-70, among the lowest in the world.
This effort was made by industry by a voluntary levy of only rupee one per tonne of production. After some years, after seeing the encouraging results, the industry felt that twenty one much greater efforts had to be made, as an impact of only twenty five hundred hectares out of seventeen million hectares was too small. As the government had, in the meantime, clamped price control, industry asked for permission to raise this levy from rupee one to rupees seventeen per tonne, totally insignificant per kilo to the consumer. A rather rigid and short-sighted Joint Secretary in the Food Ministry turned this down on the ground that this would be an added burden on the consumer; quite oblivious of the fact that, in the rising shortage, the consumer had had to pay over rupees one thousand a tonne more for lack of national effort in the controls Black-Marketing regime.
Steve Turner had pointed to the gap of 4.5 million tonnes in the coming decade, and warned, "This gap can be filled simply by letting the price of fat go up relatively to that of other commodities. When the demand for a product is as sensitive to income, as that of fat, limited increase in price can cut down consumption of fat sharply, to the detriment of peoples' nutrition". Nutrition has never really been a serious aspect of India's food policies.
As another follow-up of suggestions of 1959, on two occasions, first in the early sixties, and the second in the later sixties, we offered to bring a palm oil expert for the government at our cost, to explore the possibilities of palm growing in India. On both occasions, the experts confirmed that India had the soil and climate to grow palm in places like Assam, Kerala, and the Andamans. No palm was grown, and the proposal was languished on the files right through the sixties. By the early seventies, a few acres had been put under the palm in Kerala. Meanwhile, Malaysia made gigantic strides in the world palm oil market, and this became one of its major foreign exchange earnings. India had to import from Malaysia later. India continued to foot a heavy bill for imported fats and oils, rising nearly six hundred crores a year in hard currency in the early eighties, when the concession PL-480 imports were over; this was a part of the heavy national cost because of one stupid Joint Secretary, and no accountability in the self-righteous system.
So, fifteen years after the first warning in 1959, we continued to live in the vegetable oil crisis; and still do, forty five years later. Vegetable oil was a basic need of the common man in India, where there are virtually no animal fats. More millions consumed vegetable oils than either rice or wheat, and yet the Sirkar could not respond to this basic need over thirty years in its Five-Year agricultural plans. What was possible with easy PL-480 agreements, with an inter-ministerial passing of files, and with a stroke of the pen, the Sirkar did. It seemed quite incapable of appropriate actions in the states and in the farms of India, involving planning, implementation and organization at the grass roots. Even more, it lagged far behind in industry. In those easy PL-480 years, it was said that India had Food Ministers, not Agriculture Ministers.
Fifteen years later, we again sounded the tocsin in the Chairman's AGM speech of 1974, in which we took stock of the fifteen years since the first warning in 1959, made our prognostications for the next fifteen years, and suggested a package of answers to the problem. By 1974, concessional imports of soya bean oil had dried up; one hundred twenty million more people had been added to the population of India; and the gap between the demand and the supply was now widening to well over half a million tonnes a year, with rising prices for the public. In 1959, it was estimated that the net local supply of oils was about two million tonnes, and the average groundnut oil price was rupees two thousand a tonne. In 1973-74, the net local supply had risen to only 2.6 million tonnes, an increase of only 0.6 million tonnes against industry's earlier forecast need for an additional 4.5 million tonnes; and the average price of groundnut oil had risen steeply to rupees seventy five hundred a tonne, almost a four-fold increase. The Green Revolution came and went. By the end of the century India still remained badly deficit in oils and fats, failing to realize its nutrient value higher than cereals for a billion people. India then had more malnourished people than sub-Saharan Africa.
In the early sixties, government regarded our management involvement in agri-business as a useful base from which to grow a new processed foods industry. In response, we bypassed the capital-intensive deep freeze technology of the West at that time, and introduced the cheaper and more relevant dehydration technology for vegetables. It so happened, that the introduction of this technology was timely from the point of view of the country's defense needs after 1962, when it was possible to drop supplies in the distant and high Himalayan areas at about one-tenth of the weight of fresh supplies. At the time of the Chinese incursion into NEFA, we had just begun operations in Ghaziabad, and we decided to donate the entire stock available, amounting to several lakhs of rupees, to the Army. Having made the offer to the Chief of Staff personally and in writing, an offer which was appreciated, to my surprise, the stocks were not lifted. Two colonels in Army Headquarters could not find one truck to take the delivery of stocks from Ghaziabad, only thirteen miles away from Delhi! Instances like these make one wonder whether our bureaucracy can respond adequately, even in times of a national crisis, as in November 1962.
Dehydration technology had a great future in a country where fruits and vegetables were supposed to suffer enormous wastage up to forty percent, and where prices fluctuated in a ratio 1:4, between the flush and the off seasons. There were two major problems. The first was to increase farm yields, which were the lowest in the world, at least to two or three times, to make the dehydration operation viable. The second was to provide suitable new packaging, which would also be hygroscopic in India's continental variations of temperature and humidity. It took five years to double the agricultural yields and two or three years to develop the packaging from aluminum foil, which, unfortunately, was high cost. But, by the time yields could be doubled and the operation made large-scale, a greedy and short-sighted government put up excise duties so as to kill this and other solid food businesses in India. There was no growth in processed foods for years after 1965, an opportunity destroyed by a greedy, short-sighted bureaucracy.
I remember making a personal plea in the Finance Ministry not to impose any further excise, as this would be the killing blow; but the excise came nevertheless, and this promising start with dehydration technology in what should have been one of India's most potential fields, that is, agri-business, was killed before it had a chance to grow out of its infancy. It is, at last, recognized as one of India's high potentials in the early twenty first century; just one example among many, of decades of governmental neglect in the last decades. The fallacy was to believe that economic planning meant only government outlays, and no .regard for outcomes, besides the lack of cooperation with the private sector, a critical mistake of the Nehruvian State.
In the middle of the sixties, Mr. C. Subramaniam, India's most outstanding Food & Agriculture Minister, put me on the Board of the National Seeds Corporation. I found, to my dismay, that it was not a National Seeds Corporation at all; it merely dealt with hybrid maize and vegetable seeds in very limited quantities; it did not produce seeds for the main cereal crops; and it was not geared to the agricultural plans of the country. At one of the early meetings of the Board, I drew this to the notice of the Chairman, Dr. M. S. Randhawa, and said that the Corporation's plan should be revised to include the national agricultural plans of major cereals like rice and wheat at least. He immediately accepted this proposal, and set up a committee of the Board to make a five-year plan for the corporation. I was its Chairman. Between the Chief Executive Officer and me, we drew up the first five-year plan of the Corporation in three months.
A most significant wider lesson of this exercise was the way the government mind allows overhead costs to rise mindlessly, irrespective of functional needs and costs – a fatal error. The Chief Executive Officer produced overhead costs for seeds-multiplication farms, which duplicated the secretariat organization, with the usual contingent of upper and lower division clerks and chaprasis for each grade of officer. I only had to ask him what all these clerks and chaprasis would do on the rural seeds-multiplication farms, for him to see the point that they had no function there. Within ten minutes, we were able to reduce the overhead costs by a third. A decade later it was good to know that the Public Accounts Committee thought that the NSC had performed the function for which it was set up.
Ever since 1960, I have believed that one major characteristic lack of viability of the Sirkar was the mindless mounting of the government's overheads, and that the economy could not afford this rate of growth of overhead expenditures, especially with declining growth and no policy for surplus resource generation. When, in 1968, my friend, Prakash Tandon, became the Chairman of the State Trading Corporation of India, he found that he had a staff of eighteen hundred. If, given a choice, he said, he could have managed with four hundred! Of the eighteen hundred, six hundred were clerks, while the other six hundred were chaprasis. One wondered what their contribution to international trading was! But this was a price with the organizational behavior of the Sirkar. The officers had to have their retinue of hangers-on; the uncle had to find a place for his nephew; the politician had to have a widening pool of patronage; the state and the tax-payer had to provide for them; with disastrous future consequences of non-development expenditures rising to over seventy percent, at the killing cost of health, education, and infrastructure expenditures. Definitely "anti-people", as the Left would say, but the Left was the main guardian of this mounting bureaucratic hemorrhage of the low growth economy.
As a result of this process, the millions living off the Sirkar's exchequer multiply. Out of the twenty four million in the organized sector of India in the early seventies, almost eighteen million lived off the treasury in the central, the state and the local bodies; in railways; in electricity and water supplies; in banking, insurance, and the public sector; and of these, over ninety five percent were the wasteful Class III and Class IV! As a result, with the impact of inflation, the wages and the salaries bill of the government doubled in the six years ending 1974-75 to rupees one thousand four hundred seventy crores, rising at the rate of fifteen percent a year; steadily reducing resources for development, the major purpose of heavy taxation, the mark of a 'soft' state. The state's consumption kept rising, poverty continued.
By 1974, the two years of killing inflation and dearness allowance for the unproductive, surplus Class III and Class IV employees had, at least, taught government a lesson in mounting overheads, and of a mindless wage structure inherited from the facile thinking of the fifties, in which Dearness Allowance (D.A.) was linked with the cost of living in an economy, in which, the productivity was low, growth was declining, and population was rising fast. By then, many state governments were too bankrupt to be able to afford to pay the government servants their wages, and the Government of India was also in arrears with five installments of D.A. In the largest state of India, Uttar Pradesh, the wage bill alone was higher than the revenues of the state, leaving no resources for development. In another extreme case, J & K, out of the total budget of over rupees one hundred twenty crores, the state itself could only generate revenue of the order of rupees seventeen crores then; the rest came by way of subsidy from the Central Government, which itself had no further resources to meet the wage and D.A. demands.
In the context of inflation, the on-going curse of the common man, the Sirkar's contribution to it was admirably summed up in an article on ‘Deepening Rural Poverty: Past Policy and Present Crisis’, by A. S. Abraham (Times of India, May 22, 1975):
"But cause-and-effect is indistinguishable today, it's familiar chicken-and-egg situation. The strongly entrenched petty bourgeois interest-group that the bureaucracy has become is as much a contributor to inflation as it is its victim. The only way the vicious circle of inflation can be broken is through productivity. Productivity is the fruit of investment. Investment means money. Money must come chiefly from taxes. But an ever-demanding claimant to any augmented state earnings is the bureaucracy. And the bureaucracy bases its claims, not unnaturally, on the very inflation the government wants to fight!"
So, a vicious circle presided over by the top government economists, with ideological Left support. The bureaucracy's response to inflation was more corruption
Financially, the different levels of the Sirkar were like f1eas feasting on larger f1eas. The district Board and municipality overspent and looked for subsidy from the state government; the state government did the same with the Central government, and the Central government repeated the performance on grander scale by minting currency, with dependence on various forms of foreign aid, bilateral and multi-lateral, and finally, the SDR facilities. As was observed by Dr. Bernier in the days of the Mughals, the Sirkar of democratic socialist India was also living far beyond its means, taxing the people with the highest tax rates in the world, but, unlike the Mughals, becoming one of the developing world's largest international borrowers. At least, the Mughals made India rich with twenty percent of the world's trade; whereas, the Nehruvian state inherited a two percent share, and after ten development plans reduced it to 0.6 percent! There are a few more damning examples of Swaraj. This corruption the people of India called bhuk, the hunger of the ruling classes. The behemoth of the ‘Sirkar’ had an elephantine appetite. As early as the mid-sixties, I had the opportunity and satisfaction of putting R & D into India's fiscal policy. It seemed, on reflection, so simple compared with the Herculean failures elsewhere. It so happened, my company was to pioneer industrial research in India, largely aimed at import substitution of raw materials then. Our old hater, and now friend, Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, was invited to inaugurate it. At that time T.P. Singh, I.C.S., an old senior colleague from the Bihar cadre was the Finance Secretary. I told him that in the Nehru raj we were making a song and dance over science and technology, but there was no place for it in India's fiscal policies. The shaft went home. T.P. Singh immediately accepted a budget recommendation. Indian industry was very slow to respond in the coming years. In its mind, R & D expenditures seemed superfluous in an economic regime of shortages, price and other controls, high taxes, and the low "Hindu rate of growth". Indian R & D has taken a long time growing in the absence of a competitive market.
I am neither an insider, nor an authority on science and technology, but I share the view of a few others that, one of Nehru's major blunders was to set up a spate of thirty bureaucratic National Laboratories, and deprive the universities of the best scientific brains and resources. We have seen no purple record of those National Laboratories in the next four decades, no great impact on the Indian economy or even its Defense needs, despite DRDO – a pitiful contribution to international scientific research papers, practically no significant contribution to Indian patents, no functional links between Indian science and Indian users, and no Indian Nobel Prize winners with work on Indian soil, and with the universities left to languish.
The Parliamentary Committee (May, 2006) revealed that even the DRDO was symptomatic of Indian science, especially in the most significant Defense area, after appropriating eighty percent of India's R & D budget.
Despite DRDO, 26 per cent of total Defense expenditure was on imports, with DRDO's delays and obstructions to timely Defense needs;
DRDO was encumbered by four times the auxiliary staff than found in similar private sector units, as in the example of the National Seeds Corporation earlier, an endemic 'Sirkari' waste of unproductive resources;
A CAG report of 2000 shows weaknesses in the research-innovation-adaptation chain, showing very few innovations going into production;
Both DRDO and ISRO have shortages of qualified manpower in the world's third largest scientific-technological manpower pool with only 1.7 per million, compared with China's five hundred forty five and S. Korea's two thousand three hundred nineteen per million.
So China's scientific innovation and development is way ahead of India's, though started after 1980.
I am tempted to refer to only one sphere in R & D, in which I have been involved for the last three decades in a non-official capacity, especially after being a member of the Planning Commission Task Force on the Himalayan Region in 1979-80, and being a founding father of the International Centre for Mountain Region Development (ICIMOD), Kathmandu (1983) for the whole Hindukush-Himalaya. A millennium and a half ago, Kalidas, the ‘Indian Shakespeare’, called the Himalaya, "the measuring rod of the Earth". It is now a critical "measuring rod" of its impact on India's development and security. There are over thirty million people in the Indian Himalaya, in its critical border area. Whereas, the poverty rate in the rest of India has lowered, that in the Indian Himalaya has risen, especially with the high population growth rates between two to three per cent per year; a killing demographic pressure where less than fifteen percent of the total area is cultivable land (sixty five percent in the Ganga plain), and fast-eroding eco systems. Yet, there has been no R & D investment in the Social sector of Health, Education, and Nutrition etc. with total Himalayan R & D expenditure of about rupees three crores a year, its critical Agri-Science receiving only seven percent on average, with huge hydro, wind and solar energy potentials yet to be researched. There seems to have been no sound, sustainable R & D policy for this critical Himalayan region.
The paper on ‘Status and trends in research and development in the mountains: A situational analysis in the Indian Himalaya’ by Drs. Prasanna K. Sammal, Lok Man S. Palni and Pitamber P. Dhyani (International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 12 (2005)), provides a factual overall view of the little that has been done in Himalayan R & D from 1985-86 to 1998-99. There has been lesser done before, especially in the context of the magnitude and rational priority of India’s most strategic and vulnerable border land with the whole of Northern and North-East India dependent on the Himalayan range, as a climate-maker, as the source of over sixty percent of India’s water resources, with more than a third of India's hydro power potential feeding the bread-basket and the life support systems of the Sutlej-Ganga-Brahmaputra basins. They also contain millions of the poorest people of India living on an eroding eco-system, long past its carrying capacities. The report finds that poverty is decreasing in India but increasing in the Himalayan region – a significant warning. There is hardly a good strategic defense in human infrastructure and resource terms on our northern borders.
In comparison, the twenty-year Indian Antarctica Science programme began without any basic national, scientific and geo-political objectives. It is said, it began with an ad hoc question from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to an unaware, unprepared Environment Secretary: "Can we mount an expedition to Antarctica?" In the days of "commitment" there was no time for objective examination of a costly on-going venture in the blue. In the absence of the basic long-term scientific or geo-political objectives – of which there was no trace in 1981 when it started – the probability is that its origin was in the vague area of national prestige; after prestige, dividends had been extracted from Himalayan summitry on Everest and other high peaks. Yet, it has continued with expenditures of over rupees five hundred crores, a recurring annual exercise, with no objective evaluation over twenty years in Antarctica.
The issue is not whether Antarctica is a storehouse of knowledge. It is the relative merits of spending India's limited resources in what was called the "Third Pole", the near Himalaya or in far Antarctica. Apparently, the NCAOR, National Centre for Antarctica and Ocean Research, Goa, has the main objective, which has no fundamental scientific, strategic or developmental importance to India. Neither Antarctica's wealth of krill, nor the geological similarities between East Antarctica and Deccan India, nor the old Gondwana land, has justified this twenty-year diversion of scientific effort and money. Of what use is the NCAOR, to thousands of millions of Indians struggling to rise from poverty, under-development, and one of the lowest positions in the 128-national Human Development Index in the sub-continent? But the Antarctica wagon rolls annually like Puri's mythical chariot.
Compare that with far more relevant needs of scientific research in the near Himalayan region:
· As India's climate and Monsoon maker, a fundamental of Monsoon economies;
· India's vital seismic area affecting tens of millions of its people, its river systems and huge investments in dams;
· The serious threat of retreating glaciers and drying hill springs, and its near future impact on the water systems of the whole of North India, affecting over four hundred million people. Instead of the Dakshin Gangotri, the Gangotri itself is such a near threatening, retreating glacier area;
· The increasing poverty, and Maoist vulnerability of India's most strategic Himalayan border areas;
· Serious changes in the earlier rich bio-diversity of plant and animal species in the Himalayan region.
Both Antarctica and Himalayan policies were badly conceived, with no cost benefits over twenty years, and typical of government-minds whose first consideration is prestige – H. N. Bahuguna's "dikhane ke liye", or show; another waste of a poor nation's public money.
In the context of science and development, one of Nehru's nebulous dream, I go to the heart of India's problems by exploring the fifty-year gap between the Manmohan Singh-Mashelkar era just opening in 2005-06, and the wasted period since the Nehru-Bhatnagar start. The amazing link was Professor P. M. S. Blackett's useful lecture in Delhi in 1965, ‘Science and Technology in an Unequal World’. Blackett was one of Nehru's scientific gurus, one of the many good minds he did not heed.
Blackett propounded the central thesis to the problem of science and development in his "Innovation chain", which, he emphasized, was a "single whole", a holistic module. The chain began not with R & D in the Sirkari scientific blue, but with clear market development objectives and needs, whether in hunger and nutrition, in energy and powerlessness, health and medicine, or in national security and its absence. Firstly, this calls for clear selectivity, and prioritization, especially in countries with poor resources and large populations like India. Secondly, it requires selective investment in advanced technologies, avoiding waste of scarce resources. No reinventing the wheel. Thirdly, the importance of and links with business managements and markets (i.e. national demand and needs in future) in public and private sectors, and cost consciousness for the end of objective of competitiveness, national and international.
Unfortunately, that "single whole" of Blackett's innovation chain was broken by Nehru's ideological apathy to profits; continued later by Mrs. G, and her numberless socialist colleagues. Without profits and cost-consciousness, there can be no blood-stream of innovative competitiveness. Instead, Sirkar science lapsed into what Blackett had clearly warned, "a Robinson Crusoe syndrome" of living in a desert island, and government science becoming "consumers of wealth rather than creators of wealth". Nor did the Sirkari, socialist India learn from Japan post-1950, of creating advanced innovative, competitive technology, based on the R & D of other countries. India produced no Sony.
So as late as 2006, the patenting which follows the Innovation chain was just dawning on Sirkari science, when Dr. R. Mashelkar, D.G., CSIR admitted: "These are new games. We were naive initially”. Meanwhile, science in schools and universities was ignored for half a century, while a Sirkari pyramid network at the top of thirty eight national laboratories became "consumers of the nation's wealth, not its creators", as Blackett had warned. India and its scientists largely lived the "Robinson Crusoe syndrome" for half a critical century. At the NCAER meeting on Unemployment (11 Sept. 1971), at the height of the Nehru dynasty's 'Sirkari socialism', with pretensions to remove poverty and unemployment, the truth came out in true vernacular meaning from economist, B. R. Shenoy. He asked: "Is it 'samigri' (cooking) or ideation?" To which another participant, Arnin gave the simple, true answer: " 'Samigri' is not enough. What is wrong is the cook"; fifty years of Sirkari cooks who were ideologically disinclined to follow Blackett's universal recipe of the Total Innovation Chain, with market and development objectives at the end of the chain.
Perhaps, I could continue the anecdotal thread with Mr. J. R. D. Tata, a critical witness of the Nehruvian state. At one of our Board's lunch meetings, in which, J. R. D. was a guest, I asked him how he was perhaps the closest Indian businessman to Nehru, socially and culturally, and yet he seemed to make no impact on Nehru's policies in at least two areas of concern to him – economic development and population policies. His spontaneous reply silenced me. He said, "He wouldn't listen". Nehru was well-known for non-listening habits. He was said to look out of the window or plead he had another meeting. He had ideological ears, which could not listen beyond ideological walls.
By Mrs. Gandhi's time, when tolerance of private enterprise gave way to deliberate political antipathy and exclusion from economic development, Monopoly was raised as the big bogey, when by 1975 the biggest industrial power was in the Public sector; when the few large Indian companies were puny by international standards, and crippled in international competitiveness by mindless state-control. Recall a mere Joint Secretary ruining India's fats and oils prospects, and the fiscal killing of the infant processed foods industry, later acknowledged to be good for farmers, by punitive high taxation killing investments which were already made.
At a meeting with the Planning Commission in 1968, J. R. D. Tata made his famous self-questioning disclosure, which, of course, went unanswered. This most honest, most respected and admired Indian businessman, asked himself in all simplicity: "When I wake up every morning, as the head of one of the largest industrial groups in the country, what is this tremendous concentration of economic power", which he was supposed to wield? He asked directly, "Shall I crush competition, exploit consumers, fire recalcitrant workers, and topple a government? I wish Dr. Gadgil (then Vice-Chairman), or some other protagonist of this theory enlighten me as to the nature of this great power concentrated in my hands. I have totally failed to identify let alone exercise it". Then he went on to define those powers "to start a company, to raise or borrow money, to employ or retrench labor, to appoint managers and their salaries, to fix prices, and so on". In fact, of these powers, "the only fearsome, almost totalitarian concentration of economic power lies in the hands of ministers, planners, and government officials. It is that concentration of economic power which I claim is the real threat to our progress and our democracy”. Mr. Tata's own managers and workers would have endorsed that, apart from many others in and outside business; as in the case of Prem Shankar Jha's devastating article in the Times of India in1973, ‘Unproductive Jobs: The Core of the Economic Crisis’, the central theme of the Planning State, the consuming behemoth.
The next significant anecdotal experience is a revealing contemporary ‘Ramayana Katha’ from the highest reaches of the political system in Mrs. Gandhi's days: More political witnesses to the time.
Around 1973-74, we were in a Board meeting. The new Chairman was called out to take a telephone call. He then called me out and told me there was a call from the Treasurer of the Congress party (say, Sri P. for the English Pound) to meet a senior Congressman, Minister of the Cabinet, and a close retainer of the Nehru family, (say, Sri USD or the US Dollar). It was customary to call "eminent industrialists" before elections, with the irrefutable plea in J. R. D.'s totalitarian controlled state, to convey they had had "a peaceful prosperous time, now is the time for help”. Note the mix of the Jajmani/Sauda mindset in those words. I told my Chairman it was not proper for the Chairman to be directly exposed to such political pressure, and I would go.
Among the "eminent industrialists" of Bombay, I was surprised to be called first into another room. Previously we were addressed collectively. So began the usual "peace and prosperity" theme, and a request for "help". I asked him straight away how this was possible when his own government and party had made political donations illegal. Being surprised at the rise of the Swatantra party under C. Rajagopalachari's leadership in the 1967 elections – when the Delhi Treasurer of the party offered me a Swatantra seat in the Rajya Sabha – Mrs. Gandhi (Mrs. G. in future) had passed a law, banning political funding by companies, in order to deny any such to the Opposition parties. But, cynically, she sent her party men out to squeeze political funding from the same abominable Indian private enterprise she tried to destroy. She knew the sauda game of politics, and many Indian businessmen in the 'control raj' had to learn it too.
Being foxed by my direct statement of illegality, USD shifted ground and said, "But you advertise, don't you?" I said yes. I pointed out that the then rates for advertising pamphlets ranged from rupees hundred to rupees two thousand a page. "Is that what you are referring to?" I asked. Back came the retort that you are a big company, and should give rupees two lakhs, to which P. quickly added that he knew us, and considering our size, it should be rupees five lakhs. Then a babu, sitting in a corner with sheets of paper, said, "No, no, the matter has been discussed with them by the Minister for Petroleum and Chemicals (our parent ministry), and that rupees ten lakhs had been agreed”. I felt like a very desirable slave of the ancient slave markets, whose value was being so handsomely raised in minutes! I categorically refuted any such meeting or agreement. It is amazing how such blatant lies could be put on paper, and then announced as Sirkari truths. "Satyameva Jayate", indeed!
Then, in addition to the advertising argument, USD assured me that the Labor Ministry had sent out a letter saying political funding was legal! From my own sources I had known about this letter a year ago. The pronounced Leftist Minister of Labor – this was not under his jurisdiction anyway – had tried to get his I.C.S. Secretary to sign this contrived, misleading letter. He refused. The poor Under Secretary must have been made to sign it as an "official clarification" of a clear banning law! It was rather twisted "Satyameva Jayate", this time.
Amused at the way our price was being put up, and a bit sick with these double dealings, I decided to make my decisive point. I told both USD and P that I was now speaking as an Indian citizen: (a) they ought to consider the serious implications of asking international companies for political donations, and its possible repercussions for the Prime Minister herself; and (b) if I was sent a copy of the Labor Minister's letter, I would have it examined; at which, both looked at each other as if my statement had something in it. I took that moment of their weakness to leave, assuring them of the serious examination of the Labor Minister’s letter.
Within hours, I was sent a copy of that letter with an unprecedented speed, which I gave to our Legal Head. He got the written view of both the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, that political funding by companies was clearly illegal.
Barely had I flown back to Delhi, when I got another call from an ex-Cabinet Minister for Commerce (say, Sri MS for Manipulative Sauda), asking me to see him in an office in Connaught Place. When I arrived there, I saw Delhi's "eminent industrialists" also invited. I waited for them to finish, and then walked up to MS, saying, “You seem to be busier than when you were a Cabinet Minister!" To which he spontaneously replied as an old acquaintance, "This is a dirty business". He was issuing receipts like a cinema booking clerk for political donations, and despite Mrs. G's law against political donations.
Then he got down to business in a way in which USD was a novice. He began threateningly by saying, "You have four expansion proposals in government, don't you?" I said yes. I then told him what I had been through in Bombay with Sri USD and Sri P, and reminded him that he knew us from earlier years; we did not give any political money, even when it was legal. Very cleverly, he then changed tack and asked, "You buy lakhs worth of raw materials every week from Gujarat, don't you?" I said yes. "Then there is no problem," he smilingly replied. He was suggesting that we add a small percentage to the raw material price, and the supplier could pass it on to the party. In true indigenous style, ‘no problem’; clever, but not right. The Indian consumer would have to pay eventually for the illegal political donation.
Then, threatening our future expansion plans, he said firmly, "Either you are with Mrs. Gandhi, or you are not”. I told him we Board members were professional managers, and apart from the illegality of political donations, we did not own any of the assets of the company to make political donations.
Coming away, aware of probable, if not near-certain threats to our expansion plans, and its future consequences on our eight thousand employees, I decided that evening to take up the matter with the Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary, P. N. Haksar. I took him through the Bombay and Delhi episodes and showed him the legal opinions of the Attorney and Solicitor Generals. When he asked to keep them, I knew he meant business. Acting sometimes as if he was the Deputy Prime Minister, he called a meeting that evening of the Labor and two other ministers to give them a piece of his mind. Six weeks later, this honest, able guide, and confidant of Mrs. Gandhi was shifted to the Planning Commission! This was the reward for a loyal, able right-hand man.
It is worth cogently summarizing the lessons of this ‘Ramayana Katha’ at the highest levels. It clearly showed:
Vicious, deliberate perversion of one's self-made law to paralyze opposition in a democracy;
Cunning ways of evading the consequences through pleas for advertising payment and payments through raw material suppliers;
Brazen threats to industrial growth with the power of the license raj, despite adverse consequences to workers, the industry, agriculture and the country, and;
Sadly for me and the country, the betrayal and abandonment of an outstanding, loyal, and supportive senior public servant.
Nothing so clearly revealed the face of Mrs. G's raj before the Emergency.
I have used the very appropriate Hindi work, Sauda earlier. The credit for bringing it to my notice goes to a senior Congressman, from a family of kingmakers in Madhya Pradesh, and dealing with Mrs. G's Allahabad High Court case, questioning the legality of her election then. He was ranting against a senior Secretary in the Government of India, questioning his integrity without any facts or evidence. I told him I knew the Secretary, he was a man of ample means, and did not have to stoop to corruption. I also added that when senior public officials refused to comply with the politician's wishes, the latter jumped to the conclusion that they were in someone else's pocket, which, I said, was wrong. He cut me short by saying in Hindi, "Moddie sahib, you don't know. In this country everything is sauda”. I thanked him for this accurate indigenous expression, which was better than the English word, corruption. I have since referred to the 'Sauda Society' and the 'Sauda State'. The most neutral, amoral translation of sauda is exchange. I have found that indigenous words like sauda, jajman and karta are far more insightful in our social and governmental behavior. He was aresounding witness to our times.
It may be advisable to summarize the main conclusions of this chapter from many first-hand experiences. It has shown:
The ignorance of the ruling classes about the realities from the Himalayan border, leading to the shameful debacle at the hands of China in 1962, and the lack of any strategic high level minds since, in an unhistorical people;
The biased exclusion of the Indian private sector in India's planning in industry and agriculture; the J. R. D. Tata demolishing of 'monopolist power'; and the power of bureaucrats to retard growth at great future costs to the nation, including farmers;
The huge consumption propensity of the behemoth Sirkar, with dear examples of the NSC, CSIR and STC to show mindless Sirkari growth of unproductive overheads, non-Plan expenditures, and inflation;
The critical, ideological neglect of Blackett’s total Innovation Chain in Indian R & D for India’s development and security;
The cynical misuse of the law and political power in an authoritarian Sirkar to extract political funds for one party and one leader after making it illegal;
All leading to a low “Hindu rate of growth” of three to four percent per annum, the failure of Planning, the shameful continuance of thirty to forty percent people in poverty, and the impending bankruptcy of the Nehruvian state by 1991;
Underlying all, the indigenous clarity of sauda and jajmani as cultural realities in the Indian state and society.
These were real and significant revelations to supplement those of the earlier chapters, which then were portents of things to come. And they came.
The earlier glow of Swaraj was fast fading. Gandhi was forgotten. Nehru was a disappointing darling of the masses. Azadi or freedom was eclipsed by the insensitive continuation of the colonial law, the police, and the Sirkari systems, and then dashed by the despotic Emergency. Development was dying – a political charade. There was, of course, the victorious Bangladesh War, but we lost the peace at Simla – even with ninety thousand Pakistani prisoners in the bag – and later, the goodwill of Bangladesh. Then terrorism entered Punjab – its leader Bhidranwale, once a creature of Mrs. G against moderate Sikhs! It was followed by the triple tragedies of Amritsar, Mrs. G's terrible assassination, and the, revengeful massacre of the brave Sikh community in Delhi in 1984.
My reactions then were Biblical. “They that play with fire, perish in fire”. There were more fires to come.
Nehru: The Discoverer of India
As a student in Allahabad University, we listened to Nehru, that darling of the masses, as the present generation watches another Allahabad charmer, Amitabh Bachan. Amitabh is a consummate professional actor of many parts. Nehru was one unique person, a nostalgic dreamer of the past and present. No hard maker of a new state like Lenin or Sardar Patel. He is the foremost witness to our time in modern India.
Shortly after Independence, when he came to the All-India Services Training School at Metcalfe House, Old Delhi, I had an opportunity of getting close to him. I went up to him and said, "Sir, I have a design on you". Calmly he asked, "What?" I said, "Sir', would you kindly autograph your Discovery of India, for me?" Wordlessly, and with an uncharacteristic calm, he did so. As he was writing, I could not help admiring his beautifully chiseled face, so qualitatively different from the face of nearly all other Indian politicians then, and since. They are either ordinary, or coarse, or even brutal. Here was the face that launched a thousand hopes, and the continuing Five-Year Plans for the Nehruvian state of the future. No one seems to have thought of looking at his Discovery as a prelude to the Nehruvian state. I have pondered this for years after he autographed my copy.
So, before we look at the Nehruvian state in the next chapter, could we take him up on his own question: "The discovery of India – what have I discovered?” He gives his own answer so transparently over six hundred ninety four pages written at Ahmednagar Fort prison between that fateful "Quit India", August 9, 1942 and his release on March 28, 1945. He himself referred to it as "two years of dreaming", "an emotional experience which quite overwhelmed me". For him, it was "a great voyage of discovery", of “infinite charm and variety". The first half of the book is a dreaming voyage of India's past history, mainly its culture and intellectual attainments, a search for old Bharat Mata and her dharti, the diversity and sustainability of its culture, "a world in itself". For him it was "imaged history". He admits there to "too much of the volcano” of emotion in him “for real detachment”. No better interpreter of Nehru than Nehru himself.
He said that for "the house of India's future, you had to dig deep for its foundations". But, that, he seemed to fail to do as a practical politician, as a future Prime Minister. As one of the topmost leaders of India's Independence movement after Gandhi, one would have expected him to explore the positive and the negative realities of the past Indian governance and statehood; especially, as he himself said then, that freedom when it comes should be differently meaningful to the Indian people. He seemed to draw no relevant conclusions, even after more than one reference to Kautilya's Arthashastra, the ancient classic on Indian statehood. He just passed on to the Jataka tales. In his emotional "imaged history", the realities of the past Indian governance quite escaped the future Prime Minister. He failed to "dig deep" into India's history. Instead, he borrowed Socialism and Secularism superficially from the West. And both failed by 1990, especially in his home state of U.P. (and Bihar), which became the dens of casteist, criminal politics. He invented Non-Alignment, which too evaporated in the world of real politics.
Most significantly then, "We wanted no change of masters from white to brown, but a real people's rule by the people and for the people, and an ending of our poverty and misery". That is worth remembering in reading the next chapter. With foresight he asked, "Was democracy then to be a close pressure of thick skins, loud voices, and accommodating consciences?" That is what it became. Yet over twenty years of the demand of Swaraj before 1947, and even in a thousand days of enforced seclusion in prison, that ‘discovery’ did not go to past lessons of governance of Indian statehood. He himself admitted then, that "The ignoring of history had evil consequences which pursue us still” and which would pursue India for half a century after Independence. He thought it was "partly due to the nationalism which consumes us in our present state”. Only when we are politically, critically and economically free, does the mind function normally and critically”; an example of the glib postponement of realities. He was so wrong. It would be too late. He and other leaders of the freedom movement failed to do their homework when they had no governance responsibility, and were in years of enforced leisure in jail. They failed to appreciate realistically they would be drowned by the demand of a sub-continental society as India, after taking over the many new tasks of governance of which they had no experience, in a society which had lost the experience of governing for centuries; and that, in the middle of mounting communal tension and the tragic consequences of Partition; hardly a time for objective historical homework.
But, getting back to the peaceful writing in Ahmednagar Fort jail, the Mauryas and Ashoka, particularly fascinated Nehru. He found the Mauryan state highly regulated with a widespread, pervasive bureaucracy. Agriculture, irrigation, food markets, slaughter houses, cattle-raising, water-rights, navigation of rivers, sports, courtesans and drinking saloons were all regulated by the state. Nehru believed this was in the towns, "The village communities were practically autonomous". This comprehensive state control then was not too far from the Nehruvian license-permit state, without the traditional autonomy of the village communities. It is strange this marked the similarity between the ancient Mauryan state and the socialist state Nehru inherited from the war-time British colonial regime, and then stamped with the ideology of Socialism with ubiquitous control. Ashoka fascinated him as a King with a conscience after the conquest of Kalinga, as a ruler with 'dharma'. Was it a possible self image? But, strangely, he never asked himself why the Mauryan dynasty faded away after Ashoka. Why such dharmic greatness and its quick disappearance?
Before going on to his next great fascination, Akbar, one finds Nehru referring to ‘the inner decay’, especially in North India with hundreds of small states, in the millennium before the Muslim invasions, "the dramatic collapse of Indian Civilization". He vaguely refers to the "internal decay", the "growing rigidity and exclusiveness of the Indian social structure"; but there is no examination of Indian governance and the state, which led to repeated collapse. Then as now, he found "those Indians who had gone abroad, as in South-East Asia....had opportunities for growth and expansion”. Neither did Nehru learn lessons from that experience, nor his successors in the latter half of the twentieth century. He seemed unable to look at the strengths and the weaknesses of Indian states before Plassey and the colonial era; though pre-colonial Indian states also had feudal landlords, money-lenders, exploitative tax collectors, agents of what he called exploitation. He failed to study how the Mughal Empire and significant Indian states, rich Bengal and the great fighting of the Marathas, Tipu Sultan, and the Sikhs, were defeated by Factory Managers and so few British of the East India Company. He failed to see the greatness of the Indian enterprise, linked with statehood all the way from the Chola South-East Asia to the Silk Routes in the Central Asia and the West Asia, apart from the Indian enterprise, especially in the glorious Mughal period. There must have been risks of capital and the profit motive then too, which Nehru disliked. It was an ideological and unreal Berlin wall in his mind.
He recognized Akbar had "built an edifice so well", and yet there was no curiosity for Akbar’s state structure, no lessons learnt from Akbar’s substantial sharing of power – even in monarchical despotism – with significant subsidiary powers like the Hindu Rajputs and the defeated Afghans; a lesson most relevant in the Congress/Muslim League politics of his democratic time. He totally ignored Abdul Fazl's innovative new revenue system of governance, from which even the British learnt; a significant omission in grassroots Indian statecraft. He even had a chapter on ‘The Technique of British Rule’, but no other such chapter on previous Hindu, Afghan, and Mughal rule. Why was everything before Plassey so euphoric?
What is also interesting to compare is his comments on various aspects of the British rule in his time, and their continuity after ten Five-Year Plans of the Nehruvian state. For example, he says, "India became progressively ruralized; when in every progressive country during the past century there was a shift of population from the agriculture to the industry....in India this process was reversed as a result of British policy". First, we have no reliable statistics before the British Census began in 1871, of the split of the rural and the urban population in India. Second, even after ten Five-Year Plans of the same Nehruvian state, in 2006, India still has the same burdensome phenomenon of nearly seventy percent population in rural India, with about three hundred million in acute poverty, under-employment and unemployment. Most significantly, he quotes Janaka and Yagnavalka at the dawn of history, "that it was the function of the leaders to make them (the people) fearless. But the dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of evasive, oppressing, strangling fear; fear of the army, the police the widespread secret service, fear of the official class; fear of the law meant to suppress and of prison; fear of the landlord's agent, fear of the money-lender, fear of unemployment and starvation, which was always on the threshold". Is not the Indian media full of the same fear and suffering of the people after ten development plans over the last fifty years of the Nehruvian state, despite the Constitution?
There are other familiar throw forwards from Nehru's criticism of the British Raj in our day around 2000. He criticized the official policy then for its neglect of the education of the minorities and the backward classes. He wanted "a change from the Police state into a socially-guided state". He criticized the civil service then as "helpless and incompetent" with "no training to function democratically with the goodwill and cooperation of the people”. Surprisingly, he said then, that the failing of the permanent services “seemed obvious to us”, and were “totally incapable of leading India in any progressive direction". It would be necessary "to untrain them", and to bathe them in the waters of Lethe so that they might forget what they had been. These sweeping remarks were not followed up by actions when he became the Prime Minister, or by his party during his and later governance.
Nehru and the Congress leaders gave no specific thought to better changed governance before or after 1947. Later, commissions’ and committees’ reports on administration and education became dead documents. At the very time in 1948, he was giving me his autograph on a copy of his Discovery of India, in which he had said all these things; he had accepted the old ways of the old malik ethos of the services of the Raj and the Metcalfe House and at the Raisina, North and South Blocks. The Independence Raj virtually adopted the same laws and systems, the same permanent services, the same repressive Official Secrets Act, Defense of India Act, and Land Acquisition Act, the Cr. PC, IPC etc. of the British regime, and in the Indian Jajmani/Raja ethos, and with the same or worse consequences for the people, of which Nehru complained pre-1947. There was no bathing of the administration in the ‘waters of Lethe’, as may be seen in my first hand experience in the earlier chapters, and the consequences for the Nehruvian state in the next chapter. Sadly, after 1947, the Ganga of the government and the Ganga of Bhagirath, were both polluted.
Whatever Nehru discovered about India in the six hundred ninety four pages of this Discovery, it certainly did not include the lessons of past governance in India over the twenty five hundred years of recorded history. Sadly, there was no preparatory work for Swaraj, even after listing all the failings of the British Raj, and no learning from pre-colonial governance either. So he, and the leaders of the Indian independence movement, failed to learn the lessons of governance from India's long history. They say those who do not learn from history, repeat history; which, in many ways, the Nehruvian state did, behind the facade of modernity.
Later, there is a chapter on the ‘Nehruvian State’, but first, a few examples of the lack of learning from history in India's internal and external security in Nehru's years, which made India pay a heavy price during Nehru's life and in the decades later. So, when it came to primary foreign policy for the external security of India, and the benefits to India's economic strength abroad, he could only offer the specious, hollow Non-Alignment in the dynamic post-World War II world; a theoretical escapade from the real-politic. After 1954, it became a cover for such an apparent pro-USSR alignment, as I was asked in Germany after 1980, if "India was a part of the Warsaw Pact"! Yet in the 1950's and 1960's, we were critically dependent on US PL 480 food to save us from more famines, as I have related from my Bihar experience. In India's pathetic 1962 position with China on the Northern border, he fell back on dependence for the USA's support. Nehru's Non-Aligned India was a weakling, aligning both ways, but presuming to be the Jagat guru of the world, a traditional Brahmin with the Kamandal. If the Discovery of India was the work of a dreamer, it continued in the Nehruvian years of governance.
Earlier, at the time of the Cabinet Mission to India in 1946, the people of Assam and the North-East found that, but for Gandhiji and the Congress Chief Minister, Bishuram Medhi, Nehru and the Congress had almost lost them to the proposed Pakistan. Those colonial British gave the North-East a rail, river, and power infrastructure, and a prospering economy served by two ports of Calcutta and Chittagong. When, after independence, Nehru refused to protect India's only oilfields, at Digboi for "defense reasons", Chief Minister Medhi asked him how then he would protect the pipeline from Assam to Barauni in Bihar, when one hundred forty miles of it passed near the Pakistan border. Apart from the lack of appreciation for the self-determination aspirations of the North-East, that critical border region was shocked how easily Nehru abandoned them in 1962. Jai Prakash Narain showed far greater sympathy and concern for those North-East aspirations, especially of the Nagas (Origins of ‘Strike Back’ IIC Quarterly, Winter, 2005, Udaya Mishra). No wonder the North East has remained a cultural, infrastructural, economic and psycho-social vulnerable gap in India's nationhood and security.
India's security was Nehru's blind eye. When, in the first months after Independence, the British Commander-in-Chief did the proper thing – asked Nehru's government for its perceptions of security threats of India – General Rudra's autobiography relates how Nehru lost his temper like a petulant child, instead of a responsible Prime Minister. He is reported to have burst out: "What threats? India is a peaceful, non-violent country. It needs no army”. This dreamer seemed to be unaware of the geo-politics of his own time. Within two months, that necessary army saved his dear Kashmir from Pakistan raiders; a critical J & K region where in, his politics, corrupt administration, poor development and he were largely responsible for, in the next two decades.
Despite Sardar Patel's written warnings in 1950, and Beijing's call for a stand-still agreement to prevent patrol clashes and negotiations to agree boundary alignments, Nehru, who spent half his Discovery condemning the British Colonial rule, adhered to the 1911 British imperial version of the Northern frontier, on the vague, unspecified idea of the Himalayan watershed, a frontier which had never been demarcated clearly on the ground. In this nebulous residue of the Raj, Nehru not only insisted there was "no dispute", but from 1954 to 1962 pursued a mindless forward policy of pushing little posts uselessly forward, as if the presence of sections of soldiers established a well designed territorial right; aided and abetted in later years by his Intelligence Chief, N. B. Mullick, ignorant of military matters, and his Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, whose claim to fame in geo-politics was a boring nine hour speech in the U.N.. Nehru had failed to learn hard lessons of reality. He learnt no lesson from the loss of Aksaichin in Ladakh to the Chinese in 1957, which he hid from the nation, and dismissed as a place where "not a blade of grass grew!" Not much grass has grown on the high slopes of the Siachin glacier either, where India and Pakistan military have been in conflict for twenty years.
As if it was mere Police action against China’s powerful armies, on 12 October, 1962, Nehru left for Sri Lanka ordering his troops to throw the Chinese out from his version of the frontier! The Chinese treated it as a declaration of war, and in the next weeks made the Indian army look like a completely impotent force. The once famous, Fourth Division of the Indian army, earning high praise under British leadership in World War II, was routed under the command of a Nehru stooge, a General B. M. Kaul, who never had any operational experience; who as Nehru's chamcha supplanted the professional Army HQ, and when he faced defeat in Assam, ran back to the shelter of the master, Nehru in New Delhi. Political and incompetent chamchagiri replaced good military professionalism. After the disgrace, General Henderson Brooks was asked to do an operational review of the disaster, restricted to Army Command and downwards, with no access to documents on the civil side, where the root of the disastrous Forward Policy lay. It has remained hidden as a ‘most secret’ document since. But there are other revealing sources such as Brig. J. Dalvis’s, Himalayan Blunder, and Neville Maxwell's, India's China War. Nehru did not discover the past realities of India before he sought to govern it after 1947.
The Nehruvian State: Another Failed Mahabharata?
Part-I
Let me once again begin with an anecdotal truth and see where it leads in one of the world's oldest, most plural, divisive, complex societies on a sub-continental scale.
In 1954, I was trekking in Kumaon in the Central Himalaya with a Swiss friend, who later became an India-China development expert, Gilbert Etienne. It was a hot June day, and Gilbert, in only Khaki shorts, displayed a large area of his white skin in a brown land. Near Wan, a village in the heart of Kumaon, we suddenly met an old man, led by his granddaughter in the middle of a forest. When he saw the white apparition of Gilbert, he stopped in surprise and began making a short speech. The gist of what he said in Hindi was, "You knew how to rule. You gave justice. You were not corrupt". Gilbert asked me what he was saying. I said he had mistaken him for the British, at which, in high indignation, he told me to tell the old Kumaoni that he was not British, he was Swiss. I replied that he had never heard of the Swiss. Gilbert insisted. So I told the old man, in Hindi, "This sahib is not the British who ruled here. He is Swiss and comes from another mountain country called Switzerland". His reply was unforgettably touching, "No matter. It is the same stock (murti)”; a surprising and genuine compliment to the British Raj from one of the millions of Indian villagers. He may not have heard of the massacre of the Jalianwala Bagh, or the British economic exploitation of India over a century; but it came as a remarkable surprise to me just seven years after Independence in 1947. It reflected the views in the districts of good British officers, in this case going back to the memorable thirty years of Commissioner Ramsay in Kumaon in the nineteenth century.
Fifty years later in 2005, I met another old Kumaoni in Sitla Khet, also in the interior of Kumaon. We were discussing what goes by in name of 'development'. He told me that a lot of money was coming to the district, and even down to the villages, but nothing significant was happening. In his own idiom, he described the phenomenon as "Upar ka hawa" or "the upper winds", a climate of undelivered rain, about which people on the ground knew but could do nothing. It was like weather watching. The making of the weather was in the hands of Sirkari gods.
What had changed in these fifty years, since the high hopes of the Nehruvian state of 1954, in the mind of one old Kumaoni's favourable impression of the British Raj, and another old Kumaoni's philosophical despairing description of the development ways of the Indian Raj fifty years later? What became of the ten Five Year Plans, of 'Garibi Hatao' (Removal of Poverty), of 'India Shining', and now back to political thoughts of the forgotten 'Aam Admi', or the common man? Behind the remarks of these two old, salt-of-the-earth Kumaonis, separated by half a century of hopes and expectations, lies the fate of the Nehruvian state. I pose the question of the failed Mahabharata in a metaphorical sense of an epic struggle to establish an All-India State with good governance after Independence.
Nehru was the foremost witness. He was a unique icon of his time, the darling of both the masses and the classes. He strode the Indian stage in an attractive trinity image, of a high class Kashmiri Brahman, Harrow and Cambridge educated, of a true non-feudal democrat, and of "the last British Viceroy of India" in his English 'avatar'! Yet this socialist planner, this liberal Indian, taller than most, this builder of "temples" of development, this patron of science, established the Nehruvian state in the shackles of the Control-Neta-Babu Raj, with inefficient hordes in the Centre and the States of a spastic bureaucracy, unable to deliver public services and justice to the people, and the high GDP which East Asian countries did after 1960. There is yet to be a good historical study after the icon has shed its halo, as to how far Nehru himself, his family successors, the Congress party, the political systems, the bureaucracy, and the people themselves were responsible; when, by 1975 democracy was derailed by the Emergency, and by 1991 the Nehruvian state went totally bankrupt, after eight Five Year Plans. It was reminiscent of the failure of that other socialist icon, Nyereri of Tanzania. In any social analysis, the reasons go beyond one man, in all fairness.
So, I begin with the commentaries on others within the Nehruvian state; then some anecdotal experience in the machine itself, to supplement the earlier chapters; followed by tentative probes into India's psycho-social roots; and finally, signs of "India Unbound" in the recent years, desperately struggling to emerge from the "India Bound", and asserting the rights of the Constitution given by the people of India in its Nehruvian infancy. Study the past, said Confucius, if you would divine the future. This is not meant to be a dirge, but a realistic, hard-headed appraisal.
As early as 1964, the culmination of what many believed were the halcyon days of Nehru, S. G. Barve, an early example of a civil servant turned politician, found four major malaise in the political-administrative system. First, he found a crippling lack of coherence and incapacity to govern. Each ministry or department was the fief of political and administrative heads, "working at cross purposes with migratory effect". He found a "diffusion of responsibility and a plethora of consultation before a decision is reached, accompanied by a general lack of follow-up and implementation”. Since then, the monster of government has grown four-fold consuming nearly all the revenues, with the development expenditures coming from unsustainable borrowings. The Fifth Pay (Prey) Commission gave unprecedented largesse, but asked for thirty percent abolition of class III & IV unproductive posts. They are over ninety percent of the beneficiaries, and they remain, despite the Fifth Pay Commission.
Under the strong leadership of Margaret Thatcher from whom Mrs. G could have learnt, British bureaucrats were reduced from seven hundred fifty one thousand in 1976 to four hundred sixty thousand in 1999, with better and more efficient delivery of public services, and a greater personal accountability. Barve's second malaise was just that, the Indian government's "outstanding failure to locate definite responsibility". He concludes: "It was clearly due to want of will". Why this on-going lack of political will? How far is the Indian politics just a reflection of the Indian society?
Barve's third malaise – long before bankruptcy in 1991 – was the virtual lack of financial control or responsibility. This was confirmed by HVR Iyengar, one of the earliest I.C.S. satraps of independent India, when he confirmed that "forty percent of Indian expenditures went down the drain". Barve spoke of officers not being "servants of the law", but of "the whims and fancies, and interests of individuals"; the root rot in what was meant to be public service. He found, even then "the structure erodes, until it rots through and through". In the Congress party, of which he was a minister, he found "strife, indiscipline, self-seeking and opportunism".
After Nehru's "temples", Indira Gandhi rode to power with the great message "Garibi Hatao", or remove poverty. With her authoritarian style, with and without the Emergency, she destroyed both the Indian democracy and the limbs of the state, in a healthy, democratic legislature, a fair and impartial bureaucracy functioning in the public interest, a fearless independent judiciary. Between the making of the Constitution in 1951 and 1979, the basic democratic right to property was totally subordinated to the state, in the vague and specious "public interest", a partial reversion to the Mughal/Caliphate times. She undermined all these with a fear psychosis and a blatantly personal government. She sought to bend all to her imperious will.
Through her shallow populist politics, she steadily crippled the economy in its critical middle phase; losing the momentum of the earlier Green Revolution, curbing industrial growth, nationalizing and exploiting the banking sector, doing no good in the nationalized coal sector, ignoring India's opportunities in international trade, investments, technologies and energy potentials, when the international markets were buoyant between 1968 and 1983. So, India sadly missed the bus, which her Asian neighbors took to modernize and internationalize; for example, China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia. They are now streets ahead of it. Indira left over forty percent of India below the poverty line, despite "Garibi Hatao". By the World Bank standards of thirty dollars per month, the poor were fifty five percent, when China's were only twenty percent, and even Sub-Saharan Africa's forty seven percent. She failed in her war on poverty, by waging political war against Indian enterprise for her political ends. She paved the way for India's economic decline for the next twenty years till bankruptcy. The same enterprise flowered after 1991. The truth behind her populist politics may be summed up by a simple remark of a very senior Congressman, a Chief Minister of U.P: "Dikhane ke liye karna parta"! It was a charade on the nation. She made India an economic spastic, which the UNICEF defined as "an intelligent mind imprisoned in an unwilling body".
So, the seeds of the rot in the Nehruvian state were sown in Nehru's time. They seemed deep in Indian psyche and culture, an atavistic virus mocking at the presumed self-righteous trinity of socialism, secularism, and development – the three pillars of the Nehruvian state. It was the latest chapter in the epic of failed Mahabharatas in the long making and unmaking of the state in India; in which India knew good central governance for only five out of twenty-five centuries, three of which were by foreigners, the Mughals and the British. India, in between, only knew the rise and fall of hundreds of regional and local states with little stability and periodic disorder.
In June 1991, after a lunch meeting of Delhi intellectuals, I heard the Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha say, "The treasury is empty. I am hanging by a thread, and waiting for the next government to take over". That seemed to sound like the death-knell of the Nehruvian state. After his talk, I asked the Finance Minister, one of the rising breed of bureaucrats entering politics, why there seemed to be no financial discipline or control in India anywhere. There were institutions such as the Finance departments and the Central Finance Ministry; there was the RBI and CAG; each Central ministry had a Financial Controller; then there was the Parliament and the Legislatures with accountability committees. Yet, there was widespread financial indiscipline, cost-overruns, deficit financing and increasing borrowings, no financial management three decades after HVR Iyengar's forty percent wastage "down the drain". Why? Mr. Yashwant Sinha in that confidential group gave me the kind of rare frank answer I got decades ago from Chief Minister H. N. Bahuguna. He said in despair, "Politicians don't care about finance". Did the bureaucrats? Did the electorate? Here was a frank, informal admission of one of India's Achilles' heels in statehood and development management. In 2000 I made a presentation to the Planning Commission on India's economic hemorrhage of about rupees five hundred thousand crores from their own figures. Like the Pandavas, the socialist state gambled away huge public resources. India's exchequer is India's modern Draupadi.
I was able to make my presentation in 2000 because I had long known Mr. K. C. Pant, the Vice-Chairman of the Planning Commission. I began by saying in all modesty, that I had come to do so from the village of Bhimtal, with no computers, no research body, but with published figures. Apart from listing the details of India's massive economic hemorrhage of rupees five thousand crores (larger than the Central Government's Revenue budget earlier), I produced a comparative table of India's and China's performances. Half way through it, I was cut short by Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a Member of the Commission and one of India's economic commissars then and since, to say they knew the figures. I was provoked to reply, "I am sure you do. But the problem is what you have done about it!" Silence was the response in that large room. I added that in the future India must, in competition and in cooperation, register its performances with China. Six years later, after Tatas took over Corus Steel in a moment of national pride, to become the fifth largest steel maker in the world, Ratan Tata disclosed that he "wanted to understand the difference between China and India”. After a commissioned study, what "hit him in the face" was that "China set itself big goals, and then pursued them come what may....That got us thinking. Be bold in setting your goals and do not be afraid of taking risks”. I recalled the exemplary Jamshedji Tata, similarly pioneering India's steel industry a century ago, despite British ridicule and discouragement. His big spirit had a big mind which set big goals for Ratan Tata to follow. What happened to Nehru's big goals for India's development, both before and after the bankruptcy of 1991, and the limping liberalization since?
In the fifty years of a modest working life, if I have learnt one basic reason for organizational failures – the state, the corporate or any other – it is the arrogance of people at the top. No management or executive school in the world from Harvard to IIM Ahmedabad teaches that. Despite vast differences, both Jawaharlal and Indira Nehru shared this basic defect. Both were bad listeners, as JRD Tata and others had found. It was said that at Bandung, Chou en Lei thought Nehru the most arrogant man he had met. Bad listeners produce mindless, subservient subordinates. Between the adoration for Nehru and the fear of Indira, sound objective national advice was largely absent, whether in India's internal politics and development, or in its inane Non-Alignment foreign policy. This is the Achilles heel of all such leaders. So they blunder with arrogant minds and no ears.
In his budget speech of 2005, the later Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram drew the Parliament's and India's attention to this parasitic trait of Indian governments; a keen political desire for ever increasing financial outlays, and no concern for outcomes; a nation of wasteful spendthrifts of huge sums of public money. The public resources of a poor country, part of it with sub-Saharan standards of the Human Development Index, seemed fair game for all, the politician, the bureaucrat, the technocrat, the contractor, and even those in the departments of Science, Education and Health; top to bottom of the pyramid, beneath which lay the bankrupt Indian state in 1991. Was this the "tryst with destiny" of the Nehruvian state at that midnight hour of new hope of the 15th August, 1947?
A little later, on my return to Bombay, I was asked to address the Management Council of senior businessmen and professional managers on the Liberalized policies of Dr. Man Mohan Singh. To them it seemed like a new hour of hope, the end of the Control and Inspector Raj of the past. (Fifteen years later, at an IT awards function 2006, Dr. Man Mohan Singh was still hoping for an end to the Inspector Raj in future.) I was compelled to bring some reality into those hopes. First, I reminded my friends that the Liberalization decision taken by the new Narasimha Rao Congress government was a decision taken under the compulsion of bankruptcy. It was not a decision taken out of political conviction. And that, the 'Controls' behavior of the ‘Sirkar’ was deep-rooted, not only in the Nehruvian socialist planning ideology, but also in the inherited war-time controls of the British, and our past feudal history, and even in Kautilya's Arthashastra written twenty-four centuries ago.
My view then was confirmed by Mr. P Chidambaram, the Finance Minister, in his address to the Stanford University on October 24, 2006, when he said: "It seemed that the driver of the change was the crisis faced by the economy, and not the conviction that fundamental change was imperative to prevent an economic collapse". He referred to the "earlier dirigiste regime".
If they cared to read Kautilya's Arthashastra – India’s Machiavelli – they would find strong resemblances in the detailed state controls in the Mauryan state over two millennia ago. Indians love power and authority more than anything else, this side of Moksha or Salvation. The last stage of Sanyas or Vanvasa, a spiritual retirement to the forest and the Vedas came only after the life of materialism and power of the householder. Even that tradition has gone in the political system. So, I said, let us not suffer from the temporary illusions of freedom from state shackles. The Politician and the bureaucrat will fight a long rear-guard action to regain and retain power. That has been the experience of the Indian people in the next fifteen years of limping Liberalization, and repeated reservations of the control regime in telecommunications, in the 'Open Skies' aviation policy, in pricing autonomy in the oil sector, and, recently in the Right to Information Act.
Another anecdote of that time: I was long retired, but I had known Dr. Man Mohan Singh off and on since the 1960's. So I called on him in 1992, partly to congratulate him on initiating Indian Liberalization policies, but partly to caution him against failure due to a failure of public communications. In his speeches, he referred to Liberalization as "Restructuring", a safe, non-political term. But it meant nothing. The core message of Liberalization for a new freed enterprising, growing India was not clearly conveyed to the Cabinet, his own Congress party, the Parliament, or to the Indian public opinion. Liberalization seemed an inevitable decision, which politics brought in quietly by the compulsions of bankruptcy through the Kitchen door. It was hard to face the political and economic ideological failure of the Control Raj of the Nehruvian state, and the huge stakes of the gargantuan political and bureaucratic system in it.
Another interesting insight on liberalization by compulsion and political contrivance, not conviction, was revealed by Finance Minister, P Chidambaram at the Economic Times function in 2006, commemorating fifteen years of Liberalization. He revealed that "there was a massive protest from the Congress old guards in the cabinet" to the new liberalized industrial policy in 1991. When the Finance Minister, Man Mohan Singh moved the resolution, they wanted it to reflect, both continuity and change, and the Prime Minister Narasimha Rao asked Chidambaram to re-write the resolution. The first paragraph of the re-writing was the contribution of Pandit Nehru to the industrial policy. The second was the contribution of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, despite the drop in the GDP from 4.5 per cent per annum earlier, to below 4 per cent, with two years of only 2.3 per cent per annum between 1968 and 1977. The third paragraph was the contribution of Rajiv Gandhi. The old guard was placated! We find it hard to face our failures, even when the facts make them clear. One wonders if continuity meant cover-up.
Even after 1991, the political force behind Liberalization was not sustained. In 1991 GDP fell to 1.3 per cent. In the first post-Liberalization phase till 1996-97, it rose from 5.1 per cent to 7.8 per cent per annum; then dropped again to 5 per cent between 1997 and 2003; when the political system reverted to type in the basic infra-structure, in telecommunications, in the 'Open Skies' aviation policy, not to speak of the critical lag in low investments in Agriculture, Health, and Education. But the consumption of the central and the state governments, the political bureaucratic appetite, rose to deficits of 10 per cent, and there was a Pay Commission to feed it, with no responsible financial discipline. The political system is India's weakest line of defense in economic development, and in internal and external security. It has in it, the making of past Panipats. India has been saved by its enterprise and its people.
In the Nehruvian socialist state, the productivity of capital, labor and technology was the forgotten factor. Total Factor productivity dropped to 0.1 per cent per annum in 1965-80. After Liberalization it increased to 3.6 per cent in 1991-93. It is now 2.5 per cent. The state was highly inefficient. The peoples' enterprise, and compelled relaxation of state controls yielded far higher productivity, a doubling of GDP growth, lowering of poverty and higher international competitiveness. Over the ten Five-Year Plans, the missing core in India's development has been Total Factor Productivity (TFP), with poor discipline in capital management and very poor investment in human capital. It is at the root of China's superiority over India. India has some of the world's lowest farm yields, and the highest cost power in the world. Its TFP in farming has actually fallen since 1993. In the worst days of the Control Raj, pre-1980, TFP growth was only 0.2% a year. Even after Liberalization, since 1993 China's TFP has grown by an annual average of 6.2%, compared with India's 1.1%. Why, even after Liberalization have Indian Finance Ministers, its Planning Commissions, its public and private sector managements, and especially its Agriculture ministers and planners placed no importance on the critical TPF for fifty years? It is developing India's cardinal sin: More so of its great economic pandits.
To be fair to some of the best and the most honest minds in the Government, there was an appreciation, at least at the head of the Planning Commission, two decades before Liberalization; that the increasing load and complexity of economic decision-making was foreign to nearly all bureaucrats (I myself was personally pleading with senior officers in the Finance Ministry in the 1970's to open Indian industry to local and global competition and to minimize the Control Raj. They could only listen in silence then). Something had to be done. So, I found myself invited, as an ex-bureaucrat-turned-company-Director, on an informal committee under the then Vice-Chairman, to plan a training course on "Economic Decision-Making" for officers up to the rank of the Joint-Secretary. No fundamental questions were raised as to why the economic planning of the Nehruvian Control regime was failing even after twenty years of planning: Governments in India never took professional training, management development, and succession-building seriously. And decision-making was never examined seriously. It was intended that the Course would be held at the Mussourie located All-India Services Academy. The head of the faculty would be a senior member of the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, a person later to become a member of the pathetic Monopolies Commission, largely non-functional in the later years.
After the third meeting at the planning Commission, this Faculty Head confessed to me that he was lost in framing the programme for the course, after the divergent views rained on him by the Vice-Chairman and other senior bureaucrats. I told him that I was not surprised, as each of them gave ad hoc outdated views of what they had earlier imagined as economic decision-making. "What was good enough for us, must be good enough" for the younger generation, seemed to be the spirit of their views. For example, the Vice-Chairman of the Planning Commission, one of the last ICS, nebulously thought they ought to be taught "something about Cooperatives", as he had earlier served in that area. He failed to see that those politicized Cooperatives, especially of the Sugar Barons and the Loan Thugs, once one of the great white hopes of the Nehruvian Redemption, would be a significant aspect of the economic failure of the Nehruvian state in development, contributing to India's later economic hemorrhage. Secretaries to Government were like Hindu deities, beyond professional training, beyond change, and increasing in numbers rivaling the plethora of the Hindu pantheon!
But the plum of that experience yet awaited us in Mussourie. The Course members had no interest at all in the economic decision-making. The long brewing civil war in the Government between the 'Generalists' and the 'Specialists' burst on us like a Monsoon storm even in Mussourie. The Course Director from IIPA was helpless. He asked for my views. Knowing well how deep this civil war was in the Indian governments, I suggested that we inform the visiting Cabinet Secretary, and ask him to take an open-house discussion on the problem after dinner. It was not just buck-passing. The Cabinet Secretary of the Government of India was meant to be the head of all government services. He too was one of the last of the Indian rump of the I.C.S. There could be no better authority to refer the problems of which he himself should have been well aware. The critical infrastructural problems of India – apart from Defense – lay in that failing zone, where the generalists and the specialists contended for sway, to the detriment of efficient results. It became India's major development handicap even after Liberalization, especially in contrast to Deng's China after 1980. Deng, like the later Vietnamese leaders, was able to overcome "the color" of the ideological cat, which still bugs Indian leadership including its Left, a decade and a half after Liberalization.
The Cabinet Secretary arrived and agreed to take the after-dinner sessions with no qualms, no apparent apprehensions, and disregarding the particular failure to discuss economic decision-making. The Generalist-Specialist civil war was played out again in front of the Cabinet Secretary for almost an hour, with no intervention by or contribution from him. It was like the cavalry and the infantry battling among them before a mute, helpless General. For me, this was one of the most pathetic moments I had experienced of the earlier "steel-frame" of India, and the later Redemption instrument of the ideological Nehruvian state, a paralytic aspect of the "Upar ka Hawa" of that old Kumaoni villager.
Apparently unable to respond to his officers, he turned to me and said, "You have been on both sides of the fence. Do you have this Generalist-Specialist problem in the industry?" I told him I was not aware of it as much a problem, as it was in Government. Then I explained that, (a) The Government and the Industry recruited their officers and managers from the same source, the best in the universities; (b) in the Government from day one fledgling officers assumed they were born Specialists and born Generalists (as in the caste system), when they were neither; (c) in the Industry, all managers were specialists in engineering, sales, accountancy, law etc. till they reached the first middle management rung of integrated management, e.g. the Factory Manager or the Branch Manager, when they began to outgrow single specializations; and (d) when they reached the Board level, they were both the Specialists and the Generalists in the top-level integrated management. Hence, there were no such civil or caste war problems. The Cabinet Secretary returned helpless.
If, at Independence, we took over the entire British colonial apparatus – a mere transfer of power, not a newly thought-out Swaraj – how could this poor Cabinet Secretary make such a fundamental change? So the two castes continued to war, at the expense of good governance, and the widespread failure of development delivery systems. Nor did they learn more about economic decision-making. In his memorial lecture on Nani Palkhivala, India's latest icon, Narayana Murthy, the founding father of INFOSYS, held that all development bureaucrats should be trained in Project Management with accountability; a very good idea even now.
In an article in Scientific American (August 2006), C. N. R. Rao, Chairman of the prime Minister’s Advisory Council, finds even now, four decades after that Generalist-Specialist war erupted - "bureaucracy today is unbearable - in the context of the decline in high quality research threatening to jeopardize India as a scientifically proficient nation". India contributes only three percent of world science, he reminds us, while China's figure is twelve percent. Generalists, he thinks, do not recognize "the special equipment of scientists and engineers" in a growing technological world. Indian governments ought to learn from the best in the corporate sector, Indian and global, if India is to be competitive and strong. And it must invest two to three per cent of the GDP in higher education and R and D with a better control over economic hemorrhage.
By this time in the 1970's, the quality of Government services was described by a good I.C.S officer, E. N. Mangat Rai in "Commitment My Style". He felt the "tradition of personal government was extremely strong". As I discovered in my early days in Madhubani, in India everybody had to be "somebody's man", a Kinsman or a patron's client. He found this personal rule from the Chief Minister downward. Decisions were taken by ishara (gesture), not by open, objective, rational considerations. So, "a policy paralysis afflicted the government”. Decisions circumambulated in the vast, slow wheels of the government. There was no clear responsibility for decision-making; an ambiguous consensus took ages to emerge; which consensus he described as "a glutinous mass of ill-shaped substance representing the many views, pressures, prejudices which contributed to its birth”. His final despair: "I wasted a great deal of decency on the government in endeavoring to get matters decided by data, reason, and argument, but it all got absorbed somewhere in the morass of prejudices and promptings that masqueraded as policy, till I discovered that the system had gone beyond any awareness of decency as I knew it as a professional". That was a rare honest reaction.
We will later come to the psycho-social reasons for this absence of clear responsibilities, rational decision making, and clear accountability; of weak subordination and the love of power, and a total lack of a sense of public interest. It goes back to childhood rearing. Due to a lack of personal responsibility, a later survey showed that sixty five Indians conveniently attributed failures to a nebulous "system", and not specific individuals; a passing of the buck to a vague outer world. In this survey of the global Indian generation, in which seventy percent was below thirty five years, sixty four percent was against corruption and eighty four percent against criminal members of legislatures; but thirty four percent was willing to bribe! Only eleven percent was in favor of Liberalization in government policies. All these indicated moral ambivalence, dependency and a lack of personal and public responsibility in most.
After all these past experiences, and after decades of failure in reforming government bureaucracy by political and bureaucratic leaders, as late as April 2006, PM Man Mohan Singh addresses the Civil Service Day function and at least recognizes, "We need a new public service, not of mere administrators but managers...You have to manage public services...Governments must develop the capability to work in a more open environment with more demanding standards of transparency and accountability”. Within months of the Prime Minister’s public plea, that bureaucracy tried to whittle down the Freedom of Information Act, and initiate another Pay Commission for higher emoluments. No stomach for reformed public services.
In our typical unhistorical mind-set, Indians have forgotten the failure of the Nehruvian state. "We want our heroes to be saints", wrote A.G. Noorani, in the context of Nehru. But after the failure of the Nehruvian state people are asking basic questions of that failure, as the reasons lay in the last decade of bad politicians. The questions themselves point to that widespread failure in a balance of historical reckoning. I list them below.
Why, with a multiplication of Police forces after 1950, as also Intelligence forces, has law and order worsened, with one hundred seventy districts under Maoist insurgency, and widespread alienation and conflict in the north-eastern States? Apart from nearly two decades of Terrorism in Kashmir.
Why have the Police – Judicial system yielded only an average of six per cent convictions (seventy percent in western democracies) after charge-sheets, with widespread corruption and criminalization of the political class itself, the body of the Nehruvian state? Why has the judicial system failed to give justice, with millions of pending cases, and the lack of judicial verdicts for ten to twenty years? Why this massive denial of justice?
Then the Rajiv Gandhi syndrome of the failures of even development services in irrigation, extended to the researched dissatisfaction of the people of India with eighty five percent of all public utilities, apart from mass Sauda or corruption.” Why are three hundred million – about the same population as at the time of independence – below the poverty line even after ten Five-Year Plans?
Why in a planned economy with the basic objective of development among all political parties, have there been failures in the basics of Education, Health and Infra-structure? Why is there child labor, instead of Education? Why have government overheads consumption risen to rupees seventy thousand crores per annum when there seem grossly inadequate resources, hardly exceeding rupees ten thousand crores crores per annum for those basics of Health and Education? Why the lack of good financial management with huge deficits, cost overruns, huge borrowings, high bankruptcy in 1991? Instead of removing poverty, the Nehruvian State itself became bankrupt.
Why after five decades of reservations for the weaker sections, there have been no evaluations of results, benefits only to the "creamy layer", which still continues to be a burning issue?
Why have tens of millions, perhaps adding upto fifty million of the poorest people been inhumanly and arbitrarily displaced, uprooted from the slums in cities, dams, mines, farms, forests, now in SEZs; with no proper resettlement and compensation, with harsh bull-dozing of their hard-built shanties after years of occupation; when no such bull-dozing of the unauthorized construction of the rich, including the unauthorized farm houses of the elite in Delhi?
Why have the upper crust, the influential, government servants, and the members of legislatures in Delhi, the capital become the sink of chors, who regularly fail to pay public service dues for power, water, telephones and rent? Why have the political parties not been made accountable under the Tax and Election laws when small tax-payers do not even get their due refunds? The powerful in the Sirkar and the Legislatures think they have inherited the ancient Raja's right to dip into the public exchequer in a constitutional democracy. And then be saved from prosecution under Section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code, for which government's permission is necessary, but never given in the upper layers of politicians and bureaucrats.
Lastly, why have millions of Indians done so well in other states abroad, but have failed in their own country's Nehruvian state?
These unanswered, unresolved questions themselves indicate the fate of the Nehruvian socialist State at home; apart from the widespread foreign affairs failures flowing from Nehru's ineffectual foreign policies. The failure of the Nehruvian State has yet to meet its objective historian. Contemporary discussions of such questions end in limited ad hoc answers and continuing dissatisfactions. For me there have been three basic reasons in a very complex situation of a sub continent of hundreds of millions.
The first is that those demanding Swaraj and the Constitution-makers between 1929 and 1950 did not do their historical homework and ask themselves what were the lessons of 'Swaraj' pre-Mahmud Ghazni and pre-Clive, both positive and negative? If they had they would have had found that Indians in past history could not give themselves good centralized government for more than five out of twenty-five centuries of recorded history; and three of the five were by foreigners, the Mughals and the British. In most centuries, there were hundreds of small kingdoms and principalities, with weak governance and of short duration. By and large, Indians were not good in governing themselves in large states. The best governance was the customary governance of natural resources like water, forests, pastures, and social customs at the village level, and these were durable till the centralizing took over in the nineteenth century. Swaraj seekers were blind to this.
The second reason was that the so-called Independence was a mere "transfer of power" from a few thousand white colonial hands to a few million brown hands, content to govern with the same colonial laws, regulations, administration, police, and political set up of the colonizers. That also went with a reversion to the traditional zamindar, Jajman, feudal culture of the past. India imagined it was free. It was subservient to two retrogressive pasts, the colonial and the pre-colonial. How could a Westminster model Constitution reconcile these deep historical differences? In politics, education, and infrastructure, at least the colonial brought India into the modern world, so behind that facade of a superficial modernity, between 1950 and 2000, India reverted to much of its feudal Jajmani past in the Nehruvian State, without a sizeable, educated industrial middle class, which is just emerging post 2000. The many anecdotal truths of the earlier chapters confirm this.
The third basic reason was Gandhiji's undemocratic "Himalayan blunder" of making an impractical, idealist Nehru his heir. This westernized darling of the masses was no George Washington, no Kemal Ataturk, and no Nelson Mandela. In his Discovery of India, an autographed copy of which he gave me, I found that Nehru never discovered India beyond a mushy appreciation of its past culture. He failed to see that in past centuries, from the Cholas to the Mughals, Indians were among the best traders and businessmen in the world, needing no "pink socialism" from the London School of Economics, as is now being realized post 1991. His historical model from Indian history was Ashoka, after whom the Mauryan Empire vanished from the pages of history. The best model would have been Akbar, a strong liberal, power-sharing ruler, the real maker of Mughal India, when India acquired twenty percent of the world's trade and was a super power. Nehru was totally unaware of geo-politics or military strategy or international industry and trade. In the foreign and the Kashmir policy he was a wishful disaster, leaving a legacy of internal and external problems. But, as the darling of the masses and the classes, like Mandela, he could hold the diverse people of India together in the early hopeful days. He should have been India's first President. A good man, but not good enough for the challenge of India. Nor was he a good team and succession builder. He set the tradition for the lack of objective accountability with Krishna Menon, and other favorites. He failed to heed the realist, Sardar Patel on China as early as 1950. He lost one of his ablest colleagues, C Rajagopalachari, far wiser than him. The Kashmir problem suffered a decade of continuous bungling, India's longest liability. His ignorance of the real politic and military affairs gave India its saddest hour in the debacle in NEFA in 1962, a "Himalayan Blunder."
The Nehruvian State: Another Failed Mahabharata?
Part II
The question at the heart of this chapter, and one of the questions at the heart of this book is, what was at the heart of the apparent failure of the Nehruvian state by 1991? Especially when the world's largest gold-loving people had to sell its gold reserves. And, the other question is of course, how to compress the gist of the answers in a few pages, in probing the psycho-social space of a large and diverse people. It is unfair and unrealistic to put all responsibility on one man. A democratic nation has its responsibilities too.
Any state needs to be judged on its performance on Law, Accountability and Politics. At a seminar in Mangalore in 2005, I was fortunate to hear a most excellent, fair and factual delivery on this subject by S. P. Sathe, an excellent constitutional lawyer from Pune. He is my witness in this complex area. I can only sum up the main highlights of his presentation. It is a commentary on C. Rajagopalachari’s earlier prescient remark that the worth of a Constitution lies in the people who run it.
Sathe first defined "Accountability" as a moral concept, and "a method of sustaining legitimacy". Even when laws and ordinances may be passed by opportunist politicians, they may lack legitimacy in the eyes of the people: "The Constitution is sustained not only by law, but by morality".
Sathe describes political defections of opportunist politicians as "a peculiar Indian phenomenon", not witnessed in mature democracies. This phenomenon is known as "Aayaram Gayaram", when the legislatures are on sale for office. Speakers of legislatures have found it hard to decide issues of disqualification under the Anti-Defection Law, and on the issue of "offices of profit". The Supreme Court has held that the Speaker's decision on grounds of defections is subject to judicial review. To put a limit on political greed, a constitution amendment has now imposed a ceiling on the size of the cabinet and fifteen per cent of the total membership of the house. Issues of venality of legislatures cover a wide area besides ‘ministerships’ and offices of profit. They are grants of petrol pumps, for questions in the legislature, and even human traffic overseas for mythical jobs on false passports; to list a few. In the U.K a disgraced Profumo never came back. In India, the Antuleys and many such manage to return.
Sathe emphasizes "Empowering Civil Society", "in the shift from charismatic leadership to a performing leadership” with accountability. The empowerment of civil society largely rests with the Right To Information, which is now enacted. But, the politicians of all political parties have brazenly fought a long rear-guard action – as also bureaucrats – even with the electorate's Right to Information of candidates before elections. He conveys that in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, the numbers of MP's with criminal records ranged from ten percent to fifty six percent in different parties. The declared wealth of such candidates ranged from rupees one crore to rupees hundred crores. In a country where the Poverty Line is shamelessly low, below rupees three hundred fifty per month, or rupees forty two hundred per year, for about two hundred fifty million poor people, the poverty line of their political representatives exceed rupees hundred lakhs, and is fast rising each year. What more factual commentary on Nehruvian socialism? These politicians have also created a social future of non-payment for public services of telephones, rent, electricity etc, for which Sathe finds half the MPs’ outstandings are in excess of rupees ten lakhs, in a total amounting to a hefty rupees four hundred thirteen crores. If the state legislatures were included, that figure would be multiplied. All parties have candidates with criminal records, which range from ten percent to forty six percent in Sathe's paper; the highest being among the regional parties, which are now the kings and the king-makers, after the decline of the Congress. Sathe reminds us of "the convergence between money power and criminality". As for their behavior in the legislatures, Indian politicians have been the favorite subject of cartoons – a public joke with serious public consequences.
Sathe also refers to the lack of accountability of the public servants, the worst being the Police, who "are not only politicized but also communalized"; and the public would add, dehumanized in the flagrant use of weapons against innocent people, the treatment of under-trial prisoners, and the convicted. Sathe draws particular attention to the brutal massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, the post-Babri Masjid carnage in Mumbai in 1993, and the Godhra genocide in Gujarat in 2001-02; not to forget the Bhagalpur blinding.
In the context of "Information is Power" in a democracy, S. P. Sathe shows a long history of official and political repression of information, from the colonial Official Secrets Act, 1923, to the recent struggles by citizens under the Right to Information Act, all militating against the fundamental right to information under the Constitution, with "stiff resistance of Netas and Babus in the establishment". Although, the National Human Rights Commission, the Electoral Commission, and the Supreme and the High Courts have been saviors of the Constitution and the people, "the system of justice is collapsing. The Law of Liability in India is in a very bad state". Finally, "Good governance is required more by the poor than by the rich", the final test of constitutional democracy.
Later the Indian Punjab officals showed similar traits in the blatant misuse of public funds through the Sukhmani Societies in the districts. In this brazen, illegal “facilitation charges” were levied for a wide range of public services already paid with public money from the public exchequer; charges on registration of births and deaths, marriages, vehicles, driving licenses, ration cards, arms licenses, etc. The funds were then misused by deputy commissioners and even sessions judges to pay for electricity bills, renovate their offices, acquire computers, phones, furniture, TV sets, mobile phones; and even giving themselves “interest free loans”. In addition, they misappropriated Indian Red Cross Funds. How such a blatant, illegal public counter system could last for years before press revelation, - “so far no action” under the very noses of the political, civil service, and judicial heads of the state only reveals the ingrained “batwara of loot” of the Indian ruling classes. And a far cry from the District Officers of the British colonial raj from which the Indian people were “liberated’!
As may be seen in preceding pages, Indian governance and democracy have suffered from reversions to past Jajmani (patron-client relationships), Sauda, Caste, communal divisiveness, arbitrary authority, in the context of a weak civic sense. Before and after Nehru's famous "midnight hour tryst with destiny" on 15 August, 1947, Indian leaders and the intelligentsia failed to learn from the Indian history. Like Nehru, most were wishful dreamers. In the partitioned part of old India, in Pakistan, there was a reversion to military Tughlaqs. In a state claiming Pak – purity in Islam – the Pakistan military springing from three Punjab districts has acquired private assets worth ten billion dollars, by trade in about a third of the economy in thousands of companies, with the Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust as business conglomerates. When will the sub-continent learn from its history (Military Inc. and Asha Siddiya, Pluto Press)?
Sathe did not touch two adverse fundamentals of the Nehruvian state undermining its self-made Constitution, and its Gandhian plea for the poor rural masses. Barely had the Constitution been framed under Nehru, when its subversion began with the passing of the first amendment (Articles 31A and 31 B), the origins of the Ninth Schedule for the state to acquire landed property in the name of development This led to the cruel dispossession, without proper compensation, and the inhuman displacement of innocent tribals and poor farmers for the later controversial dam sites; and has now ended in social conflicts with local people in the SEZ's Singur and Nandigram. In 1975-76, it was used by Mrs. Gandhi's notorious Emergency to bring in more amendments, even to support sugarcane prices! Only in 2007, after decades of political abuse of the Constitution by the escapist political route of the Ninth Schedule, did the Supreme Court say that the law placed under the Ninth Schedule after April 24, 1973 can be open to challenge in Courts, if it violated the fundamental rights under Articles 14, 19 to 21, of the Constitution. The fact that for thirty-four years after 1973, the people of India suffered political erosion of their fundamental rights is a commentary on Indian society's fundamental belief in those fundamental rights. The Constitution needs to be backed by public conscience and strong civic actions.
Similarly, the Gandhian concern for the poor rural masses has ended in the tragedy of suicides by thousands of poor farmers. Through the dubious statistics of the Commission for Agriculture Costs and Prices, the inefficient, the wasteful Food Corporation of India etc, agricultural prices have been deliberately kept low in a kind of mild Stalinist regime, in addition to the government's failure through many Five-Year Plans to raise Indian agricultural productivity. Politicians have fattened on cotton and sugar controls, and neglected the poor man's diet of oilseeds, millets, pulses, and coarse grains. The Essential Commodities Act was a venal farce: "dikhane ke liye", as the Chief Minister, H. Bahuguna had inadvertently revealed. Hopefully, the IT age and the growth of agri-business will change this tragic Nehruvian legacy.
Modern scholars of societies and civilizations say that culture is basic, so a brief probe into the psycho-social roots; again, not easy, and very controversial in a plural, complex, changing society as the twentieth century India. But it would be a useful insight to understand some of the ‘whys’ of Indian behavior. To start with, why do millions of Indians perform well, better than the locals abroad, when they perform so badly in India? What is there in the Indian history, ethos and psyche to account for this? For years I have tried to understand this, since my first book, The Brahmanical Culture and Modernity. Indians in India still seem to live in a past 'India Bound'. They do well when others run the state, from Seattle to Singapore.
The first insights came from P. Spratt's, Hindu Culture and Personality (1967). Spratt came to India to put some international fire in Mahatma Gandhi's freedom struggle. He lived on here, ended up with the ‘Swatantra’ party leader, C. Rajagopalachari, and then quietly wrote this revealing book. It is strange how, whenever something new has to be rediscovered about India, it is done by foreigners, beginning with Sir William Jones, the first Orientalist in the 1770's, down to Verrier Elwin's discovery of the beauty of our tribals and their poetry (while we treated them sub-human), to Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus, on the caste system, to Milton Singer's When A Great Tradition Modernizes – an understanding of how Tamil society has modernized blending the traditional and the modern. Not to forget the delightful understanding of Hindu culture in, The Speaking Tree by Richard Lannoy.
Unfortunately, for India that critical year, 1946-47 saw the meeting of two mutually admiring super narcissists, Nehru and Mountbatten. In his precipitate zeal to cut a fine figure and run with success, Mountbatten precipitated the Partition tragedy and the post-Partition slaughter of millions, for which Nehru rewarded him with the first Governor-Generalship of India. Thereafter, both stymied India's near successful throwing out of insurgents from Kashmir, the useless reference to the UN, and the subsequent problems of the LOC. In the next decade under Nehru, began a series of unprincipled, corrupt policies in J&K, after imprisoning his closest secular ally, Sheikh Abdullah. That valuable decade has cost India fifty years of its most acute Indo-Pak problem, and its democratic credibility with clean governance, especially after Nehru lost the last opportunity of a settlement with Ayub Khan, only because he looked down the bridge of his arrogant nose at generals, both Pakistani and Indian; leading also to the military calamity in NEFA in 1962. In his China policy, there was the same narcissist trait of insisting that there was no border problem, when he accepted the un-demarcated British borders, and failed to understand the Chinese mind of 'Celestial empire', with no socialist "bhai bhai".
To revert to Spratt, he explained this at its roots as "a different unconscious conviction of omniscience, the feeling that we knew it all before, which comes in the way of fresh searching". It was all there before in the ancient scripture and Knowledge. He explains this as a fundamentally Narcissist trait in the Freudian sense. All societies have narcissists, but for him, the Hindu society had this trait strongly in its cultural ethos, especially in such practices as Yoga and Samadhi, in which the outer world almost vanishes, and the psyche is turned exclusively inward. The dictum, “Tat tsam Asi” of Upanishadic philosophy ("I am that'') is the ultimate Super Ego of the know All. Hence, perhaps, a weak rational questioning and the absence of a strong objective learning process in child and adult.
Spratt points to ''the Olympian impartiality of the Narcissist psyche and the tortoise-like self-isolation seem to show themselves in this indecisiveness and unwillingness to enter into an alliance”; an insightful comment on the Jagatguru posture of the Non-Alignment; hardly noticing the roaring arrival of the Soviet tanks in Hungary and the Soviet army's invasion of Afghanistan, the beginnings of Terror in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, besides the congenital failure of the Congress Party, either to share power with the Muslim League in 1936-37, or to come to terms with the League and the British Government by 1942. The Last failure to precipitate power with the Muslim League was at the time of the Cripps Mission, 1946; all precipitating the catastrophic Partition of India, with the subsequent tragic fall-out for hundreds of millions.
My earlier anecdotes of bureaucrats of the Nehruvian state are conjured up by Spratt in grandiose psychological terms: "He feels himself to be universally benevolent, endowed with omniscience and omni-competence, sitting at the controls of society, wiping the tears from every eye and steering the state to utopia. Bureaucracy expresses the non-aggressive superiority feeling of the Narcissist, and the desire to exercise unostentatious power”. In my limited, but practical experience I would omit "wiping tears", "non-aggressive" and "unostentatious", as experienced in earlier and subsequent years. No tears were shed over eighty five percent "systematic failures" of Rajiv Gandhi and Man Mohan Singh. Ask any one of the thousands of victims of the Police deaths in custody, or in 'encounters', about "non-aggression". And the "un-ostentatious power" has been blatantly discarded as Gandhi's khadi was. That basically Narcissist attitude was observed by an objective Muslim scholar, AI-beruni a thousand years ago, when we gave him the impression that there was no country like our's, no religion like our's, no part of the earth's surface like our's. All reflected again in the closed Swadeshi minds of the first eight Five-Year Plans, with "omniscience and omni-competence sitting at the controls of society".
So such Narcissists in power find it hard to face or consider objective criticism or accountability, much less question themselves. When such arise only after public demand, as in Commissions looking into failures of administrative performance or corruption, they are delayed, shelved, forgotten. Accountability for the outcomes comes hard to a narcissist, deliberately inheriting the colonial law, the administrative systems, the Official Secrets Act, and a still feudal Sirkari ethos, in a mere transfer of colonial power from the British to the Indian hands. The only difference is in the color of the hands! And the Indian public is just beginning to mature in its limited modernizing educated classes in getting accountability through Public Interest Litigation from an over-burdened judiciary, and a starting struggle for the Right to Information.
Sudhir Kakkar also offers revealing indigenous insights into Indian accountability and Indian values in a modern world. He conveys that the traditional Indian child is brought up in a pristine, non-judgmental, valueless world in the first seven years, with complete indulgence. He quotes a North Indian proverb, "Treat a child like a raja for the first five years, like a slave for the next ten, and like a friend thereafter"; a disjointed, impossible combination. This implies no discipline or values of good and bad, right or wrong in the first five formative years. He, especially the male child, has the indulgence and pampering of a raja, or a little King, while the girl child has work to perform, and is trained to be a good wife and a good mother, but a subordinate human being. Then the harsh transition from raja to an obedient, unquestioning slave, at a stage in life when questioning should be encouraged as a fundamental of education. As that sudden, immature transition from raja to slave in these growing years, five to fifteen, is psychologically hard, Kakkar refers to "the consequences of the 'second birth' in the identity development of Indian men: a heightened narcissist vulnerability, an unconscious tendency to submit to an idealized omnipotent figure, both in the inner world of fancy (a film star ?), and in the outside world of making "a living", an executive, a neta, a boss figure, even a criminal one; hence, a "narcissist injury to the grandiose, self-generating narcissist personality disturbances....c1amour for attention, exhibitionism, hypochondria, or in an extreme of psychosis, a cold paranoid grandiosity".
These characteristics, Sudhir Kakkar says, "are projected back into the culture's institutions and social forms, and thereby perpetrated from generation to generation". Hence, there are unrealized ideals from generation to generation, from Vivekananda's rational, scientific, strong India to Gandhi's non-violent India, to Nehru's socialism, secularism, and "temples" of development. Yet all these "unrealized ideals" come crashing down in the Chinese invasion in 1962, in Mrs. G's "Emergency", in the mounting and unaccountable Sauda Raj and an earlier Hindu rate of growth of only three percent per annum, with India, in one of the lowest international positions in the Human Development Index and one of the highest in the Transparency Index of corruption; and, finally, in the crashing bankruptcy of the Planned Socialist State in 1991; as well as the secular state between Amritsar, the Bombay blasts, terror in J & K, and in Gujarat's communal frenzy.
In the Gandhian-Ashokan aura of the Nehruvian state, it unctuously gave itself the motto: ‘Satya meva jayate’ or truth alone triumphs. Even Gandhi only experimented with Truth, not knowing if it would prevail. Yet, in his "Inner World", Sudhir Kakkar painfully reminds us from that indulgent traditional upbringing of the Indian child, the father of the Indian man: "Dishonesty, nepotism, corruption, as understood in the West are merely abstract concepts...The Indian psycho-social experience, from childhood on, nurtures one standard of responsible action, the individual's obligation to his Kith and Kin”. There is no guilt "when foreign ethical standards of justice and efficiency are breached". So, how do we achieve global standards of national unity, high democratic and civic values, and higher standards of public accountability for a richer life, without those ethical standards required of modern institutions beyond family, tribe and caste, in an amoral relationship?
While I would give Nehru full marks for one most significant political decision, the Universal Adult Franchise, the Nehruvian state largely failed on two of its primary ostensible objectives: first, development, poverty, and unemployment; second, human rights. We have already seen that in the development delivery systems in health, education and infrastructure, the state was a failed spastic. In the spate of literature on Indian development, the prolonged failures on the Capital expenditures front have been largely ignored. While the Indian state has, over long years, far exceeded the budget Revenue expenditures and unsustainable borrowings, it has failed to meet its budgeted Capital expenditures by over twenty percent, in some cases over forty percent, in the Centre and the States. Why? The answer is simple – because consumption comes easy. Capital investment requires hard, prudent work in sound, prudent investments, project planning and execution, and good managerial capability. Even such Capital investments as have taken place have been high cost with, regular huge capital over-runs and no accountability, political over-employment (twenty five percent in the Railways), non-payment in power and water, and a failure to deliver farmers irrigation water to the extent of eighty five percent, and callous failures at public counters. We want foreign investments. We fail to invest prudently with our own resources.
So, the Nehruvian state had an elephantine appetite in consumption, but a criminal, failed record in capital building for the future development of the Indian people. The high-placed economists and planners of the Planning Commission made the first five Plans on the assumption of zero inflation, when the poor Indian people had to bear inflation rates from five percent to twenty percent, averaging about eight percent per annum, in the first thirty years of planning, in decades of garibi and mehngai, the thirty-year complaint by my poor barber in Bhimtal, and hundreds of millions like him. I used to tell friends in the Planning Commission to go home, and tell their wives that there would be zero inflation till the next five years, and learn some home truths at the housewives' level. And, the legislatures largely failed in this fundamental accountability, as in other ways. The Nehruvian state was a bad Grihast or householder.
Nehru's self-righteous expression of ''temples'' for big dams seemed to blind the state to the democratic and human rights of millions of poor people in its feudal, colonial mindset. Only after fifty years, the Right to Information Act is struggling to overcome the long, secretive, undemocratic ways of the colonial Official Secrets Act, which enabled it to cover up citizen's rights, huge wasteful public expenditures, corruption, and a near total lack of public accountability. After five decades of inhuman dispossession of the homes, lands and livelihood of millions of poor tribals and peasants under the colonial Land Acquisition Act, in the so-called "public interest" for the "temples" of dubious dams and loss-making PSUs, the poor peasants of Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal have resisted such repressive, inhuman expropriation with inadequate compensation, and virtually no resettlement. The people have had enough; they can take no more in the specious "public interest", treating tens of millions as almost Holocaust victims since 1955. The Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram has suddenly discovered that there is a "sacred link" between the people and their lands, after the state treated them as mere flotsam for fifty years, with token severance money, empty promises, and total disruption of generations of past lives. Nehru's "temples" of development seemed in later years to lack a "human face". And there have been no cost benefits of ''the public interest" acquisitions of the poor man's land. It now calls for a human face, fair reform, with clear public accountability of the "public interest".
Trying to understand the Indian working world, McCellan found that competition in a ‘Control’ economy was an anathema. It led to a "psychological withdrawal". No one asked for a competitive society in India. They all asked for quotas, subsidies, reservations, vested interests to be protected against competition. He also found, to his managerial surprise, that work was done not to get results or for higher productivity, but "it was a form of giving, of bestowing service" from a higher position. It was the Jajman tradition, the patron-client relationship. It manifested itself in the giving of jobs without performance or accountability, and in the case of the babus of all ranks, teachers, and legislative members, even non-attendance at work. The Indian state is probably the most over-manned and underperforming among the top hundred states of the world.
In an earlier chapter, I quoted a humorous poem from, a British bureaucrat in India, in the British days. I offer one of mine on the Indian Neta of Swaraj days below, adapted from one of Tagore's famous poems, which most Netas may well have missed. It could be on the tomb-stone of the planned, Neta-Babu Nehruvian State:
Where the mind is Sauda-obsessed,
And pockets are full;
Where power, water and telephones are free;
Where kursis are many, and
Party men have not broken into fragments
By in-fighting:
Where manifestos come out
From depths of incredibility;
Where tireless striving stretches its
Arms towards crores;
Where the clear stream of followers
Has not lost its way into the
Dreary desert of dissidence by dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by these
Into ever Widening power, theka, Sauda;
Into that heaven of Swaraj, my Father,
Let my country awake.
In the context of work and results, Peter Baur of the LSE, indignantly complained to me that, despite our civilization and culture, we Indians did not seem to know the relationship of cause and effect. When I asked him to explain, he said when traveling by rail, he found the air-conditioning in his compartment was not working. He complained. After some fiddling, the mechanic told him the machine was working. To which, hot and exasperated, he replied, "But damn it, I am not getting temperature!" No different at the highest levels, the machine of the government and planning has been so "working" for the past fifty years with no regard for outcomes. So that:
Eighty five percent of the people remain dissatisfied with public services, and only four percent of food grains reaches below poverty line households, thirty six percent is leaked, twenty two percent goes to the non-poor;
Poverty and malnutrition persist in about thirty percent of India, which makes about three hundred million people;
More children drop out than remain in schools, and the constitutional mandate for universal primary education in the first ten years has not been provided after fifty years of Swaraj.
As deplored by Bhaskar Ghosh, an ex-I.A.S. officer, "the rule of law has been destroyed systematically. The Police do not function; the courts are ineffective...and as a consequence poverty, disease, and economic collapse";
The government overheads with the Pay Commission’s largesse and threats of strike-amount to rupees seventy thousand crores, the total expenditures on Health and Education in human development hardly reach rupees ten thousand crores. Since 1994-95, the annual rise in the Consumer Price Index varied from ten percent to four percent, but Sirkari emoluments rose from 14.5 to 16.5% by 2002-03. The mounting greed of the ruling class is insensitive to the plight of the three hundred million unemployed and under-employed, and the poorest;
The public interest litigation compels the higher courts to ensure the normal functions of the decision-less Executive, from fair treatment of minorities, to reduced pollution by public transport with the use of the CNG in Delhi, to even the filling of potholes on the streets of Mumbai; it appears to be a spastic state in a restless, dissatisfied society.
There is a Hindu myth that Brahma sleeps while the universe is created. Brahma still sleeps in this nightmare of Indian governance. It has been said, "Everybody in India dances"; and makes others dance. This is a highly politicized Natraj (the dancing God of Government), one besotted with new power and possessions, torn between grandiose and greed.
The Nehruvian state began with the plausible "Panchsheel", the Five Principles. By 1991, it had seen Panch Bhool or five failures. They were:
The failure of Northern borders policy and the 1962 avoidable and shameful military defeat by China;
The failure of foreign policy abroad, especially in the buffer states around its boundaries, even in Hindu Nepal;
The failure of Democracy during the Emergency, in corrupt, criminal politics, and the Sauda state;
The failure of planned development against poverty, and,
The failure of its two principles – secularism and socialism.
Having looked within obsessively for over two millennia, we now need to look more mindfully at some of this flawed thinking of our real problems inherited from a long past, in an exploding atavistic India. First, we need to recognize a deep civilizational conflict in contemporary India between the distant philosophical concept of the universal in the higher Indian philosophical minds, and the dark political realities of so many broken sub-identities of caste, tribe, religion, and community, which limit our horizons and bedevil our minds, our politics, and our governance; now giving rise to a recurrence of widespread conflict and criminality in the body politic seen even before the British Raj. A complex of ambivalences, between Swadeshi and globalization also continue to bedevil us, with no c1ear strategic or development thinking. Perhaps, we assumed nationhood too glibly and too soon, underestimating the forces of our historical sub-nationalisms, now ravaging a billion people with opportunist politics and increasing criminal politicians.
As a consequence, instead of going forward with balanced coherence and strategic national objectives, we are still fighting our past Panipats: between Muslims and Hindus, since Mahmud Ghazni to Partition and Pakistan; since Manu, with the world's most embedded, inegalitarian, and mythologized caste system; with the sad alienation of the Sikhs with the central governments from the Mughals to Indira Gandhi and Amritsar (1984); with the alienation of our beautiful tribal people; the battle with Clive at Plassey, lingering as the wicked capitalist West. How can such a past-obsessed nation fight its present and future battles?
The second fallacy was to assume that the traditional Indian (Hindu) tolerance, based on the philosophical acceptance of all phenomena and legitimized dharmic order, would continue, when that dharmic mantle blew away so fast in the materialist wind of the real politic democracy of all those dormant sub-identities; now struggling for a place under the twentieth century sun, with diminishing tolerance and increased conflict. A mundane karma this side of death has taken the place of the spiritual karma of later reincarnations in earlier belief. 'Sauda Karma' now rules, and dharma is only for communal conflict. This was a multi-dimensional change of profound and fundamental substance, not heeded by the idealist leaders of the earlier Independence movement, who did not learn Indian governance and society in pre-colonial centuries. The midnight ''tryst with destiny" on the 15th August 1947 was mere hope without homework.
The third major intellectual mistake of that leadership was its failure to see the institutional lacuna in the traditional Indian society, and the limitations of the pre-colonial Indian state over two millennia for the kind of modern public institutions required by a modern state of the most plural society in a globalizing world. In which, India earlier presumed to be the Jagatguru during Non-Alignment days, is now a nuclear, economic power after 2000. How, can the earlier Jagatguru now become a Jagat-performer? Especially after eighty years of destruction of a work culture by the disruptive politics of hartals, bandhs, wild-cat strikes, and a lack of accountability for performance and results in a Sauda state. Atavistic contradictions have damaged the Indian psyche, blurred clarity of mind, and defeated clear strategic objectives in the most conflict-ridden, exploding century of human history. There is neither Krishna of an objective ‘dharma’; nor a seeking Arjuna in honest doubt in this contemporary ‘Kurukshetra’. That is where the millions have to find a new collective role as its own 'Guru' in the world's largest, explosive democracy and in more decentralized governance. The people as the 'Guru', is a strange idea for Indians, but an inevitable one in a real democracy.
Yet, even if the Nehruvian state in its original form has failed, a changing, challenging Indian spirit and society in the early twenty first century may hold some vibrant promise of a reformed liberalized state and Society by 2020; but only if it is reflected in a changed, liberalized leadership, especially in politics and governance. There are new up-thrusts of a stronger, maturing democracy, though not yet in legislatures; a freer, technological, questioning media; a partially liberalized up-thrust of the economy and the growth of India's first ever sizeable middle class, with a demographic youth majority under thirty five; the return of the successful Non Resident Indians; not the least, the tangible demands of "aam admi" (the common man) beyond food and ration cards for education, health, employment, power and water. Sagarika Ghosh rightly asks of new reforms: "If India can be compliant with the global standards in bank loans and in stock market management, then why can India not seek similar international standards in the police force, in hospitals, in schools, and in the judicial system?...All we hear from minister after minister in this government is quotas, quotas, and more quotas”.
The Indian political class will find itself pressed between the richer, organized urban millstone, and a millstone of an assertive, rebellious, more educated, and more tuned to technological connectivity of rural India than ever before. The thick-skinned, thick-headed Neta better change if he wishes to survive to face of a new Unbound India, asserting itself, unsparing, and less fooled by the past vote-bank politics. In the process, the state and the rural classes may face more dissent, more violence than they can cope with, if they too do not change mind-sets and policies radically and comprehensively, before political tectonics brings them down as the latest Purana Qila (The Old Fort of Delhi), and leaves them an invisible, forgotten ruin, in the later centuries.
And for this, there will also be need for new mindsets, new approaches, and new soft and hard instruments to deal with the social fires of local and international Terror; the single most formidable threat to sanity and peace, as seen in the past decades in the West and the South Asia. All progress requires social discipline. India gives the impression of "teeming vitality", but in a "form clashing with form", "dynamic ambiguity", as in Indian Art (Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree) or as "functioning anarchy" (Galbraith). That is its sub-continental history, mythology, and present reality. If only the shackles of the Nehruvian state could be discarded, India could be ‘Prometheus Unbound’.
In his, in memoriam for Chandrashekhar in Hindustan Times, Counterpoint of 15.7.07, Vir Sanghvi offers the latest verdict on the Nehruvian state, "the Indian tradition which withered and died". Chandrashekhar’s socialist ideas seemed "sadly out of date". Ironically, it was during his brief spell as the Prime Minister that this socialist ideologue, also with no practical experience of government, that India found itself selling its traditionally precious gold reserves in a crisis of bankruptcy in 1991. Vir Sanghvi wrote in sadness, "he lived on a lonely irrelevance in exile in Bhondsai. India had moved on". The same sadness hangs around the once hopeful Nehruvian state. Such success as India has seen, in liberalization, and the slow unshackling of the Controls Raj since 1991, has been due to India Inc. in the public and the private sectors, and the upward thrust of over three hundred million people. The narrow, restrictive ideology and culture of the Nehruvian state is still a major psycho-political drag, apart from India's persisting feudal Jajman culture in the Neta-Babu Raj, as conveyed in the adaptation of Tagore's poem.
What the post-Nehruvian state of the twenty first century requires will involve far more than a book. It is a tremendous task calling for many leadership teams over the next critical generation, and more realism. Its best political and managerial brains may need to be applied to the following main tasks, apart from the wider, nebulous world of geo-politics. These can only be simple, short indications.
First, the Indian governments must learn to implement law and order, with far more effective Police and Magistracy work; with a far speedier judicial system and conviction rates after charge sheets over fifty percent. Government’s first duty is to control criminalization, not enterprise, which, the Nehruvian state forgot. Post-1947, law and order were treated as secondary, and development was primary. There can be no development in those districts and states where law and order break down, as in Bihar and Jharkhand, and the one hundred seventy Maoist insurgent districts; India must first learn to govern before it can develop. It also needs to ask itself to what extent its own policies and neglect have created disaffection and law and order problems, as in the North East and BIMARU states.
Second, the post-British, Independent, centralized state must learn effective decentralized systems, as in the pre-colonial times, but in the twenty first century context. The Nagaland model of public service delivery since 2001 is worth exploring in other states. It tries to undo past centralized (but ineffective) government, which was considered "people-alienating, unfriendly, and distantly centralized". The new "Communitization" as it is called, is a partnership between the government and the user community; its central strength being to tap latent managerial resources within the local communities. It involves the transfer of the ownership of the government assets to the community; empowering the community by delegation of powers of management for day-to-day functions in the public services of education, health and power; assuring accountability of the local public servants. It is embodied in the Nagaland ‘Communitization’ of Public Institutions and Services Act. The collective self-interest is expected to replace bureaucratic paralysis and corruption and private profit. Interestingly, power tariff collection has risen by eighty four percent in the rural areas, and by one hundred three percent in the urban areas; a far cry from Delhi's non-paying power paralysis of past. No model is perfect. This is worth trying on a larger scale, learning from human limitations.
Third, far greater Accountability for Outcomes against Outlays, with financial prudence and discipline is a major tonic for a soft, Sauda, cost-overruns state; too long has the public exchequer of the people been treated either with imprudent indifference, or as the private treasury of Netas and Babus. The media has an important role in promoting the public interest in the work of legislatures, executive, and judiciary. 'No work, no pay' should become an axiom. The Right to Information Act should be used to get accountability for outcomes, and to protect the freedom of the citizen.
Fourth, which is the critical one, and which flows from the third – raising Agriculture, Industry and Services productivity to world class, if India wishes to be a world power. Productivity was virtually an unknown word in the Nehruvian state.
Fifth, is to make India, through prudent diplomacy, the 'Growth Centre' for its surrounding states, and the Indian Ocean, and an economic partner of the ASEAN in the East and the Islamic States in the West. Indian foreign policy either neglected this role earlier, or was accused of being a Big Brother Bully.
Sixth, India must shed the unrealities of both, Non-Alignment and Alignment in foreign policy. A globalizing world demands the promotion of widening of common interests with flexibility and mutuality. The Westphalian era of nation states is weakening. Major issues of climate, disease, trade, finance, migrations, urban power, and Terror are all global concerns.
Postscript
Lastly, some unlearnt lessons and comparisons from the Western countries, which one would have expected Nehru to have learnt by 1960, and the Indira Congress to have learnt by the 1970's, instead of playing "garibi hatao" populist games; neither cared to learn from the contemporary world of realities, especially in the decade of the 1980's, the spectacular resurgence of the West German economy as a Social Market one, as compared to the dead, East German economy among the same German people, after the ravaging destruction of the whole of Germany in World War II. India was fortunate to be spared that terrible fate.
After the Berlin Wall fell, it became public knowledge that forty percent of the East German businesses were obsolete; symbolized in the East German Trebant pollution-belching car, as India's static technology was symbolized by the two-car Ambassador-Fiat stagnation over forty years. Mao's Cultural Economy almost dealt a death blow to China and destroyed, they say, a hundred million people. The Soviet and the Nehruvian State created black-market economies, painful shortages, and a harsh life for their people, the kind which encouraged the rise of battalions of smugglers who then became political dons; Dawood Ibrahim being the prime example in India, with consequences for both, the economic and the political security of India.
Who would believe that the Nehruvian controlled Raj, accentuated by the self-righteous Morarji Desai's ineffective Prohibition, and would breed god-fathers of gangs of Dawood Ibrahim, the tools of Pakistan’s ISI? Both, the Soviet and the Nehruvian state lacked the civilized marks of a good economy, the respect for the right to private property, institutions of free market enterprise and trust, and the critical competition "creative destruction", which the open market economies enjoyed and helped them flourish. India's commissars were not much ideological commissars as in the USSR and Mao's China. They were a reincarnation of the traditional Jajmans with state power in the old Sirkari culture; hence, a spastic state.
Sadly, a more liberal Nehru from Harrow and Cambridge, and one who claimed to discover the glorious India of the past, did not bring to India the liberal John Locke’s, "natural right of every individual to life, liberty and estate". He brought the totalitarian mindset of Stalin and Mao’s Commissars with an Indian Sirkari culture, in a country with the prosperous record of the Cholas and the Mughals. It then led to what the West had seen in despair, as the Byzantine bureaucracy of India and the self-aggrandizement of the politicians and the bureaucrats, and to the State's bankruptcy in 1991; with over three hundred million in the same Human Development Index as the Sub-Saharan Africa. It was an India with loud-mouthed leaders and people with hungry stomachs; a talented, enterprising people whose capabilities were stifled, only to rise partially after 1991 by the compulsion of a limping liberalization, but, with the lingering past, Sirkari mindsets rising again like bad genes.
De Gaulle's France, with its emphasis on a euphoric inward-looking nationalism, a socialist state, and a democracy presents an interesting comparison. Both states, the post-war France and India, were founded by iconic leaders with strong ultra-nationalist visions. For them, the international stage was a political stage, hardly a globalizing market. Both the Indian and the French economies could not afford state socialism. As a result, both suffered from large unemployment, huge public debt, leading to sizeable populations migrating to economies with greater opportunities. The reality of three hundred thousand Frenchmen seeking better pastures in London would have been anathema to de Gaulle's France. Two million Non Resident Indians received recognition only when their millions of remittances augmented the foreign exchange resources of a bankrupt Nehruvian state in the 1990s.
In Mrs. Indira Gandhi's time, India was mistaken in Europe for a ‘Warsaw Pact’ county. "We are the last communist country in the world", said a French industrialist recently. As in India, in France too, its bureaucracy was far more inefficient in setting up factories and businesses, as compared to other countries from Britain to China. France had a socialism which delivered social security and public services. The Nehruvian state could delver neither.
Witness to India’s Sixtieth Swadeshi Anniversary
Before we go on to the issues of a wider world, let me offer witnesses to India's sixtieth Swadeshi anniversary. It is derived from the media around 14/15 August, 2007.
First, the NDTV poll, which reflects urban middle class views from thirteen cities. At a time when we believe Gandhi and his mind-set are forgotten history, it is significant that fifty two percent of the poll thought Gandhi was the dominant icon; and strangely too, followed by Mother Theresa, an Albanian nun with seventeen percent. In a violent India, seventy percent of India chose icons of non-violence and humanity, the soft atmaic heart of India. They were followed by JRD Tata (nine percent), a fine model of civilized humanity in business and public affairs; Indira Gandhi (seven percent), modern India's Durga; Narayan Murthy (six percent), a later IT version of JRD Tata; Amitabh Bachan (five percent), representing the rising Bollywood world; and, significantly, Jawaharlal Nehru, the last of the seven jewels (only four percent). Does this last figure reflect my earlier assessment of Nehru and the Nehruvian state? If so, I feel vindicated.
Significantly, democracy was India's "greatest pride" with forty four percent of the poll, with Secularism second with seventeen percent, which though low, is higher than I would have thought. I wonder if Secularism to urban India also means Liberalism and multi-culturalism. If so, it is more meaningful. The IT industry, the Armed Forces, the Indian Railways, and the Judiciary follow in that order as India's "Greatest Pride". After the highest marks for Democracy, I wonder why the Central Election Commission, an important, impartial instrument of that democracy, was forgotten. Public memory is short. The CEC comes alive only at elections. Sixty six percent of urban India regarded Bribery and Hunger, two of India's "Worst shames"; followed by twenty eight percent in untouchability and dowry, not high enough for modern, liberal, egalitarian values.
Significantly, seventy percent of urban India thought the I.T. Revolution and Liberalization were the major events that “changed India" – a most significant finding which political parties and governments should learn in their dated Sirkari-Jajmani mindsets. Sirkar in Hindi means master, and Jajmani was the old patron-client mind-set of dependency; the root of the Neta-Babu Control – Inspector Raj. The Inspector Raj remains and is even more bloated. Significantly too, the other three events that "changed India" were the nuclear bomb, the cell phone, and the Mandal Commission – examples of technology and social change in changing India.
Sixty three percent thought that operation Blue Star/Anti-Sikh riots (1984) and the Riots after Partition were the "Greatest Political Blots"; both during the time of the Nehruvian State. Mount Batten’s impetuous rush to the Partition riots could have been tempered by reasonable anticipations, especially after the Great Calcutta killing of 1946. Indian political judgment was as faulty as Mountbatten’s.
Sixty two percent thought that Brains and Yoga, both soft powers, "Best described India Abroad", followed by Bollywood, Curry, and Gurus.
In the Hindustan Times survey of young urban India (sixteen to twenty five years), in eight cities, it is not surprising that sixty four percent rejected outright, the idea of taking up politics as a career option, though another twenty two percent did not rule it out. Fifty six percent defined good economic growth as "high economic growth with fresh job creation”, and significantly for a country with less than two percent investors in equity and mutual funds, fourteen percent pumped for "a thriving stock market" – again, a lesson for dated, ignorant politicians. Fifty three percent of these young thought "doing your own work efficiently and sincerely" would help the most; again a lesson for Netas and Babus who don't. Despite the predominant urban admiration for Gandhi, only nine percent of these young thought Gandhigiri (civil disobedience) and ahimsa worth adopting. Sixty on percent voted for gender equality and adequate female representation in public life; another significant lesson for our Netas and Babus, as also the corporate sector. The youth were also on the ball when sixty one percent thought Education, Health and Infrastructure were "India's top priorities"; twenty three percent for Population Control, but only sixteen percent for Agriculture, that urban bias. Their four "biggest Indian icons in today's world" were Gandhi (fifty eight percent), Pandit Ravi Shankar (nine percent), Amitabh Bachan (twenty five percent), and Sachin Tendulkalr (eleven percent). Gandhi is probably resurrected by two popular films, ‘Munnabhai’ and ‘Mr. Gandhi, my Father’; which, with Bachan's popularity, indicates the power of good cinema in the media. These youth seemed to have no illusions of Indo-Pak relations in 2006-07. In most cities, fifty six percent to sixty six percent thought that the "old tensions will continue, despite increased transactions”. This is such a nutshell learning survey for the Netas and Babus and corporate leaders of the future.
If the Nehruvian Neta-Babu Raj state had any lessons to learn from the harsh Partition of India and over ten million uprooted refugees fleeing from the killing fields, it was the marvel of how they rehabilitated themselves with their fortitude, enterprise and hard work in agriculture (e.g. the U.P. terai region), in trade, cottage and small scale, medium scale enterprise (e.g. Faridabad), without the help of the state or a Planning Commission; a lesson which the future planned state presumptuously ignored – the grassroots capabilities of the Indian people.
Let us turn to freedom, Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar has woken us up to the realization that "freedom was won by himsa, rather than ahimsa"; in contradiction to the long-held notion that Gandhi and his ahimsa over decades won it. He recalled a seminar in 1967 on the twentieth anniversary of Independence. The debate was at which point independence became certain beyond doubt. John Freeman, the then British High Commissioner thought that independence became certain after the Naval Mutiny of 1946. This almost side issue, surprised the audience: "The British were petrified of a repeat of the 1857 mutiny, since this time they would be slaughtered to the last man…This time instead of a few mutineers, there were about 2.5 million men in uniform”. Ironically, Aiyar inform us, both Gandhiji and Jinnah condemned it; Vallabhai negotiated with the mutineers to bring the mutiny to an end. He concludes, "The threat of himsa was at least as big a factor in winning independence as ahimsa". (Economic Times 15th August 2007).
In ‘Strings to Freedom’ (Economic Times 14th August, 2007), Raghuram G. Rajan pointed to the lack of economic freedom in those sixty years of shaping a democracy, especially in economic choices: "In order for an adult to take advantage of expanded opportunity in a market economy, he/she has to have been a child with access to reasonable nutrition, health care, and education, when young; giving access to finance so that the lack of wealth does not hamper." it is this failure to create an inclusive, high-growth, competitive economy, which has deprived half to three-quarters of India's people of those basic opportunities to freedom. Bad politics and bad governance have caused a huge deprivation of this freedom in ten Five-Year Plans.
Pothick Ghosh, in the same issue of ET, finds even "the Indian Left trapped in a prison of what Slovene philosopher, Slavos Jijek calls parapolitics…The pursuit of state power at all costs – frames Indian mainstream politics”; hence, "the de-legitimization of dissent", across the political spectrum. Left politics finds itself dated, contradictory, rigid at the Centre and flexible in states where the Left is in power; backing a state public sector only, with similar protection for less than twenty million organized, entrenched, low-productivity workers, at the expense of over three hundred million in the working population. "The Lefts' schizophrenia has become acute” and it cannot face its many contradictions squarely. Ghosh finds the modern state's "inability and reluctance to recognize the undemocratic institutional DNA", which has seriously impacted the Left. “Worse, they (Maoist insurgents and Left extremists) have ended up mirroring the local state in all its coercive iniquity”. Apart from the politics of power not empowering people to make free choices in an expanding market of goods and services, there is also "the less quantifiable things like clean environment, cultural pride, and a sense of communitarian connectedness equally important."
C. L. Manoj, in ‘Community caught in a Political Labyrinth’ (ET 14th August 2007), hammers away at the old complaint of a minority, which has "always remained under-represented in the Lok Sabha", resulting in "North Indian Muslims developing a sense of guilt and withdrawal syndrome". He says, "Eighty percent of Indian Muslims belong to OBC's and EBCs, with twenty percent elite cornering the patronage”. There are several ironies in both the Hindu and Muslim estrangement syndrome before and after 1947, which need to be faced squarely in this late sixtieth year of Independence.
When Jinnah posed the simple fear in Muslim minds that they could not live with an eighty percent Hindu majority that was the first misleading fallacy. In the last thousand years, the Hindus have never had anything like an eighty percent majority in political matters. Yet, even Hindu and Muslim historians and politicians, pre and post 1947, never debunked this historical fallacy. Both Hindu and Muslim communities have been exploited in "vote banks" by their respective leaders. Both have a twenty percent privileged upper class, to the detriment of the remaining eighty percent in both communities, and largely for the same reasons. Both are infected with the political caste system of OBCs and SCs, and the leaders of both have developmentally ignored those poorer eighty percent. It is high time Hindus and Muslims rose above past clichés of bluff, and recognized common realities of past composite cultures, past peaceful cooperative economic activities, and past common exploitation by their elites; leading to the fundamental development problem highlighted by the Prime Minister, Man Mohan Singh from the Red Fort address on 15 August 2007, of the forgotten eighty percent, in both communities and in the entire country. Exploitative political leaders will not face or publicize these common realities. It will forfeit their exploitative weapon. "The task is left to honest media, honest teachers, and honest parents of all communities. That could then lead to true secularism and better development."
Independence Day is at least one day to remember and reflect on hard hit areas like the J & K and the North-East. In ‘Frozen Turbulence’, M. Najeeb Mubarki (ET 14 August 2007), refers to Kashmir "in seize", with check points and soldiers everywhere; and with Kashmiris caught between the militants and extremists, on the one hand, and the siege of Police and Military on the other; a paradise in prolonged pain right through the sixty independent years. He refers to it as "the heart of darkness at the nation's core", with a tragic history. Sheikh Abdullah, “the original Liberation hero”, and a friend of Nehru, was imprisoned for twenty two years, because political India could not define and devolve true autonomy. Elections were rigged; the political process frustrated. The rule of the gun, the bomb, and terror has taken over. The bitter reality, Mubarki says is that "Indian institutions have hardly any legitimacy left", and "alienation is as deep as seventeen years ago". "Kashmir is now a diseased polity with large scale criminalization, gradual breakdown of social and local networks", and occasional "outbreaks of paranoid rage" against those from "outside". In the discourse of Terror, extremism, and militarization, "there is a consensus of silence on fundamental civil and human rights"; this includes those of the Kashmiri Pandits who lost their ancestral homes. It is “a dark corner of India like the North-East”, says Mubarki.
So, let us go to that North-East in Neelash Mishra's, ‘No Man's Land’ ("OPED on Saturday", 14th August 2007). He concentrates on Manipur: "It is India's first failed state overrun by militant groups whose activities touch nearly every aspect of the lives of the state's citizens. The most popular movies are Korean. Much of the food is from Myanmar. The citizen of Manipur pays tax twice over – one to the government, and then to the underground militant groups…coexistence with them being a way of life. Graduates with masks pull rickshaws in shame"; “The District Administrator has not been in his office for a month”. And, “it doesn’t really matter that there are no schools or hospitals or employment opportunities…The Chief Minister, Okram Ibobi spends most of his time in Delhi", "collecting frequent flier points at the expense of the state". Intercom does not work in Manipur.
Suparna Lahiri, member of the Steering Committee of the National Forum for Forest People and Forest Workers tells us that in the North-East and tribal areas not only does the Employment Guarantee Act not work, "it is completely alien to tribal moves" (‘Down To Earth’, July 31, 1907). He says, "Promoting individual wage labor among people whose ways of life – social, cultural, political, economic – is community-centric, could be dangerous and lead to several internal conflicts....Many tribal communities are not integrated with the market and the wage labor economy.” They create social assets as communities. No individual owns them. This is another of the many examples of the failed centralized state of India, which, in fact, has destroyed the local social capabilities, disrupted the local communities and economies, and wasted the public money. It is the kingdom of the Blind. Sixty Independence days have gone, and the centralized Sirkar does not know its own people, within borders which they patriotically claim as theirs.
In ten Five-Year Plans of a "socialist pattern", the Arjun Sen Gupta led National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized sector, has revealed that the same blind Sirkar has forgotten three hundred ninety five million, or eighty six percent of the country's total work force who are not in any kind of security net in the far flung towns and districts – the back of beyond for ruling Netas and Babus (Hindustan Times, August 11, 2007). Eighty percent of those forgotten three hundred ninety five million work for twenty rupees a day, or six hundred rupees a month; when unproductive chaprasis get at least four thousand rupees a month, as they are the pro-peop1e’s Left’s vote bank. These neglected millions of Schedule Tribes and Castes, OBCs and Muslims are left vulnerable and forgotten between elections. Another example of the hollowness of the political-governmental machine towards the distant weak: socialism without social security, unknown in developed societies. Over 10 Plans no thought has been given to public policy in social security. The Employees .Provident Fund caters to the organized 25 million only. Article 41 of the Constitution declared over 50 years ago that the state should provide assistance to its citizens in unemployment, old age, sickness and disability. Constitutional obligations are forgotten by a heartless and mindless political system, which looks for no more than votes by reservations and quotas, and be damned with genuine social security for nearly 400 million, of whom about 50 million are aged. (Hindustan Times editorial, August 11, 2007).
“At 60, India Has A Second Chance" (Times, Business/Economy, 16 August 2007). Robyn Meredith, Editor Asia, puts his finger on the problem of the next 20 years. On the one hand, India will have a population reaching nearly 1.5 billion, with nearly a billion of working age, an increase of 270 million after 2006: 30% of whom will be under 16: a demographic boom opportunity for the expansion of India's huge potential human resources and markets. On the other, we have a corrupt, inefficient political leadership who cannot manage effective coalitions for national policies beyond sectional vested interests, and incapable of governing the country with good delivery systems in law and order, agriculture, health, education, and infrastructure for the rising aspirations of millions of youth. There will be huge problems of inclusive growth for more hundreds of millions. There will be need for big minded democratic leaders who can manage effective coalitions, a crippled bureaucracy, and bring a new ethos of civic discipline. India's corporate mind is now fast rising to meet future challenges, national and global. India's biggest drag is its political-bureaucratic system, now recognized by retired bureaucrats like Bhaskar Ghosh. In "Systems Failure" (Frontline, August 10, 2007), he sees what I saw in the early chapters of this book 50 years ago; "it is simply a failure of inspection and supervision, with real accountability; which he significantly adds, as I too mentioned in those chapters, "the systems the British left behind"; with Administrative Reforms reports since "unread, unreadable", and ignored.
So India is clearly left with one enormous basic problem: how can the politico-bureaucratic systems be redeemed from past failures of the Nehruvian state and rise to India's future needs with Dengian determination. That young, aspiring disillusioned civil servant of 1952 has come full circle.
So, despite a nine percent GDP growth, a buoyant corporate sector, huge foreign exchange reserves, and a mood of confident optimism; the views of the people and media of India in this sixtieth year reflected major failures of good governance, of social security, freedom and human rights, and the huge development deficits for the forgotten eighty percent of the Indian people. Having lost the first forty five years of time the critical Himalayan ridge of India's development has yet to be crossed. The responsibility rests clearly with the two main failures of the past, Indian politics and Indian governments
Voices in the Wind
Who has ever heard, or would believe that two men go for a walk in the Buddha Jayanti Gardens of New Delhi, and ten years down the road, they and many others come up with the formation of an International Institute for Mountain Region Development for the entire Hindu Kush-Himalaya in Kathmandu? Hardly anyone in our time believes in miracles, yet this was indeed a miracle brought about by earnest innocents in a world largely indifferent to mountains. This is the brief story of that unbelievable happening after pursuing the idea around the world, meeting a variety of people and institutions, persisting in hope in many moments of despondency. For me, it was unpredictably the best thing I have done in my long and insignificant life, and a very satisfying culmination of my long Himalayan years. In my account of these ten years in “Voices in the wind”, I write: “And thereby longs a tale, a tale of huge, impending, relentless ecological and human disaster in an erstwhile mountain region of grand forests, holy flowing rivers, and the Abode of the Gods”
If the Himalaya runs like a thread in the weave of this book, it is because of the icon of Mallory, and this bidding of Kipling since my youth:
"Something hidden. Go find it,
Go and look behind the Ranges,
Something lost behind the Ranges,
Lost and waiting for you.
Go!"
As we walked in the Buddha Jayanti gardens, we were clutching at straws, reaching into the blue for possible friends and helpers at influential places. Random names and random thoughts fell like little sticks of wood to feed the fire of incipient hope. Later I read these lines in T. S. Eliot's ‘Four Quartets’, and thought there might be something in it in our situation:
"Old men ought to be explorers,
Here and there does not matter,
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity.”
Our first foray in March 1973 was to the Forest Research Institute in Dehra Dun, the scientific keeper of the Himalayan forests since it was founded at the start of the century by that great Viceroy, Lord Curzon. Joined by our wives, we drove past miles of winter wheat, with patches of yellow mustard and tall sugar cane. The sun touched the countryside with sprinklings of gold. We discussed the first rudimentary thoughts of the proposed Centre, its basic ecological concerns of soil erosion, water resources, and forests. We saw the first toll in the Siwalik foothills and the Rajaji game sanctuary for tigers. No wild life was visible. The forest was being depleted.
At the FRI we met the Chief Botanist, a genial and helpful person, who conducted us around the grounds of the FRI, an imposing building of the Raj, a kind of Versailles of forestry. There seemed little signs of activity, a sense of the emptiness of a lost empire. To our speechless horror, the Chief Botanist disclosed that a number of old trees in the spacious grounds had been cut down recently to enable them to take a better commemorative photograph of the building! One could hardly believe this in one of Asia's leading forest institutes. This was neither the axe of the poor peasant seeking firewood, nor the greed of the forest contractor; it was ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ by its high priests.
At the Institute we raised some questions with the Director and his officials. Was there any research yet in fuel forestry? What were the prospects of the fast-growing trees? How much of the Himalayan hills had good forest cover? How did the pace of deforestation compare with the pace of afforestation? The learned forest scientists thought our questions were relevant, but had few answers. In this cradle of Indian forestry science and training we had drawn a blank. Our botanist friend introduced us to the Mexican Cypress, as an answer for fuel trees. The saplings he presented us died, and despite my following his expert advice the seeds failed to germinate at my hill home in Bhimtal. Nor later, did I find any trace of Mexican Cypress in the forests of the Central Himalayas. The state of UP, India's largest state, and home to the FRI in Dehra Dun, had then only nine percent forest cover, against a desirable figure of thirty three percent. The official figure for the whole of India was only nineteen percent. A few years later, using satellite imaging, Dr. J. S. Singh, the Head of Department of Ecology, Kumaon University, found in a limited study in Nainital district with the largest official forest cover in Kumaon, it had only four percent good forest cover with sixty percent canopy.
We went to Dehra Dun with our first hopes. We returned with a dismal impression of secretive specialization buried in a Curzonian tomb, distant and remote from the realities of forests outside. The Himalayas could be left to its fate, with the highest demographic and economic pressures of any mountain range in the world.
On our return to Delhi, Joe and I produced Opus I on Mountain Eco-Development. We were like inexperienced draftsmen producing the first design of an idea for the proposed International Centre. It was a general statement of ecological concern for, and threats to mountain environments. We recommended three core concerns:
The preservation of mountain ecology under threats of demographic pressures, deforestation, unplanned tourism, dam and road building;
Learning from world experience in other mountain regions;
New eco-development policies for mountain regions.
It was discussed at a meeting with the Head of the Ford Foundation and his colleagues in Delhi. Joe expressed his concerns in Sikkim and Kashmir, and I, mine, relating to the Garhwal and Kumaon Himalayas. There was a lack of coherent action plan in hill development, leading me to visualize the whole Himalayan scene as an ecological clock ticking its time to night and doom. In the Eastern Himalayas it was still ear1y morning; but late afternoon in the Western Himalayas. We were asked: were we aiming at picture post-cards? Were we asking for a cheque? Then a classic remark: We were a hundred years ahead of our time! In our view, we were two decades behind in action time.
Harry Wilhelm, the Head of Ford Foundation-India saw the germ of potential in our ideas. He was our first friend. The seed had been planted. At the next meeting, on my return from IUCN in Geneva, and with a copy of the MAB6 UNESCO report on ‘Mountains in the Man’, and Biosphere report, Harry gave us the signal: "Gentlemen, you have a lot on your plate. Get started". So, with travel grants from Ford Foundation, Joe and I planned to travel East and West to learn from what was happening in the other mountain regions of the world. We produced Opus II. It crystallized the idea of an International Centre for Mountain Environment (ICME). It suggested alternative energy sources to wood, mini hydro-electric schemes and solar energy, forestry in soil conservation, with an emphasis on fuel forestry, and planned eco-tourism in mountain regions.
It was one thing to plan global trips with some relevant institutions and people, quite another to be able to carry them out in the far-flung places with busy and traveling people. We decided to split our global journeys into two parts – to go with the East Wind to Nepal, Malaysia and Japan, and with the West Wind to Europe and America. A brief account of this follows, as our learning experience and the planting of the seed of the proposed ICME in distant fields.
I was returning to Nepal after twenty five years, when in 1949 I went to seek permission of the Rana regime to explore the then unknown southern approach to Everest. Now the Japanese had built a tourist hotel at the foot of Everest at Siangboche under the towering Ama Dablam; with a helicopter service from Kathmandu to the hotel. There, groggy, elderly and un-acclimatized American tourists gazed at Everest, sustained by oxygen cylinders! We first met Colonel Jim Roberts, ex-mountaineer and Honorary Secretary of the Himalayan Club, who suggested we confine our future work to the Himalayas rather than go global – wise advice which we heeded later. He also suggested sponsors like the King of Nepal and Prince Bernhardt, the latter sponsoring World Wildlife Fund. For the first time I wondered whether the ICME should be based in Kathmandu; and of course we would always be looking for high-level sponsors, among them McNamara, the Head of the World Bank, then trekking in the Langtang area of Nepal. He and Maurice Strong of UNEP were to be our future magnets. McNamara's statement at Stockholm in 1972 summed up our basic objective: "What clearly needs to be done is to examine the relationship between two fundamental requirements, the necessity for economic development, and the preservation of the environment" – so simple to state, so hard to do.
After meeting Forest & Wildlife departments and the Vice Chancellor of Tribhuvan University, we met like-minded and outstanding men such as Dr. Bhek Bahadur Thapa and Ratna Rana, the new generation of leaders of Nepal. They shared the ICME idea and said they would "buy the concept" as it was implicit in Nepal's planning. It was also refreshing to meet Dr. Harka Bahadur Gurung of the National Planning Commission, who looked the very son of the soil. He was earthy, sound and direct. His response to the ICME was positive, and increasingly, Nepal looked to be fertile ground for the future ICME.
With the help of John Cool of the Ford Foundation, now the third in our infant trinity, we met Carter Ide and his US AID colleagues. Carter suggested the Manang Valley as a suitable location for a base-line study. Joe and I seemed also absorbed in the future eco-tourism work in Nepal, especially in the Pokhra-Annapurna area. We foresaw a tremendous growth in Nepal's future tourism prospects in 1973, a future Asian Switzerland of sorts. When PanAm meets Pashupathinath and JAL meets Thyangboche, there are more things to be reckoned with in Nature and Man than a foreign exchange account. At the end of our trip to the Pokhra-Annapurna region we caught a magnificent glimpse of the sun's last pink glow on the summits of Annapurna and Macha Puchare. We watched silently as:
"The holy time was quiet as a nun,
Breathless with adoration."
For that moment, under the magic play of that light we shared the spiritual experience of the ordinary Himalayan people, towards that phenomenon where Earth and Heaven met, in si1ence and in storm, perhaps, a validation of their belief over millennia, that this is where the Gods reside.
The East Wind then took us on exploratory flights to Japan and Malaysia. I took with me to Japan, Shotuku Taishi's first article, ‘Harmony (Wa) is the highest’, and it came across in the Japanese gardens and in the mountains of Honshu. As we flew into Tokyo at night over fifty miles of electrification, I had never seen such a burst of intense electric energy in one human conglomeration in all my travels – symbolic of the energy of twelve million Japanese living in its two dense cities, above and below the ground.
At our first introductory meeting with Professor Numata, at the University of Chiba's Department of Geology, he told us of an earlier proposal of this nature in an international meeting in Kathmandu in 1968, of which we were unaware. No one told us in Kathmandu itself – an example of the conference goers who speak and leave behind a vacuity in silence, and their ideas in limbo. Numata approved of our ideas.
Our meeting with Dr. E. Nishibori and the local members of both the Himalayan Club and the Japanese Alpine Club was a warm and heartening experience among a receptive group of transparent, sincere and helpful individuals sharing a love for mountains. They exuded a natural sympathy for the ICME idea, and readily organized a learning trip for us in the Japanese Alps, which provided a unique model of mountain development anywhere in the world. In a journey of over fifteen thousand kilometers on the main island of Honshu, in the area of Mount. Fuji, and from Tokyo to the Pacific coast, to Toyama on the coast of the Sea of Japan and the Japanese Alps, the dominant single impression was that human habitation and cultivation stopped where upland met lowland. I had not seen this in the European Alps, and the Himalaya was teeming with people. The entire mountain area seemed to have been left to forestry, hydro-electric works and tourist resorts. We were informed that this development took place after Word War II, when even the few highland farmers were attracted to profitable occupations in the industrialized plains; with the amazing result that only two percent of Japan's population was left on eighty percent of the land in upland areas.
Only high industrial productivity in Japanese industry and agriculture could absorb ninety eight percent of the then one hundred three million populations in the lowlands. Not the least of the surprises was that the Government regarded "GNP per unit of flat land" as the yardstick of the nation's overall economic activity; which was 2.3 times higher than that of Britain. This is all the more remarkable when Japan's per capita ratio of flat land is only thirty square meter per person; and in this cramped space is one of the world's most highly developed industrial and agricultural economies. It was such a contrast to the Indian subcontinent and the Himalayas where human population is in abundance from the sea to the snow-line. Although forests covered only six percent of Japan's land mass, they could well afford importing wood from abroad, with consumption of local firewood and charcoal declining from fifteen million tonne in 1960 to 2.3 million tonne in 1970. This could only come from a people, where sixty percent of them thought that nature is precious because "it softens and delights the spirit".
The Malaysian High Commission in Delhi had very kindly arranged high-level appointments for us in Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately, in the absence of the Minister for Environment and Mr. Rama Iyer of the PM's Department for Planning and Environment, who were away, we had an interesting meeting with Mr. H. A. Majeed of the General Planning Unit of the PM's office. We had earlier sent him a copy of our introductory paper, to which his response was, “Till we got your paper, the relevance of mountain environment did not strike us with such force”, and in particular, the impact of floods in recent years after deforestation. Apparently, both in Nepal and Malaysia we seemed to be dropping fruitful seeds.
We then explored the Gentian Highlands in their magnificent tropical vegetation, the lush heartland of Malaysia, which was then lightly populated with only ten inhabitants per square mile, as compared to, between a hundred and a hundred fifty, in Himalayan districts below eight thousand feet. Forty percent of Malaysia's land mass is uplands with vast tropical forests. Malaysia had, without an Indian-style Forest Research Institute, with a single study on the economies of forestry, quietly become one of the world's leading exporters of timber, thanks largely to nature's tropical abundance and low population density, apart from declining wood fuel consumption with the use of oil and gas. But, unlike Japan, both high population growth and tourism promotion was pushing people into the uplands of Malaysia, where the overall population had grown from three million in 1921 to nine million in 1970.
In our discussions in Malaysia we learnt that four main developments impinged on the future of upland environments and economy. The first was that of flood control and hydro-electric dams. As Malaysia does not have a vast Gangetic plain to absorb flood waters, the 1967 floods were reported to have killed a quarter of a million people. Second, the Malaysian government, unlike Japan, had ambitious and challenging plans for land settlements of mixed races numbering a few hundred thousand, involving complexes of townships and urban services; a social and a technological challenge. Third was the tin mining and the housing development. Fourth, the making of upland tourist resorts, hitherto largely confined to Penang and Kuala Lumpur. Unlike governments in the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia's Department of Environment was under the Prime Minister, and its organization seemed well advanced. But so far environmental planning had not included the tourist thrust into the upland regions. Long neglected in the Himalayan region even by 2000
Nepal, Japan and Malaysia were good learning experiences, and receptive to the idea of the ICME. The East Wind was warm and favorable.
The Westerly to the two EI Dorado’s of Europe and America, the sources of real decision-making and funding, were more uncertain with flights through pockets of indifference and ignorance of the Third World mountain regions. Hope and hopelessness mingled in the Western air currents. In UNDP we were introduced amusingly as ‘Yeti’ or the mysterious snow creatures from the Himalaya. Our job was to muster influential and scientific support, organizational backing and funding – no small task for just four unknown men, personal friends in a common cause. The focus in Europe now was Klaus Lampe of GTZ, Germany, who became the fourth member of the team.
At Berne, we met the Swiss government officials with the ICME proposals. Among the Swiss, Drs Newenshwander, Hans Buchman and Fisher were most interested. They took us to see Dr. Whalen, the grand old man of Switzerland, its ex-President and savior in World War II, in making the Swiss agriculturally self-sufficient to remain politically neutral. After being the Deputy Director-General of FAO, he was now a small and frail old man. However, one of his first reactions to us was enthusiastic enough, involving moving a resolution at the UN! It was hard enough for governments to move resolutions. It was totally impractical for us four strays. Whalen's suggestions were mixed – on the surface, contacts with FAO and the UN; below the surface, he trailed mild signs of cynicism which I have seen in retired bureaucrats. Yet, he seemed to have a great and gentle spirit, and his sympathy for our cause surfaced when he gave us his blessings, "If you succeed, you will have a place in the next world".
Next day we met Hagen of Nepal fame in Lenzerhide, a skiing centre in the Alps. His mountain chalet was a cozy home of timber, warm rugs and books. He too, more than Whalen, was a retired, despairing international bureaucrat since his UN days, who disclosed that he was at the time writing a book on his twenty years of frustration and futility, especially in the Sub-Saharan Africa, and two other continents. It was strange to meet two well-intentioned, disappointed, distinguished men, as Whalen and Hagen, once seeking good ends, but disappointed in spirit in their old age. Having known enough disappointments in international development fields, Hagen's depressing message to us was no more than, “the best of luck", a lesson to us, as we walked away in the snow in the last light of day under a sickle moon. When we reflected in the cold and darkness, Joe's quiet, strong spirit spoke: "Only courage like Helen Keller, who moves me to tears". That went home to me. Yet the best of men have known so much, and brood so much.
A significant step forward was the organization of the first ever international conference of mountain scientists in Munich in 1974. I called it the "Club of Munich" at a time when the conservationist Club of Rome was famous. Klaus and his friends had organized a formidable barrage of scientists reading scientific papers. Would we just discuss learned papers and then disperse? I suggested that the papers be taken as read, and then we get down to practical business. Joe agreed, and John was torn. As our proposal was too radical for the German academia, we compromised on two and a half days of scientific paper reading and discussions, and one and a half days of operational discussions. Our task was facilitated by John's patient, discreet Chairmanship, and by the senior white-haired Professor Ellenberg, who was practical, brief and authoritative. When we tended to waffle, Professor Stappler of Canada thumped the table with, "What? What? What? Before you talk of anything you have to be clear what the proposed organization will do", as he emphasized.
The tall, serene Jack Fobes, Deputy Director-General of UNESCO dropped in from Paris. He very graciously said he had come to pay tribute to the promoters of the idea, and to those who had contributed to it at the workshop, and in doing so, also pledged some form of support from the UNESCO. At the end of the third day, the quiet, unobtrusive Winkler of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation quietly expressed his ministry's commitment to bear the costs of the working group to bring the idea into being for the funders. He lit a lamp quietly and unexpectedly. This was real stuff after ideation.
Three clear successes were chalked up. First, a Working Group was to be set up to present a programme, an organization, and funding proposals at three significant meetings of the year – the World Bank meeting in Washington in July 1975, the Confederation of European Agriculture meeting in July, and the MAB6 programme meeting in Kathmandu in September. Second, continuing the association at the workshop, as an "association" in the French sense, as suggested by Frank Davidson. Third was the pursuit of funding, besides the help from the German government. Now the first four promoters had become a flock of forty. It was probably the world's first meeting of mountain scientists. But before the flight to the next continent, the EI Dorado of America, there were meetings with the Swiss in Berne.
Our meetings with the Swiss officials were congenial, like-minded and productive. There was agreement on three proposals. First, a proposal to set up a non-profit consultancy trust, and we had as a partial model, the IUCN, and that of an entomological institute in Nairobi. Second, we suggested feasibility studies on eco-development in the Himalayan regions such as the Paro valley in Bhutan, the Pokhra valley in Nepal, and the Kulu valley in India. We were now veering from the earlier global concept to the specific Himalayan region, with which all of us were more familiar and more concerned. The third suggestion was that of Joe Stein, the architect and first conceiver of the idea, which was to undertake inter-institutional studies of eco-housing and mountain settlements, with suitable technologies.
The Bonn / Berne discussions were continued on the flight to Boston, to what seemed like the possible EI Dorado. We wondered if, in the event our ICME type organization did not materialize, we could ride 'piggy back' on other research and development institutes. Klaus was in an "all or nothing" frame of mind for the original ICME concept with a budget of US $ 1.4 million. So, when the Lufthansa menu was passed around, I speculated with a hopeful and puckish imagination, conjuring up the following fare:
US$
· Swiss Cheese 200,000
· UNESCO Perfume 100,000
· German Wines 300,000
· Ford Foundation Hot Dog 100,000
· Austrian Weinhand 100,000
· US AID Bourbon 200,000
· World Bank Pie 500,000
At Boston, the draft was finalized, but left behind after dinner at Pier 4 by John. Klaus rushed back and frantically retrieved it. At another dinner with Frank Davidson at his charming country club, his fertile mind ranged over various funding sources, saying "If you need money, the first principle is to go to those who have it!", and suggested going to the bankers with a small account, as they would have an interest to make it grow. Klaus stood solidly for international funding agencies like the World Bank and the UNDP, with a million dollars or nothing.
In Washington, we had two very different experiences. The small world of Lester Brown at Earth Watch, of Eric Eckholm of the Cosmos Club, and of Barry Bishop at the National Geographic was beautiful, understanding, knowledgeable and helpful. The big world of the World Bank and the UNDP confirmed the saying that the worst bureaucrat is the international bureaucrat. The small world showed interest, mind and soul; the big world's story has to be told briefly to be believed.
Earlier, Joe had written to McNamara for us to see him in Washington. The same letter came back with his hand-written notation asking us to drop in when in Washington – unbelievably informal for the President of the World Bank! When we got to the Bank on June 23, 1975, instead of McNamara we were ushered into the office of Dr. James Lee, the Head of the Environment department, and were aghast to see wildlife trophies blatantly displayed on the walls! As at the Forestry Research Institute in India, here was another ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. After an hour on the philosophy, the ecology and the economics of our proposal, Dr. Lee enquired why we did not approach the UNEP, as McNamara may ask the same question. We replied that we had every intention of doing so, but that we would like the World Bank to father the idea, as, a) the focus of the fund collection, and b) that the ICME idea had a strong all-round developmental concept, including infra-structure, which were fundamental in the Bank's concerns. In response to Lee's apparent 'buck-passing', Klaus bluntly came to the point, conveying that the West German government had financed this trip, as it had an interest in the ICME concept, but the Bank was central to its materialization, and enquired whether Lee was asking us to go elsewhere? Dr. Lee recovered from the blunt assault, and soon enough offered to help with McNamara and his top management.
Our next appointment was with Lief Christopherson, the Head of Department for Rural Development, alleged to be McNamara's blue-eyed boy, and we had been cautioned to be on our guard. He seemed young, inexperienced and conceited in his views, with little or no grass-roots experience. Apart from trying to impress us with his irrelevant views on what should be in the portfolios of the Prime Ministers of developing countries, he seemed to have no idea of the politics and the cabinet making in the Third World. With a mind that was just not switched on, he seemed ignorant of the problems of the mountain regions, and seeing no relevance between mountains-plains relationships. In his arrogance, he claimed receiving scores of such proposals every day, and could hardly find time for one more. This Scandinavian sultan was a disappointing wash-out.
Our next introduction was to the Vice-President Baum whose initial reaction was equally cagey, "I'm not reacting yet", with the same bureaucratic diversionary tactic of "What about the UNDP and UNEP?" Buck-passing seemed to be the way of the most highly paid development experts in the world, in the upper echelons of the famous Bank. He had no idea of the problems of the mountain regions, and was under the vague impression that great things had been done in the hydro-electric field in the Himalayas. Little he did know that the whole of North India had been suffering from power shortages – and it still suffers.
On the way out, we took stock of the physical proportions, the extravagance, and the whole atmosphere of the Bank. Here was a world apex institution dedicated to the uplift of the poor in the developing world. It was a palace inhabited by the world's highest-paid bureaucracy. The Bank Group comprised about three thousand persons with an over-heads budget of dollar two hundred million a year, or dollar seventy thousand per head. They were tackling poverty. I asked myself, "What would have been Gandhi's approach with all these resources?" As a manager, I asked myself and some friends at the World Bank, how the management capabilities of the Bank compared with the best multi-nationals. They confirmed my impression that the multi-nationals – another example of big bureaucracy – were far more competent. Certainly they seemed more humane, more intelligent and sometimes more concerned about wider problems. They too dealt with very large sums of money, but it did not seem to bring the cool arrogance of power as it did in the Bank. The big businessman knows his place in the world, and he is result-oriented. The big World Bank man seems to have an inflated idea of his real place in the world, and I am far more uncertain about his result-getting capacity.
The last meeting with Brown, at the small UNEP Liaison office in New York was a refreshing contrast. He impressed us immediately. He had a clear, quick mind; questioning, yet positive all through. On his own, he suggested we write to the Deputy Head of the UNEP in Nairobi. His was the finest performance among those we met in EI Dorado. He was a young black, and could walk into a senior management position in any MNC; unlike others in palaces of power and wealth, apparently dedicated to the poor of the world.
Mountain environment work, unlike mountain climbing, has no clear summits. The world's institutions present problems more complex than the face of Kanchendzanga, less beautiful than Siniolchvn. In fact, mountain environment work is more like negotiating glaciers with crevasses. Good footholds and good camp sites may change with politics, persons and serendipity. It is a big game of chance.
So, on return to Delhi, there was one more thrust towards the Man and the Biosphere Conference (MAB6) in Kathmandu in 1975. Stein, B. B. Vohra, Corneille Jest, Lampe and I, from the Munich Group, met in Delhi to discuss joint moves for it. The Munich Group made a perceptible impact in Kathmandu later. It was amusing to hear that several international experts at the MAB6 conference were not quite convinced about the environmental problems in the Himalayas until they were themselves stranded on the far side of a landslide on a route out of Kathmandu. For those in five-star lives to be cut-off from the prospect of a good dinner and a luxurious bed seemed to be a far better learning experience than conferencing!
After three years of such international groundwork, it took another seven years, between UNESCO, the German, the Swiss and the Nepal governments, for the ICME to be delivered at the inauguration of ICIMOD (International Centre for Mountain Region Development) in Kathmandu in 1983. It was a long, arduous summit slope. At that summit, inaugurated by the King of Nepal, for the first time in Asian history, eight Himalayan countries came together for peaceful, eco-development purposes. They were Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, Myanmar and even Bangladesh; a vast region spanning the sources of Asia's greatest rivers, and determining Asia's climate. Fifteen hundred years ago, Kalidas, the Sanskrit Shakespeare described the Himalayas as "the measuring rod of the Earth". From now on, ICIMOD would be one of the measuring rods of Asia.
In the “Hymn to Love”, Lascalles Abercrombie wrote:
"As voices are in the worldly wind,
The great wind of the world's fate is turned,
As air to shapen sound
To mind and marvelous desires.”
We were like voices in the wind. And it was a great moment of my life. In joy, I celebrated with a flight over the Everest.
Babylon: The Game of Chance and Time perspectives
In his intriguing book Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges wrote "another reason that it is different to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporations, because Babylon is nothing else than an infinite game of chance". Analogies came home. Our endeavors to promote a movement and an institute for mountain environments was labyrinthine in its international and inter-institutional connections; it had in it the inevitable odds against success, of remote chances in a lottery; and Babylon may be imagined as those moments of experience which gave one a very partial feeling of fulfillment on the road to the achievement of those goals. Glimpses of Babylon were such little lights in the darkness of the quest. And now one learns in retrospect, how men wishfully pit their little powers in hopelessly optimistic time spans of two, five or ten years; when nature in those mountains knows long patient eons.
In 1973-74, soon after Stockholm, we believed we had an idea whose time had come. The concept of time then seemed here and now. We needed to learn that even the time of an idea may be flexible, that the idea has to cope with other exigencies of the time (in this case, the scarcity of resources with the oil crises); and most of all, the internal wonderland of international bureaucracies. One of them had told us we were fifty years ahead of the times, when we felt we were thirty years behind developments already overtaking us in eroding mountain regions.
Those were those early days in Delhi when we thought we could circle the globe in two semi-circle trips, one east, one west, and hopefully with luck, come home with the seeds of an international institute on mountain environments in two years. There were so many sustaining moments on the way, the positive response of Harka Bahadur Gurung and Rana Bhek Bahadur in Nepal; the encouraging response from the Prime Minister's office in Malaysia to our early note; the pledged interest of the governments of Switzerland and Germany; the surprisingly informal response from McNamara to Joe's letter; and all the while, the sustained support of Harry Wilhelm and the Ford Foundation in Delhi. These encouraged us to believe "in the infinite game of chance", in "the reality of the shadowy corporation", quite apart from our own self-righteous convictions! But there were also those difficult moments when Babylon seemed as remote as those Himalayan summits overlooking the borders of Tibet; a far cry to the mythical Shangri-La. When in Tokyo, we were faced with cold, inscrutable Japanese faces; the East Wind of our hopes seemed to have suddenly collapsed in the doldrums. It was trying to walk in weightlessness. When in Washington, the prospects of Joe's appointments seemed to fall through the bottom of the barrel; Klaus and I were doing little things to keep going on a blank map. With so much behind us, we dared not give up. The human spirit clutches at straws, and goes on despite. When I look back on those frustrating meetings at the world Bank, I thought how appropriate was E. Atkinson's remark that "there are two things needed these days - first for rich men to find out how the poor men live; second for poor men to know how rich men work." And if we could only have made it to McNamara, Babylon might have been in the bag. He was known to be a lover of mountains, besides being a great President of the World Bank. And that love for mountains made all the difference in the response of people. Mountain people or mountain lovers had an intrinsic warmth for our proposals; plainsmen were, as a rule, cool. Men seemed to love the Earth in parts, their parts. We were no exception. Then the unbelievable happened. We were lost in the upper labyrinth of the World Bank being asked to see the Environmental Advisor, when McNamara was waiting for us that critical morning. Then the fateful call from his office over lunch; his departure, the opportunity missed, and after coming half way round the world, EI Dorado seemed to have escaped from our finger tips. No luck with the lottery, and damnation to the labyrinth of the "shadowy corporation" which so stupidly failed us in getting to see McNamara.
At the end of it all, two thoughts linger. If Harry's advice had been heeded at the start to begin work in the Himalayan region, rather than go global; we might have had ten years of invaluable grass-roots experience and learning by now. Babylon would have been at the grass roots of the highest, grandest and most problematic ranges in the world, not in the rarefied and deceptive blue skies of the World Bank and other UN institutions.
The gulf in time between our impatient spirits in modern man's short time dimensions, and in contrast, the slow patient faces of Nature in those mountains: I remember that night in Munich in 1974 drafting our passionately eloquent "manifesto" in which we insistently concluded, "The time for action for such a response is now, in word and in action. The hour is already late." After all the flapping of our wings in various regions of the world, ten years later the mountains were still tranquil and forbearing. In my garden in Bhimtal the fireflies still flit like wandering stars in my small universe. The cicada’s call for a brief four weeks of life, after seventeen years in formative lava; a time ratio of two hundred twenty one to one, between preparation for life, and its actual fulfillment. The birds and the butterflies continued to flourish in their seasons year after year. The bears continued to sleep soundly in the Gagar forests, a favorite walking place. And there were signs of wildlife like panther, wild boar and the Kakar deer coming back to our hills; signs of ecological recovery? In December 1980, I saw Kedarnath, still rising majestically over its shrine, one of the world's grandest places of pilgrimage, seemingly unconcerned with our concerns. In June 1984, I unexpectedly found a pristine temperate forest of over three hundred square kilometers in the Dharmaganga and Bhilangna valleys; eight days of unbelievably delightful walking in an Eden of oak, rhododendron, juniper, maple and chestnut forests, and could hardly believe that they still existed. Here were the Himalayas evolving ever so slowly in their sixty five million year history, with supreme composure, knowing such vast span of time. Here nature in high places was working its inscrutable destiny with a patience beyond that of its gods; in dimensions of time and space, all of which made all our puny flapping about in distant parts seem like the cicada's brief croaking over a mere four weeks. Were we just small, rational, thinking, scheming excrescencies of Nature's scheme of things? Perhaps we were only voices in the wind.
Nevertheless, we had our moments of Babylon of the spirit too, even though we were little creatures in the great game of chance, in the labyrinth of the world's processes in human societies and in Nature. That perhaps made the game worthwhile with prizes of the spirit, if not of more tangible things. Perhaps we were very small catalytic agents, helping human consciousness- become aware of the dangers to the elemental destinies in the evolution of mountain systems.
The first moment of Babylon was the awakening of our own consciousness to that awareness during that joyful walk with Joe in the Buddha Jayanti gardens of Delhi. At the least, it gave me a worthwhile commitment in the evening of my life. Those meetings at the Ford Foundation under Harry's positive leadership were like the opening of the gates of Babylon. The encouraging meetings with so many all over the world; the faces of old Nishibori and the wordless warmth of his friends in Tokyo; the immersion with the kind and the wise Dr. Haushofer at his home in Bavaria, in the story of the regeneration of the Alps since the Eighteenth century; the meetings that night with the UNEP representative in New York, another fine positive man, and the last flicker of hope in EI Dorado; all these unforgettable moments of that happy experience; the springs of hope at which we drank in our long journeys.
Then, an intimate bit of Babylon too was experienced in the return to the Himalayas from New York, walking uphill in rain and storm and lightening on a dark night to my cottage in Bhimtal, washed of distant illusions in high places, resolving to work in future at the grassroots in the hills of my home, come what may. The years of happy working in little footsteps each year with the scientists of the Kumaon Hill University and the Central Himalayan Environment Association, was in slow, halting but tangible steps each a deepening and widening of one's awareness of a very complex and difficult problem. The days of innocence were over. The rock-face problems on the ground taught reality, and our feet were, at last, on solid earth.
Then, in December 1983, came that rare moment of Babylon, when "the shadowy corporation" seemed to take on reality with the inauguration of the ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) in Kathmandu. It was the fruit of the MAB6 UNESCO Conference there in 1975, and it materialized largely because of the efforts of our Swiss and German friends - the admirable and persistent Klaus Lampe, in particular. By a strange coincidence, three of the first four of us who started on this road a decade ago were there - John Cool, Klaus Lampe and I. We sent a nostalgic telegram to Joe Stein, the absent one. While the conduct of my government saddened me, it was good to rise above shallow politics and petty bureaucracy; to join in the general support of the ICIMOD; to feel the presence of Maurice Strong, the maker of the Stockholm Environment Conference in 1972, and one of the founders of the international environment movement; and to offer Colin Rosser and the IOMOD the model of a complex "learning machine" on behalf of the professional world of mountain scientists. It was good too, to stand by Klaus and Bhek Bahadur in their hour of despair, with the earlier non-appearance of the Indian delegation, and their later lack of cooperation, offering them the leadership example of the god Shiva, who legend says, kept the poison in his throat to save the world from contamination, and to carry on in hope and confidence. It seemed to touch John Cool too.
Jack Ives, Bruno Messerli, Corneille Jest, and Glazer from the Munich days were also there. It seemed a happy reunion of old friends to the cause, in a moment of fulfillment along a long upward climb. To use Joe's expression at Bonn ten years earlier, it was a time of "convergence" of scientists and governments from the entire Himalayan region, and several other countries. When so many good men converge, some good must come of it. In sublime happiness, I took the flight to Everest, the Mecca of my exploration aspirations thirty-three years ago.
During the inauguration ceremonies I missed Joe's long treasured tablet with "Om Mane Padme Hum", kept for ten years for just this occasion. It would have been a fitting gesture to lay this sacred tablet at the ICIMOD, Kathmandu, in this home of the higher spirit in the very heart of the Himalayan region. But that too was missed in the labyrinth of happenings, a lost token chance in the lottery of life. How we treasure such little things of significance, expressions of purpose and sensibility. I took the opportunity to convey some of our salient thoughts and problems in Kumaon. First, the foresters had forgotten in their insatiable quest for timber that Nature's purpose in a forest was to conserve soil and water, besides biomass. We questioned the practical value of international land classifications in regions where carrying capacities were far exceeded, and no political systems had the answers to transplanting millions of hill-men, as in Japan. We questioned the feasibility of leaping from subsistence farming to Punjab-style developed farming in degraded hill eco-systems. I took the liberty of saying the heart of the problem lay with the very institutions of eco-development in the hill regions. Change had to begin with us, our past thinking and policies, before we could expect the poor hill-men and women to change their dilemma of limited options. In this great international gathering representing national governments, UNESCO, and the new ICIMOD, I seemed to represent no one, and said so – repeating what I had said to an FAO official in Nepal a decade earlier: "I only represent a concern".
But now one could hope, with Tennyson's Ulysses, something larger and better might be done; some work of ecological significance in the Himalayas; better guidelines for governments of the region, more insightful solutions for eco-development planners; more sympathetic eyes, where earlier there was blindness, brashness and greed in the spoliation of mountain systems. And if that should happen in future time, perhaps we may have been more than mere voices in the wind; even if we do not find a place in Dr. Whalen's "next world".
Post- Script
Later in 2002, when I sent the account of the making of the ICIMOD to Dr. J. Gabriel Campbell, its Director-General, he wrote: "It represents a remarkable and personal account of our early years of conception and birth. It is a great tribute to the ICIMOD as an institution and a heartfelt statement of your profound love and commitment to the Himalayan peoples and environments.
The cause of the mountains was later extended to the UN also. One of our old colleagues of the early days in the Swiss Government, Jean-Francis Giovanini wrote in 2002, that "our concern for mountains continues to produce results. The International Year of the Mountains, 2002, decided by the UN general Assembly, was a success in the sense that mountains were a subject of countless meetings, books, films and seminars all over the world…So Aspi, your concern is not forgotten at all and you should be proud, as one of the grandfathers of the idea, to see that so many people are now concerned with it”. It is such a long way since 1974, when we were introduced in the UNDP as "The Yeti from the Himalaya". I hope the concern of the UN and the other bodies goes beyond "meetings, books, films and seminars" to the grass-roots of the mountain people.
Terror I: “In a Time of Darkness”
As the dragon fire of Terror in God's name has spread in the last two decades, there seem to be two delusions in the public mind, especially in the West, about its dramatic manifestations. The first is that it is a phenomenon of recent origin, like climate change; more specifically a Bush-fire around a hunted Bin Laden and an evil Al Qaida; a recent anti-West fire. The second illusion is that the 'Evil' is in the others, outside one's religious or ethnic group. Not so for me and thousands of others in India. Terror is a recent chapter from a long historical making. There have recently been copious writings on terrorism as such, as also the centuries old Christianity-Islam relationship.
While the West, especially America, has been hit dramatically on 9/11, and in London and Madrid, no non-Islamic country has lived with Islam for a millennia as India, or suffered so long and so much from invasion and inter-religious conflict as India has, despite pre-secular Bhakti, Sufi and the 'composite culture', and recent secular attempts to heal. The world may learn some long-term lessons from India, both negative and positive; as it has known both, the clash and the fusion of civilizations for a millennium and more.
I write this chapter not as a distant scholar or a momentary journalist, but as one who has lived close to communal conflict and killing in India since my youth. My father, a peace-keeper in one little corner of pre-1947 Bengal, a Zoroastrian builder of a Muslim Idgah and a Hindu temple, was swept like a human straw in the wider communal conflict at the time of Partition. Deprived of his long self-made life, I saw him quietly shrivel, the old confidence and self-esteem gone, facing an uncertain economic future, after the loss of home and twenty seven years of work, recognition, and a respected life in the old Bengal. And he was only one among the millions. When the Pax Britannica crashed down during the last years, in both revolutionary and communal fires, I witnessed the uncivilized horrors of the Great Calcutta killing for three days and three nights in 1946. Mobs seemed to go wild in the streets, knifing and assaulting each other with an unseen devil in their souls, and a hot fever in their minds. The sparks of unscrupulous communal politicians could ignite millions in hours. Prolonged hate and communal killing seems far more inhuman than occasional flash points of terrorist bombings by unseen people.
Then, after 1947, in the Civil Service in Bihar, I wondered how a small minority community could so boldly provoke a majority by the widespread firing of Hindu villages, oblivious to any sense of survival. I could not understand it then, as the West finds it hard to understand Terror now. The deliberate provocations would continue at Moharrum, and at other times. On one occasion, as a young Magistrate, I found myself unarmed, with a few constables, between an angry Muslim mob on one side, and an angry Hindu mob on the other, both seething with mob hate in dark, psychic depths. None knew what would happen next. I decided to wait there calmly, till the tempers and the mob hate abated; a kind of cool, helpless presence, a small barrier of the law, between two turbulent spaces. Patience served its purpose till the juices of hate and violence seemed to ebb slowly. In the terrorist bombing of Bombay in 1993, my wife narrowly escaped two bombing incidents within an hour. We have loved Bombay, arguably the most terrorist-bombed city in the world, outside Iraq and Afghanistan. Even now, closer to home, and in retirement in the hills, we have two Indian friends who have experienced and survived the Dantean hell of New York on 9/11, a wife anxiously waiting for her husband caught in the crashing and burning WTC towers.
So, I write, partly as a history student of these last millennia of history around the Islam world, and partly as one of the luckier ones who have experienced and survived this dragon fire of our times. What began as a localized sporadic communal killing is now called a ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Let us try and understand some of its root causes in the forgotten history, and our incapacities to cope effectively with its hidden spreading fires in the recent years. I fully realize the limitations of this attempt in just two chapters. It is only one’s own view of a long-gathering storm, now a complex global phenomenon, as well as that of the more important witnesses to terror such as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Naguib Mahfouze.
If one looks at mankind's history in the last fifteen hundred years, after the fall of the Roman and Sassanian empires, and the phenomenal rise of Islamic empires, most of the non-Sinic world felt the clash of the hard Semitic worlds of Jehovah, Christ, and Allah – all three stern children of Abraham. In this hard Semitic world of the "Chosen", of the Believers and the Non-Believers, of Crusades and other wars of Religion within and without each of them, their harshest intolerance against the heretics from within, there seems to lie the long-generating dragon seed of religious and ethnic conflicts, ending in our time with the fires of Terror in God's name. In the psycho-religious depths of history, the fires of religious war, crusade, and jihad seem to come largely from the sulphur in the seed of Abraham. Many have lit, and continue to light those Semitic fires since.
I have often wondered about the influence of geography on religion. To what extent, in this context, have the hot deserts of the West Asia produced the black and white worlds of Semitic religions, the exclusive worlds of the Believers and the Non-Believers, of the 'chosen' and the not chosen? To what extent, have centuries of journeys between oases in hot, death-dealing deserts led to absolute leaderships? The desert storms hardly permitted cool debate in waterless horizons, where the issues were those of sheer survival between life and death. With no such threats, the Hindu-Buddhist minds of earlier ages could coolly speculate on philosophies of life in the peaceful, luxuriant forests of the Gangetic plain, or contemplate on Himalayan heights which uplift human minds. It was a softer world which knew no heretics put to the sword; a world which accepted all manifestations of life, as in Nature around us, and which asked itself why there is suffering, and what the way out of it is. Nature allowed a lot of peaceful time to meditate, in contrast to the hot, death-dealing world of desert storms.
Outside the Abrahamic world, this very different, all-life-accepting Hindu-Buddhist world, felt two winds from the barren lands of the Islamic West Asia over the last millennia. The first through Sindh and Gujarat in the ninth century; the gentle winds of Sufi Islam came as a friend, or 'soft power'. A few centuries down the road came Islamic invasions and the plundering of temples by Mahmud Ghazni and the Sultanate rulers. When resistance failed, Hindu India reciprocated with the Bhakti movement; then with Sikhism, and a militant via-media. Yet another couple of centuries later, the Mughal emperor Jehangir made the remarkable observation that Sufism resembled the Vedanta – a confluence of universal philosophies at the highest levels. At the worldly level, India's greatest ruler, Akbar, built two bridges for the later warring generations to learn from – the bridge of inter-faith marriage, and the bridge of sharing power with the Hindu Rajput rulers; both admirable examples of wise 'soft' power in his and our time. A quarter of his Mansabdars or Viceroys of his empire were Hindu Rajputs – a fundamental lesson for the modern Indians, for the Western powers in the West Asia, for China in Tibet, and for Pakistan in Baluchistan and the Pakistani tribal areas. He also knew “the dialogue of civilizations” in his dialogue of religions, in his Ibadat Khana.
Then followed three centuries of a Hindu-Muslim alienation, after Aurangzeb, the bigot; the consequence of his alienating hard power and exclusiveness. In the later British period, it lead to the on-going quarrel for 'reservations' in the sharing of power, the division of Hindu-Muslim Bengal in 1905; later reservations of seats in legislatures; the fatal mistake of Nehru and the Congress in 1936-37 in not sharing power in a province like the U.P. with a substantial Muslim population and Muslim culture, under the Government of India Act, 1935; repeated at the time of the ~Cripps Mission in 1946. 1935 was the first significant sharing of power by the British themselves. Sadly, no lessons were learnt from the great Akbar, by Nehru and the Congress. Perhaps, this was the pivotal point for the growth of the alienated idea of Pakistan and the tragic Partition of the sub-continent; a tragedy larger and of a different kind to the Jewish holocaust in Europe.
Post 1947, India's secularism did neither heal the rift within India, nor solve the Kashmir problem, with Akbar's policy of sharing of power with good governance. It was followed by the three futile Indo-Pakistan wars and the break-up of Pakistan with Bangladesh, in 1971; After which, Pakistan and its ISI, turned more extremist with nuclear piracy, and the new strategy of Terrorism; vastly expanded by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban. With America's oil geo-politics in the West Asia, and the unresolved peaceful solution of the Palestine problem, the angry, frustrated, divided Islamic world boiled its Terror pot from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Two centuries of Western imperialism, culminating in Israel and the oil imperialism of the twentieth century set Islamic hearts on jihadic fire.
A violent extremism leads to the other; in India's case, that of the Hindu RSS and Hindutva with the demolition of the disused Ayodhya mosque, the Bombay riots in 1993, and the genocidal turbulence in Gujarat in 2002, and a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament. Whether in India or elsewhere, Terrorism cannot be seen in isolation. In India communal conflict and Terror as a psycho-social virus go back to the raids and plunder of Mahmud Ghazni, the Tughlaqs, and to Aurangzeb. We have seen its disastrous consequences in the British and the post-British period. Political systems have exploited religious alienations of past history, and then their governments have been unable to control the consequential fires in men's souls. Look at the assassinations in South Asia after 1947. As was said long ago, revolutions destroy their creators. The recent Maoist revolution in Nepal has even destroyed the incarnation of god Vishnu, the King.
Great movements of the human spirit can best be seen over the tides of centuries, sometimes a millennium. And so it has been with the violent children of Abraham in its three branches. Ironically, soon after the rise of the first Christian empire under Constantine, the early Christian fathers took it away from Europe's liberal Greco-Roman civilzational roots into what Europeans themselves called their 'Dark Ages'. Despite Charlemagne and the Christian saints, Christian Europe seemed to enclose itself in its own Wahabism of the spirit in the medieval Roman Catholic Church. When high priests turned to what they thought was pristine purity, a dark cloud descended on civilization. Greek science was dead and gone. The Earth was flat. The making of great laws, a great empire, and great engineering was buried with Rome.
In these centuries Islam, the third Abrahamic child, rose from the Arabian deserts like a flock of falcons, in a century of furious invasions, and then established a millennium of one of the highest civilizations of mankind from the eighth to the eighteenth century. Under the banners of Abbasid, Saffarid, Mongol, Mughal and Ottoman, it created empires and civilizations stretching across the northern hemisphere. The centers of those civilizations were in a long chain of great cities; from Seville in Spain to Cairo in Egypt, to Damascus and Istanbul and Baghdad in the central heartlands, and to Bokhara, Samarkhand and Delhi in the heart of Asia. Gathering Hindu philosophy, science, and mathematics from the East, and those of the Greeks from the West, it created a global civilization in the sciences, the arts, and the architecture in the heart of the Eurasian world.
While the glorious relics of that civilization still stand as mosques and tombs, and delight as artifacts, paintings, books, the Islamic spirit has since withdrawn to its harsh desert homelands, after the eclipse of the Islamic power. The clerics of purity and pristineness took over, when Islamic civilization lost its self-esteem, after its conquest by a resurgent Christian West of the Industrial Age, after the eighteenth century, and the Mughal and the Ottoman fell. Their Wahabism came out of the Negev desert to return to an angry obscurantism, and to redemption by 'jihad' alone.
In this rise and fall of the last two children of Abraham – Christian and Muslim – the first, without state or empire, after centuries of the ghetto, Jehovah’s people found and worked their way into other centers of power and civilization. They developed great minds, great skills in many walks of life. They penetrated both the Christian and the Islamic worlds. When the latter declined, they moved strongly into the centers of the Christian and the Muslim power and civilization. Originating from the desert lands of Abraham and Moses, they became Europeanized. They reached the control rooms of the European empires in finance, trade, industry, education and science. By the early twentieth century, after the millennia between the Babylonian captivity and the Nazi holocaust, they sought the Holy Land of their fathers, into which Moses had once led them. They got their homeland as a gift from Britain and France after World War I, with the betrayal of the Arabs who fought with them to destroy the Ottoman Empire. No pillars of wisdom after Lawrence of Arabia.
The whole of the twentieth century went in negotiations and wars to settle both Palestine and Israel; and also the arbitrary carving up of the old Ottoman Empire among the states created by the Western powers. After World War II, America became the dominant player, especially after the discovery of the world's largest resources of oil in West Asia. Geo-politics, oil and religion, then, mixed in the world's deadliest combustion, especially after the rise of the Arab nationalism and Islam's alienation from the West. Terrorism then became the weapon of the conquered, of the weak against the state power; a fanatic in faith with a new kind of guerilla war.
In the mid-1970's, V. S. Naipaul wrote, Among the Believers, about the non-Arab Islamic countries. With the early insights of a great writer, he went to the heart of the problem. Islam is finding it hard to cope with the modern world, hence, frustration, anger and aggression. Divided, as the Islamic world has always been between the Shias and the Sunnis, between the Arabs and the non-Arabs, between the moderates and the extremists, the Naipaulian diagnosis summed up what we see from Morocco to Indonesia. Naipaul found a terrible conflict in the hearts of Muslims, long before Al Qaida, bin Laden and 9/11. In Iran, he found "a passion for justice, union, revenge" after the Shah. Not where the Shah left off, but a return to Karbala, the deepest wound within Islam. If Iran was on the boil with Shah and oil, and the West, Pakistan was on the boil as a failed state with poverty, dictatorship, feudalism, blindly seeking something in Islam as a refuge, a compensatory identity, and a return to Jihadic minds. It was a state afflicted with old Islamic and a new ethnic, social, governance frustrations.
The failed Islamic state was unable to build modern institutions of democracy, trade, banking, education and medicine. Naipaul asks significantly, " Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institution?" In more developed Malaysia and Indonesia, he finds that Muslims see technology and the plums of life in the alien civilization of the West, but it is not available in the desired culture of home in town and village. So there is a conflict between desire and social structures. They wish to inherit the new goodies (including nuclear) not to change and build new institutions with new values in a globalizing world. Who then could deliver them in this dilemma? An Imam-like man? A Khomeini-like man? That would be a contradiction in terms. And in frustration and anger, Naipaul saw, Islam can become like cocaine. It gives you a high. You go to the mosque and you get a high. And when you get a high, everything that happens is Allah's will: "There is no place for a rational human mind, as in the days of Islam's successful civilization".
It is revealing to go from a gifted writer of our time like Naipaul to Salman Akhtar, a Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. He explored the lure of Fundamentalism in a conversation with A. Srinivas in the Times of India. For him, Fundamentalism in religious systems involved five attributes. It is literal and narrow in interpreting religious tracts. It promotes an egoist ethnocentric attitude, in which my belief, my book are the best. It has an over-simplified, megalomaniac view of the world, with a sense of knowing the solution to everything. It generates, paradoxically, a sense of victimhood. Finally, that victimhood facilitates group and political cohesion, which, if exploited, can generate violent behavior, bomb blasts, jihad and crusade.
Fundamentalism, for Salman Akhtar, serves as morphine for those who cannot cope with sanity, because sanity is not easy, it involves coping with problems of uncertainty and complexity, problems of moral ambiguity between Tradition and Modernity. There is also the problem of cultural impurity, like eating pork or beef. In reality, there is no such thing as purity. Even chemicals and water have tolerable and intolerable limits. The fourth problem of sanity is accepting responsibility for oneself and one's behavior in such an uncertain, ambiguous, changing world. It demands ownership of the body, its sexual urges, and its disciplines – not an easy personal responsibility, especially in freer cultures. Lastly, a mentally sane person must accept total mortality as reality. Forget about heaven, hell and the after life. These uncertainties are not easy to bear. So, when Fundamentalism offers easy certainties in this life and after death, it absolves us of misery, conflict and choice of adult responsibility. It is easier to be a heroic child: "The baggage of sanity becomes hard to take. Trauma gives rise to self-hate, which is projected as hatred for the world"; if only the leaders of the Islamic and the non-Islamic world could give a sympathetic understanding to this psycho-social phenomenon explained by a Muslim psychiatrist.
Here is the long-generating psycho-social seed bed of Islamic as well as other Semitic Terrorisms. In such a world it is hard for Islamic Liberalism to grow. Although caught in the maze of conflicts between Koran and Hadith over jihad, marriage, divorce, the equality of women, and rational Islam, it is the Muslim society in the modern world that alone can find the best answers to reconcile the essence of Islam with the needs of Islamic societies in the modern world in ways which minimize conflicts within and without. The Naguib Mahfouzes are extremely rare. In his novels Naguib described the conflicts between tradition and modernity, the alienation of the individual, the struggle for personal dignity amid poverty and state repression. In short, and at the heart, a deep loss of self-esteem – Islam’s recurring curse since the eighteenth century. When he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, he declared himself a happy and grateful receiver of the Egyptian, the Islamic and the Western cultural traditions. What exemplified Islam for him was the decision by one early Muslim ruler to ransom Christian prisoners in exchange for works of Greek philosophy, medicine and mathematics. He wanted that curiosity, and generosity of spirit. But, at eighty three, he got a fanatic's knife in his neck. Contemporary Islam's fate seems to be encapsulated in Naguib's sad life.
Thereafter, mass madness followed mass madness, by the failed Muslim states, through their extremist agents and by changing networks of Terror. The USSR rashly invaded Afghanistan. In its equally mindless anti-Communist fixation, the USA financed armed jihadis and Al Qaida with arms and money. The mindless superpower – mindless even after Korea, after Vietnam, after the failures in Iran and the Bay of Pigs – then left this deadly inheritance of arms, money, and the drug trade to the world's wildest and most fanatic tribes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
There followed two decades of the rise of Terror everywhere, the change of roles and the mutual ‘Satanisation’ of America and the Muslim world. It reached its Crescendo at the amazing, ingenious destruction of the blazing WTO towers on 9/11, a Pearl Harbor shock of a mindless superpower; which, leaving the Afghanistan-Pakistan terrorist problem unfinished, plunged illegally, fire-power mad, into the quagmire of Iraq, which it had armed in the Iraq-Iran war. This is the short-sighted ‘Halliburtonisation’ of American foreign policy; a deal today, a disaster tomorrow. It went in to "shock and awe" the new enemy, Iraq. It failed to plan for the peace to follow. Its great brain tests failed to tell White House-Pentagon minds that they were entering the world's oldest, most vicious civil war of fourteen centuries, between the Sunnis and the Shias, apart from the long repression of the Kurds. Neither legal, nor political wisdom taught White House and Pentagon that, in the absence of WMD's after years of search by neutral, competent authorities, war in Iraq was unjustified, illegal, and fraught with dangerous consequences. ‘Halliburtonisation’ of foreign policy had a high cost. Forced regime change smacks of old imperialism, not a mature power promoting freedom and democracy. Virgil once wrote: "Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad". American foreign policy makers never read Virgil.
The intelligent world began to wonder:
- How a superpower lacked the mind to learn no lessons from its recent past history in Latin America, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan; the last two being the snake-pits of Islamic terrorists;
- How a superpower thought it could use fire-power alone to control the Arab oil world, and bag the post-war reconstruction business of billions, the old ‘Halliburtonisation’ of foreign and defense policies;
- How a hundred million Arabs and two billion Muslims in the world could accept an imposed-Israel after decades of warring, without an acceptable co-existence settlement with Palestine;
- How America could ignore soft power in a mindful rethink of foreign policy, and then childishly ask itself: "Why do they hate us?"
To confirm this prolonged mindlessness, a senior American General in Iraq also wondered: "Tell me how this is going to end". The world too, would like to know that, despite America's top intellectual resources, its world class universities, its famous Think Tanks, its powerful media; how its democratic people could launch such a reckless war in Iraq, with an unfinished anti-Terrorist war in Afghanistan, a nursery of Terrorism in its client state, Pakistan, and with clear objectives which its Generals could see. The world would also like to know how President George Bush, posing after 9/11 as the global champion of Freedom and Democracy, could attempt to trust them, even with war on hostile tribal states, and war lords, but happily do business with friendly despots and military dictators – hardly an inheritance of Jefferson and Lincoln and Roosevelt.
If there is a Koran belt, America has its famous Bible belt, of which President Bush has been the latest political Cromwell. American evangelists shape political and social policies like Islamic clerics. Pentecostalism is a fast growing religion in America and the West with one hundred forty thousand American missionaries. Yet, the Islamic world sees America as ‘Satan’, as Mammon, as the world's most powerful and brazen supporter of pornography. They don't see the improbable mix of Pornography and Puritanism, as they fail to see dichotomies in their own culture.
Neither of the main adversaries of the Terrorist war is able to see or understand the other beyond stereotypes, and stereotypes are dog food for mass propaganda. Both believe in their own moral sanctity; both believe in "shock and awe"; both believe in the power of propaganda. They are not concerned with pragmatic, negotiated solutions. These extremists use states, and states use them in geo-politics. They are networks of violence with mixed motives in jihadic ideology, to killing technologies, financed by narcotics, by hawala and Saudi money. They are like ghosts who appear as blast killers, and then vanish. Their world is truly witnessing a Virgilian madness among "those whom the gods wish to destroy", but who go mad in the name of their gods! How to overcome that madness behind all the many-sided forces behind this age of Terror has become the immediate global problem of the twenty-first century.
Terror II: The Eye Begins To See
Few, if any Terrorists and non-Terrorists could match the moral and spiritual suffering of the Dalai Lama over fifty years. Yet he, a respected global religious leader had a realistic message for all in acute conflict conditions, when he said, "The enemy is your teacher". He left it to the world to know this wise lesson for all jihadis, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Hindus; perhaps, sharing each other's mindsets of dogma and violence, though each satanizes the other. It is a dilemma in wide spaces of extremist human experience, from individuals to clerics and evangelists, to Terrorist organizations, to the state, and their political interconnections. Besides the Dalai Lama, my witnesses to our time in this chapter range from Huntingdon to Simon Peres, Mahathir, Phil Zuckerman, General Musharraff, Wahiduddin Khan, Mohammed Arkun, and Gilles Kepel, all advocating more sanity.
As one who has come a long way in India’s communal hate and killing, let me offer a range of learning from enemies on all sides of these human volcanoes. As the West Asian Islamic fires are largely of the West’s making, now largely concentrated in America’s hegemonic power, I wish to begin there, extending to the Islamic world, to India, and the wider worlds.
If the historical and mythological roots of the conflict are in the harsh Semitic worlds of God's "Chosen People" (less than half of mankind), of the Believers and the Non-Believers (and homelands around holy places for each), and of the new geopolitics of oil in past and present imperial mindsets; the enemy teaches us to change and modify those mindsets first, if we are not to plunge into endless mutual destruction. The Weapons of Mass Destruction, being sought in the sands of Iraq, are there in those monolithic minds. America, often speaking on behalf of "the international community", has to genuinely change its unilateral imperial mind-frame to act maturely within and for "the international community" through a strengthened UN system, which the US itself has undermined; even under-paying its clues.
Learning the lessons of its past antagonizing failures in South America and West Asia, it has to control and check the 'Halliburtonisation' of its foreign policy. Remember Eisenhower's forgotten warning of "the military-industrial complex". What is imagined as good for American business is not necessarily good for America or the world. Apart from wider troubles, it brings home American body bags, and since 9/11 is a major threat to America's heartland. It is now losing the protection of two oceans, and the confidence of the world. Even in the geopolitics of oil, so gushing in the apparent ‘Clash of Civilizations’, America and the West need to learn from the Italian oilman, Paolo Scaroni, that big Western oil companies, and the governments behind them cannot be sovereign. Just as the Anglo-French learnt earlier, they could not be sovereign in the Suez Canal. The states owning oil and gas are sovereign, the rest have to negotiate and trade. The market in the long run will be the arbiter. Experience has shown that when the Pentagon (With Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries in the revolving doors of the American State and the American business) tries to fight business wars, America, the oil/gas states, and the rest of the world pay a 'jihadic' price; and when faiths, democracy, values and rising oil prices produce Terror WMD's beyond anyone's control, White House and Pentagon only compound global problems, when they become the instruments of the Enrons and the Halliburtons.
It is high time, after Vietnam, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, and even little Somaliland, that America learnt the limits of 'hard power', and dependence on fire power. Iraq is the latest lesson, as America’s longest war ending in a futile quagmire of death, the graveyard of a superpower's virtual unilateralism, ignoring the UN; blissfully ignorant of the realities of the Islamic world. Apart from a dangerous ignorance exhibited of the tribal, sect-ridden, Shia-Sunni Islamic world, Uncle Sam looks ridiculous wearing the hats of Halliburton and Abe Lincoln; a Freedom Evangelist seeking the kingdom of Oil. Hard power, demonization, and hard heads have only led to the worst crusade of the West, and with a terrible global price tag for others too.
That super power needs to grow to maturity with the better use of soft-power, diplomacy which learns from the mistakes of history, and which respects other cultures in a growing multi-cultural America and the world. No less a person than Joseph S. Nye Junior of Harvard, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, spoke of the untapped strength of Soft Power in Limits to American Power. He cautioned against American hegemony with hard power alone. He wrote: "power is the ability to effect outcomes you want, and, if necessary, to change the behavior of others to make this happen". Today, not only are the foundations of power moving away from military force – the awesomeness of nuclear weapons have made nuclear powers "muscle bound" – post industrial democratic societies have lost "the warrior ethic"; geo-economics has become more important than geo-politics, markets are more important than munitions. Nye says, "This aspect of power – getting others to want what you want – I call soft power". It can set new political agendas, shared models of culture, the arts, music, lifestyles, and a change of past hard attitudes. As distinct from hard command power, often accompanied with myths of invincibility, soft-power helps to make states and societies more legitimate, more acceptable. Soft-power induces better listening, more receptivity, and mutual trust. There is no need to Satanize. In the real world, the judicious mix of the soft and the hard power is the end of diplomacy and geo-politics.
Before finding the potentials of new soft power in trade cultural relations, and its great universities in the UN itself, America needs to examine its own uneconomic, vulnerable, inequitable lifestyle, with a misguided energy and defense policy. One of its most intelligent citizens, Fritz of Capra, the author of, The Web of Life, significantly points to:
· America's wasteful economic system in oil extravagance; an average ounce of food has to travel sixteen hundred kilometers to be eaten.
· The US would not need to import any Persian Gulf Oil (With its horrendous military implications) if it increased the fuel efficiency of its light vehicles by a mere 2.7 miles per gallon, which can be done with the new super-efficient, hybrid electric vehicles, doubling fuel efficiencies from twenty miles per gallon to forty miles per gallon. Instead, Bush's government and Congress prefer to spend over two hundred billion of the US tax payers' money, which has also killed thousands of people, including Americans.
· So, misguided energy policies, at the cost of the environment in America and the world, have misguided America's foreign and defense policies. Such brash policies are unsustainable in ecological, economic, or peace terms.
And when it comes to international exchange of trade and culture, it is simply put by Indra Nooyi, now at the head of Pepsi, she pointed to the insensitivity and intransigence of Americans abroad. In her address to the Columbia Business School (2005) she said, "What is most critical in my analogy (of five fingers and the hand) in the five major continents is that each of us in the USA must be careful to extend our arm in either business or the political sense, we take pains to ensure we are giving a hand, not the finger. We can send the wrong message unintentionally... Now, as never before, it is important that we give the world a hand, not the finger".
So America and the West have to rethink their lifestyles, their energy and foreign policies, if they want a more peaceful planet. No less.
America and the West, whilst taking realistic note of their security against Terrorists, need to appreciate better the historical causes in the political carving-up and loss of self esteem of the Islamic world in its heartland, West Asia. The last days of Anglo-French imperialism, and the later entry of America after the Suez crisis, and the embroilment of Israel and Palestine have put a heavy responsibility on the West itself for the recent fires of resentment in West Asia.
In global geo-politics, the Anglo-American West needs to learn from its own imperial history in the corporate sector, in what I have called the Halliburtonisation of the foreign policy. The East India Company dug its own grave by impoverishing the peasants and the artisans in India, while it got its tea chests thrown into the water at the Boston Tea party in America; a lesson for America and Europe in WTO, apart from the Islamic world. By the end of the twentieth century, the best and the most durable MNCs of the West had learnt that the critical difference between the winners and the losers is the sensitivity of the winners to the customers, the workers, the government policies, and the local cultures. A major lesson for Western governments to learn, before the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ gets worse at high cost to the Western people themselves – no less a lesson for the non-Western governments.
Having touched the oil problem, a central bleeding issue remains between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Without going into its long history after World War I, the recent Simon Peres paradigm shift should seriously engage the diplomacy of the Israeli and Western world. His new hypothesis calls for new realistic recognitions; that the recent Lebanon war is a "new form of battle", in which, "the battle front and the home front are largely blurred"; terrorists are "hidden parasites"; and significantly, "the arms of Israel were not designed for wars of this nature". "What are the lessons from these changes?" he asks. They point to the "failure of the past hard power of the Six Days War".
First, forms of deterrence must change with changes in the battlefield with terrorists equipped with missiles and media; very different to the classic Six Days War with Muslim state armies. He believes it requires a new technology beyond the earlier fire-power, new surveillance tools, deterrence based on miniaturized arms, or remote-control robots, an intelligence based on nano-technology; a new "range of daring and innovative technology for the long term". Second, he favors the "restoration of lost control of their territories and armed forces", by the Lebanon and the Palestine authorities. “Israel must support the Lebanese Prime Minister and the Palestine President", a belated recognition by Israel, especially after the democratic victory of Hamas and the rise of a hybrid Hezbollah, half-state-half-guerilla. Israel will continue trying to negotiate with Hezbollah; with a significant "alternative partnership involving Israel and Palestine by the economic route, "rather than the political one". He now realizes that changes which have come since World War II have not been out of military interventions, "but of economic advances". "If we can privatize a part of the economy, why not privatize a part of the peace?” a significant recognition, that power should pass to the people from political parties and governments. Most significant: "No longer is the adage, 'a people will reside alone', valid. There are no frontlines anymore in war or peace. "Coming from an inexperienced Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, this seems to lead to new Zionist mindsets of co-existence with trade and less hard boundaries, a new recognition of past problems, and new approaches, including the non-state involvement of people, the worst sufferers. It opens new windows for the resolution of a core conflict area, between the three children of Abraham. But it calls for statesmanship between Israel and Palestine, and all of them. If the Jews have suffered ‘ghettoization’ and worse for centuries, they should not ‘ghettoize’ and hunt Palestinians. With a peace founded on coexistence in the Holy Land, with saner energy policies in America and the West, there will be no need for an American oil empire in West Asia. Then Terror and Jihad could abate, and Islam would feel less threatened. Most alienation everywhere can then abate.
Coming to the Islamic world, it has no future in a wounded and unreal Utopia, when the whole world is challenged by the forces of a coming-together globalization, which challenges every orthodox belief and past imperialisms. All peoples are groping, wanting a more peaceful world for the better lives of their children. This challenge, the Islamic people should know, is equally a challenge to the non-Islamic people. It is a challenge to humanity on a shrinking planet with finite resources, especially oil. A wise Islamic leadership can not ‘ghettoize’ itself from an interdependent and inevitable globalization, in finding a new identity. Islamic leaders need to give a creative lead in that larger role, and cease to exploit “Empty Pockets and Angry Minds”, and past manifestations of low self-esteem. Islam needs to recreate its own civilization in a modern, global twenty-first century, not the Arabia of the eleventh century. And that applies to all the earlier religion-based civilizations.
In the great contemporary thesis of the Clash of Civilizations (Samuel P. Huntingdon), Islam finds its place as a wounded civilization, one which having lost its past power and prestige, has found itself the victim of the non-Islamic civilizations, especially of the powerful West. So it has turned within in paranoia, and with hate and violence without, towards those it sees as different, as the satanic non-believers in its core ideas, especially the West; and those it has wounded in its politics and economics. In the Economist (October 4, 2003), Hendrik Weller saw three grievances which drive Islam. They were: first, western imperialism which destroyed Islamic states and power, and made them subservient; second, Israel was thrust on the Islamic West Asia by the West to placate its own conscience in persecuting and ghettoizing the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust; third, the exploitation of oil by the West. So he found historical political grievances expressed through religion. Huntingdon calls it "civilization", something wider than religion, things like "faith, family, blood and belief, what people identify with and what they will fight and die for". This may be a very plausible explanation for modern conflicts around modern wars of Terrorism, and one which the Muslims themselves may acknowledge as the basis for their separatist world, and their grievances against the other. The ‘Clash of Civilization’ theory sees the present in the past; though it is only the political military aspect in civilization. Kenneth Clark, a historian of Western Civilization rightly differentiates: "It may be difficult to define civilization, but not so difficult to recognize barbarism"; barbarism on all sides of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Even civilizations carry their barbarisms with them.
The real problem of that past is to see the future in the changing world of the present; the world in which past boundaries are breaking down or are being crossed by millions, whether national or religious, traditional or ethnic. The new change-inducing paradigms are Human Rights, Human Freedoms, the fusion of Identities as in fusion music and dress, new humane developmental answers to poverty and human suffering, and new human associations. True civilizations go beyond harsh power centers to cultures which produce the highest in the human spirit, as in Sufi, Bhakti, Zen and Renaissance; as in art, science, philosophy, literature, architecture, prosperity and well-being.
If Fundamentalism has been creeping even into post Islamic secular states, e.g. Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, it is because of the failure of these states to give good governance, reduce poverty, and make a better life for the people with more freedom. It has been the failure of the Muslim secular governance, on the top of the historical dominance of the West in the last two hundred years. So, Fundamentalism and Terror are the products of internal failure and external dominance. So, the Muslim rulers are as responsible as the Western imperialism, and more so in failed fundamentalist states, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Somaliland, and Sudan.
As this book is woven around anecdote and personal experience, let me offer an example of the failure of the Indian Muslim leaders in a secular democracy. Strangely, it was at an MRA meeting some years ago. An Indian Muslim leader, an M.P. was one of the main speakers. His career had been built on Muslim grievances, on Minority discrimination, against which he had been championing the cause of the Indian Muslims. I offered him two examples of minorities in India, who had, with their own efforts, and without state help, pulled themselves out of poverty to a large extent. They were the Parsis and the Ismailis on the West Coast. He, a Bihari, dismissed it as invalid because of the few numbers of these communities, as compared with the millions of Muslims in the North. When I asked him why, over a hundred years, the Muslim leaders could not uplift even half a dozen districts in the North where Muslims were in significant numbers to have political clout, and whose votes they counted on, e.g. Aligarh, Moradabad, Rampur and Azamgarh, he had no answer. This only confirmed the fact that the Muslim leaders like the other political leaders in under-developed societies, seem to have a vested political interest in keeping their people under-developed. Besides, both the Hindus and the Muslims have been most backward in these worst governed states of India – Bihar and U.P. Both have suffered from bad governance.
When religious leaders rant against atheists and agnostics as the makers of sinful, suffering societies; when an American tele-evangelist, Jerry Falwell put the blame for 9/11 on "a nation which deserts God, and expels God from culture"; it is interesting to find this thesis put to the research test of a sociologist, Phil Zuckerman of Pitzer College, California. His hypothesis was to find out if the least religious nations were strongholds of crime, poverty and disease, and if the most religious were models of societal health. He found the reverse. Most of the countries listed among the top twenty five countries, with high rates of "organic atheism or agnosticism" were among the societal healthy, when checked on the 2004 U.N. Human Development Index of one hundred seventy seven countries. It should be noted that "organic atheism" is different from "coercive atheism" in countries like North Korea, China, and the former USSR. Significantly, societies with non-existent rates of "organic atheism/agnosticism" were among the most destitute, with low life expectancy, high infant mortality, gender inequality, high homicide, poverty, HIV infection and high illiteracy rates. Religious countries also scored higher on suicide. The high clergy of God seem to produce the least humane, healthy and developed societies!
If there is one clear, central fact in the problem of Islamic Fundamentalism and Terror, it is that Islamic peoples have to find their own answers in the world of the twenty first century; more so, because the radical, political Islam is seen as an "armed doctrine" and sanctified as jihad. What are the possible answers? Muslim people need to begin by asking honest questions to their own selves, no matter how heroic the Terrorists may appear. First, how come, if the jihadic war is against the non-believers, and especially the imperialist America, Terror has killed more fellow Muslims than the non-Muslims, especially in the Muslim countries and societies breeding jihadic terrorism, as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the Kashmir Valley, Somalia, Sudan, and Bangladesh? Is jihadic terrorism so blindly suicidal? Second, while some leading Terrorist figures have been given a heroic halo, how have the Terrorist societies benefited in human development, in the international Human Development Index, under their own Muslim rulers? How far should the Muslim rulers of these Muslim societies be made accountable, before mad hate and killing, especially of innocent people, including women and children, hardly approved by the Koran, can be regarded as holy and justifiable? How far is it true that the Muslim rulers – kings, military dictators, tribal warlords, power-seeking clerics, money-making narcotics traders – are themselves responsible for the backwardness of their societies, and for keeping them in low health, education, and development capability, in making a fair share of a developing, richer world? Consider Nigeria, Somaliland, and Bangladesh. How far has oil wealth itself created unenterprising subsidy societies, rather than competitive ones? If the Islamic Ummah has true meaning, how come the entire Islamic history has been ridden by the most prolonged and fierce civil war in the history of fourteen thousand years, among the Sunnis and the Shias, soon after the Prophet's demise, and among the modern Muslim societies, between and within the states? If jihad has a primarily internal dimension in making one's life purer, healthier, and saner, these questions should be addressed first by all the followers of the Prophet.
Then there is the new seed-bed of Terror among immigrants to Europe. There is a conflict in the psyche of the second generation of Muslims, whose families migrated for their own economic benefit, who know no Arabic, who have retained a Muslim identity, who have imbibed a bit of western culture, education, and technology, but have now become a recruiting base for jihadi training to Pakistan and the West Asia. These second generation Muslims have a dual problem in their psyche. How to live in their earlier choice of country, giving them free citizenship, economic livelihood, and a new life? They feel victimized as a minority, and rebel as terrorist recruits; fundamentalism appeals. They feel minority victims in the new society, and align with Islamic Terror groups abroad. What is the solution to this dilemma? The modern world is characterized by minority migrant societies in multi-cultural contexts. The alienated minorities can best be helped, a) by themselves, understanding their choices and their futures; and b) by the removal of any sense of victimization by the majority. The minority rebels cannot have it both ways – to be rebels, and to support the fundamentalists abroad. Both, the majority and the minority have to move to the middle ground of sane multi-cultural cooperation.
Then, why not reclaim the cultural, scientific, and artistic gifts of the best centuries of the Islamic history, which the non-Islamic world still admires? Why breed a hate and Terror which comes from a loss of these, and a true self-esteem? How can contemporary modern societies compete in peace in science, technology, and higher standards of living, as in Malaysia and the UAE? In inaugurating the International Conference on Science and Technology, General Musharraff himself said: "Muslims form one-fourth of the humanity, but we are the poorest, the most backward, the unhealthiest, and indeed the most deprived and the weakest of the human race". Ironic as it may be coming from the head of the Pakistani state after Kargil, one of the two most active breeders of state-bred, ISI-led Terror. The Arab Human Development Report 2000, confirms "one in five Arabs still live on less than two dollars a day, per capita growth of 0.5% is the lowest in the world, outside the Sub-Saharan Africa; almost half of the Arab women are illiterate; with fifteen per cent unemployed, among the highest in the world". Arab governments have bred their own social instability, which in turn has bred Terror. Rafiq Zakaria points out that unlike many contemporary Muslim rulers, Muhammad uplifted the poor, the deprived, the oppressed and that "Osama bin Laden is the creation of America in the Cold War period", in the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan. How issues and political alignments get confused.
There have been good and ardent Muslims who are asking their fellow Muslims to rethink. At the tenth Islamic Summit in Malaysia (2003) President Mahathir himself said, "But think. We are up against a people (Jews) who think. They survived two thousand years of persecution not by hitting back, but by thinking”. He added, "Angry people cannot think properly...But the attacks solve nothing. The Muslims simply get more oppressed”. So, Simon Peres' paradigm shift on Palestine and other close Arab states should offer opportunity for Mahathir's "rethink". Akbar Ahmed of Pakistan refers to the hyper "asabiyya" which stands in the way of a reconstructed Islam, perpetuating oriental despotism without civic society. The Indian Maulana Wahiduddin Khan reminds the root word for Islam in Arabic is "silm", which means peace. The Quran, he maintains, is a Book of Peace: "Do not go to excess in your religion" (4:171). The Koran says the policy of reconciliation is the best policy" (4: 128), and in 5:64, the Quran states: "Each time they kindle the fire of war, God extinguishes it”. How can Terrorists then be Allah's representatives?
Rethinking Islam Today (2003) by an Algerian Emeritus Professor at the Sorbonne, Mohammad Arkun is perhaps the most penetrating, with the strength and the limitation of being very scholarly. He argues for a new iftihad (realization), as Christianity did after its Dark Ages in the Renaissance to create its modern civilization since. He argues to stop "irrelevant confrontation", and as happened in the highest days of Islamic civilization, to "think the unthinkable", "to recapitulate Islamic knowledge and to confront it with contemporary knowledge", as "we are in a crisis of legitimacy". Significantly and pointedly, "we have to think more clearly about new conditions (not old rigid orthodoxy), and ways to think Islam today as Renaissance Islam, as it were. This rethinking is as much necessary for the Muslim societies as for the non-Muslim ones. "Thinking about our new historical situation is a positive enterprise". Very significantly he says, "The Quran insists on the necessity of man to listen, to be aware, to reflect, to understand, and to meditate"; not blind belief. He rightly points to the universal "rupture between ethics and materialism", not a simplistic political doctrine of an ethical Islam alone, against a materialist West. The other universal problem calling for Renaissance challenge is "the conflict between meaning and power", which men in power avoid or manipulate to their advantage. In short, Arkun is addressing the basic concerns for both, the Islamic and the non-Islamic world.
In The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, Gilles Kepel recognizes the Arab masses feel they are kicked around, and that there is "kalam fadi" or hot air in Arab as in all politics, and that the Arab world is in the predicament of being fragmented. So he believes that the war for the Muslim minds in the future will lie with the Muslims in the European cities. The Muslim immigrants will create "an Islamic Vanguard" that could offer "a new vision of the faith", and a way out of "the deadened politics which has paralyzed their countries of origin". Much will depend on Europe's encouraging or discouraging reactions, with its own critical internal problem with immigrant Muslims.
The War for and against Terrorism involves many spaces and many approaches. States have to act, before and after the event, for the security of their societies within their nation-state legitimacy. In that context, Terrorism is a crime, a crime against all societies, as the innocents of all societies suffer, and civilized life is destroyed. Terrorism as a state of mind in both, the Islamic and the non-Islamic societies, can only be challenged and changed in human minds – individual and collective. This second view has been overlooked in a preoccupation with the first; yet it is fundamental to all Fundamentalisms. Even before Terrorism, it used to be said that wars start "in the minds of men". All the sane, rational forces of modern civilization need to concentrate on that battle of minds, and in both the Islamic and the non-Islamic societies. Reciprocity and reconciliation are the keys to thinking the unthinkable, if Terror-bred, bad governance, human suffering is to diminish as its seed-bed. Good governance itself is one of the best answers, especially in multi-faith, multi-cultural societies. It is no accident that Terrorism and insurrection have sprouted in the worst governed countries and regions of the world.
A central issue in the Islamic world, both internal and external, is democratization after centuries of secular and religions autocracy, and the reputation of an "armed doctrine". American pressures in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia have led to the response, that if you have elections – the external symbol of democracy – you will not get Jefferson or Lincoln, but the Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The longer conflicts of hard power over soft power continue, making it more likely that the democratic expression will be Fundamentalist. In the West and the Liberal Islam – no less Liberal Democracy in all the non-Western societies – that Liberal Democracy must grow from a good, stable governance around social development in health, education, and employment; and around the preconditions for democracy in the rule of law, individual and property rights, an independent judiciary, and local civic responsibility. Democratic capitalism needs to replace feudal capitalism; economic realities for the common man need to replace the hot dreams to the power of the sheikhs, the mullahs, and the generals. The way may better be shown by moderate Islamic societies, where these have grown, e.g. Malaysia, Indonesia, and Indian Islam, than by Washington and London establishments; not least by immigrant Muslims in the democratic societies of the West. That is a task of at least a generation.
I began the last chapter by saying no other country in the world had a thousand-year experience with Islam, in conquest, in a "composite culture", and in communal riots. With the world's second largest Muslim population, and that past experience, India too needs to rethink its alien policy of secularism in a country besotted by religions. There has to be something deeper than western secularism to strike religious chords. That space lies in two universals – Islam’s Sufism and Hindu Bhakti. Firstly, in the soft power over mind, in child and adult, in education, civic affairs, and politics, a Sufi-Bhakti inspiration is the best hope. Secondly, India must cease to fight long past mind battles with Mahmud Ghazni and Aurangzeb, with its damaging legacy of division and hate. Thirdly, it needs to recapture the long-lost "composite culture" in art, architecture, music, the Arabic and Urdu languages, and complimentary economic activities. That composite culture should include all the communities, not the Muslims alone. The limited Minorities Commission primarily confined to reservations and quotas should be transformed to a 'Human Disadvantaged Commission', in a land of only political minorities to include all communities. In the political sphere, the majority and the minority are myths. There has never been a political majority in the last thousand years. India is a country of only political minorities. So, to contend with Islamic Terrorism, Indian diplomacy needs to ally itself and its internal minorities in cohesive development policies with moderate Islamic countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE, to build bridges of peaceful diplomacy and shared economic development. Such an approach, with the help of these countries, could then be extended to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq and Iran; hopefully with wiser support from China, in its own interest.
While one hopes that the Muslim citizens in the Western states, especially their Imams, will find reasonable via media in the agonizing conflicts between new citizenship and old religion, between a new, more open, and an old more restrictive culture. Where is the "organic approach" to the problem beyond the state policies and laws? Where is the movement on both sides to meetings of minds and hearts? Chauvinists, governments and the radical Imams don't walk that difficult challenging via media. Past history, from Bosnia to Pakistan to Bangladesh is a minefield. Western societies are modern sociological Labs. As a historian, I sometimes wonder whether some clues lie in a better appreciation of past centuries, when a cultured Islam brought Greek philosophy and geometry, and Indian mathematics and astronomy to Southern Europe, and Islam's high Iberian civilization to Spain and Portugal; lighting the way to Europe's own Renaissance. Similarly, some clues in Akbar’s India, in mixed marriage, the clear sharing of state power, and Akbar's seeking of an Ilm above different religions. Not least in centuries of India's shared economic interests between the Muslim artisan and the Hindu trader; not least in the millennia of shared passionate Sufism and Bhakti. Modern globalization on a vulnerable planet needs so much such a Sufi / Bhakti universal spirit.
The twenty first century could then see the growth of a unique modern Asian civilization in the Asia-Pacific century. Buddhist Asia too needs to play its true compassionate role to quench the past fires. No less to change the colored pictures of different worlds. Poverty is black and lean; Terrorism is brown and bearded; Materialism is white and naked. Each then lead to divergent, stereotype thinking. The twenty first century Lab, Temple and Market need to create a Fusion Civilization, as the Fusion Music has led the way as a new force for a new human soul. With such a convulsive ingathering of the world's plural peoples, the human mind needs a new, saner, peaceful framework of remembering and forgetting. The poet Theodore Roethke said, "In a dark time the eye begins to see". The recent times have been so dark; a million eyes need to see well. And then to understand that most complex mechanism on the planet, the human mind.
Even the strong Maoist agnostic China is beginning to see that non-Jihadic religion promotes "harmonious society" and "social order". It is a rejection of the earlier Maoist idea of class struggle, or the religion of hard ideology and a secular jihad. Official China is encouraging the revival of Confucianism and promoting institutes of Confucianism. There are lavish new temples, halls for ancestor worship, churches and mosques. But, Fundamentalist Islam in
Xinjiang confronts the old fundamentalist Maoism, the confrontation of the hard religions and the secular jihadic mindsets seen in the previous chapter. Hard fundamentalist, West Asian Islam might learn this lesson of a religion of peace from the agnostic, Marxist China in the next generation or two.
BEYOND HUNTINGDON'S CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
For at least the last two centuries, the West has misappropriated "Civilization". Huntingdon’s recent, Clash of Civilizations, between Islam and Christianity is the latest example, in which, as may be seen in the earlier chapters on Terror, Western geo-politics has been the root cause of Islam's Terror malaise. One of my father's World War I medals (Mesopotamia then), has inscribed on it "The Great War For Civilization, 1914 -1918"; which fathered Palestine, Israel and the Middle East conflicts of the last century. My World War II medals (Burma theatre) have no such presumption. Actually, the First World War, precipitated by the assassination of an Austrian Arch-Duke, saw the end of Europe's dynastic empires and the emergence of America as the Uno Supremo. The Second saw the bankruptcy of Europe (Marshall Plan), and the end of the colonial empires, followed by the rise of two communist empires of the USSR and China; the same old power-propaganda games. At the end of the century, Huntingdon perceived the Clash of the West and Islam, embroiled in the geo-politics of petroleum, as his famous Clash of Civilizations; with the Bush propaganda of the "axis of evil", and the Satanization of both sides. In the process, serious global problems seemed overshadowed by civilzational Satans. There has been a thin line between civilization and old power games.
In the two decades after my retirement, micro developments in our small world in the Himalaya (Uttaranchal), and in India generally, not only seemed to anticipate its macro proportions globally, they went far beyond Huntingdon's ‘Clash of Civilizations’ in an age of more than Terror. Such growing issues as demographic impacts, environment and climate changes, civilzational ailments, and the quality of life, offer a more balanced outline of the problems of our time, and a better insight with the complexities of globalization. It is strange, how intelligent, professional individuals do not give enough thought to that larger unfolding. We are all too absorbed in our micro worlds, especially when they are failing, and we are struggling to cope with life from day to day. For modern man, the micro life is becoming harassing and soulless, a struggle for survival with too much. And the macro life is too large, too confusing, beyond comprehension and reach.
In 1975, Dr. D. D. Pant, just appointed Vice-Chancellor of the new Kumaon Hill University came to me and said, "I have been a teacher of Physics all my life. My government thinks the job of founding a university is done by the appointment of a Vice-Chancellor. Can you help?" I told him if he intended his university to be like others in U.P. state plains, I was not his man. But if he wished to extend the learning process to the realities of the hill people and their eco-systems in the field, I could help. I gave him a paper on the subject as a Diwali present in 1975. There was a most encouraging meeting of local administration officers and university faculty on the subject in Nainital. But, like most meetings in India, it didn’t produce results. We had forgotten the good old British principle that half of good administration is follow-up.
After a few years, Dr. K. S. Valaiya and Dr. J. S. Singh, the Heads of the Geology and the Ecology departments, respectively, came to me in Bhimtal in despair, saying they were fed up with the Sirkari (government) culture of the university, and that I "should do something". Here were three scientists at sea. That was the beginning of the Central Himalayan Environment Association of academicians and professionals, set up as an NGO with a Ford Foundation grant. In the years to come, we were absorbed in the acute Man, Environment, Climate Change problems of the Central Himalaya, one of India's poorest regions with serious problems of deforestation, soil erosion, drying up of hill springs, deficit carrying capacities, and an unfavorable hill/plains resource flow. We plunged into Sustainable Watershed Management in the Khulgad sub-catchment. We saw cold weather birds disappear, warm weather birds appear, the major peach crop dying out, and the wild life disappearing. We talked of ecological change. Nature and climate were changing in our micro world. None then were aware of the macro proportions of global climate change, or what to do about mountain region development. Plains officials had little idea of the fundamental differences of hill development and its ecological changes. All this was in our micro world two decades before Kyoto. We were little voices in the wind in a corner.
It was also a time of disillusionment with the Nehruvian socialist state planning, in which huge outlays led to low outcomes, with mounting corruption and inefficiencies; what was called a low "Hindu rate" of GNP growth of only three or four percent per annum after twenty five years of the planning state. It was a prelude to Rajiv Gandhi's discovery in 1985 that eighty five percent of irrigation expenditure since planning began had not delivered irrigation water. Later research showed that eighty five percent of the people of India were dissatisfied with all government delivery systems. "Upar ka hawa", as the old Kumaoni farmer said to me – all planning development was just a movement of upper air currents; no rain on the ground. A hill University Vice-Chancellor and an ordinary Hillman, both from Kumaon, were witness to the local scene.
Then, at top of the bankruptcy of the Nehruvian state in 1991, the propagandist demolition of the Ayodhya disused mosque, the revival of extremist Hinduism in the land of Ram, the communal riots and the Bombay blasts, brought us into the age of Terror, and Huntingdon's Clash of Civilizations. All gods seemed to fail, the ideological and the religious. But extremist Terror and sectarianism was the frustrated response in the name of God. Extremism and exclusivity go together.
In a nutshell, in the previous two decades, we were experiencing in our micro world, what was to become the global problems of the environment, climate change, demographic pressures on limited land and non-renewable resources, failed governments, failing development, ethnic communal conflict, and Terror, in the macro sphere. All these went simultaneously and far beyond Huntingdon's hypothesis. The Twentieth century was ending in a melting pot of deep and widespread uncertainties and fears. Globalization offered immense opportunities and also held calamitous threats in a world of disparities, dissatisfactions and conflicts. Nature and Man were in turmoil, beyond the intense overt pre-occupation with growing Environment – climate problems, Jihad, geo-politics, failing societies and governments, and civilizational clashes, besides, a threatening rise in oil prices, the fuel of economic growth, an impending global energy crisis. In this mix, the chaos theory emerged.
Strangely, about this time, a significant witness to all civilizations, Jared Diamond produced a thoughtful book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It deals with old and contemporary societies. In most cases, collapse is due to environmental reasons, climate change, hostile neighbors, and a society's response to challenges. Some indigenous communities know how to adapt and survive. Those that do not survive are because of cultural blind spots, scientific ignorance, and a rigid reluctance to change. Acute cases at present are China, where three hundred thousand people die every year from air pollution, the price of higher GDP growth based on carbon, and Montana in USA grappling with economic and environmental problems with the ravages of logging and mining. Both China and Montana are lessons for the rest of the world. Iceland, seeking to be the first hydrogen economy, is offered as a success story, through tough-minded community decisions. Collapse, with all its lessons, is relevant for most people who do not see beyond their noses, and those who cannot see beyond micro worlds in an interdependent world. Central African states, Pakistan and Bangladesh seem to be collapsing soon after birth.
Today, all social realities seem precarious. "All societies are constructions in the face of chaos", write Berger and Luckman in, Social Construction of Reality. Take hidden Demography, which, unlike religion, jihad, or ideology, stirs no souls. Yet demography can be destiny. Behind the huge thrust of globalization is the unprecedented global population growth of over six billion people in just the last two centuries, accompanied by the disappearance of Nature's species and bio-diversity. The Red List of threatened species shows a decline of sixteen thousand. Our children will never see tigers in the wild, or know the polar bears. Behind Islamic Terror is the fear of the high growth of Muslim population over three per cent per annum, or about twice that of non-Muslims. While the fear of populations in the developed worlds of Europe and Japan is shrinking, there is the accompanying fear of the mounting Diaspora from less developed to more developed countries, with changes of cultural heterogeneity and social frictions. Immigration of labor to such shrinking countries, once considered an economic necessity, now appears as a threat to social stability. Demographic change in the richest countries, altering the proportions of working and retired people, now makes Social Security in the West far less affordable. There is a rethink on the welfare state, on the old socialism and the new capitalism, between the extremes of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
In A Short History of Progress by Richard Wright (2004 Massey Lectures, Canada), there is a telling tale of empires from Sumer to Rome to China, Aztec and Maya, down to European colonial empires exploiting Nature in the lust for life and power. Now we have seen the USSR’s eco-devastation from the Elbe to the Pacific, with the nuclear ravaging of Chernobyl in between. The world's biggest gormandizer, the USA with only five percent of the world's population, consumes a third of its resources, tantamount to plunder and waste; a "use today, discard tomorrow" civilization. It is not sustainable and threatens more global imbalances and conflicts; after sixty two million were dead in two World Wars, plus another forty million in the other Twentieth century wars. The lust to live so inequitably and so unethically and the lust to kill for that obese life-style go together. Such lust in just one life! "Modern civilization squeezes the last drop from Nature and humanity", says Wright. Inherent in that are the future clashes far greater than Terrorism. At the time of the Renaissance of this great Western civilization, Shakespeare famously exclaimed, "What a piece of work is man”. He is a glorious greedy beast, the extinction machine of Mother Nature and other species, her wildest offspring.
Beyond Huntingdon's Clash of Civilizations around Terror, the University of East Anglia presents a far larger canvas of civilizations being the consequence of and the refuge from major past climatic changes. Civilizations have fallen and risen with such climatic changes, as those of the Maya in Mexico, or in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus-Saraswati region in India, and in China. The report said: "Having been forced into civilized communities, people found themselves faced with increasing social inequalities, greater violence in the form of organized conflict, and at the mercy of self-appointed elites who used religious authority or political ideology to bolster their position. These models of government are still present with us today”. That is also a summary of the twentieth century history, despite our assumption of a high civilization has produced extensions of old conflicts with far higher levels of violence and killings.
One of the major aspects of present and future time, beyond Huntingdon's absorbing clash, is the global threat of climate change, largely ignored by the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the public of the Third World. As these countries are largely agriculture-based, with seventy to ninety percent of populations eking out a subsistence existence there, they will be the largest hit. Yet, in a sixteen page review of this global problem by the London Economist on September Nine, 2006, it was almost entirely an Atlantic community view, concerned with the Gulf Stream change effects on Europe, the Hurricane change impact on Atlantic communities, especially Florida, the possible benefits of the warming of Europe and Russia, the implications of the carbon trade for the West at the Cologne Carbon Fair, the implications of "Greenness" for GE, GP, Shell, "Laid-back America" after Kyoto, and the fate of barley, long extinct, now reviving with warmer weather, for only fifty six thousand Greenlanders! It is a superb example of global problems being viewed with myopia by the West. The rest of the planet, with the two-thirds of population on Earth, did not exist for the London Economist. Just as Terrorism did not exist till America and Europe were hit. This Atlantic community's limited view was also responsible for Huntingdon's Clash.
Let us take a brief look at the global aspects of this planetary problem. On the assumption of a median estimate of a temperature rise of two degrees Celsius to three degrees Celsius (between extremes of one degree Celsius to five degrees Celsius), more than half of the world's major forests (Earth's plant energy centers) would be lost. Extreme floods, forest fires and droughts will hit the planet in the next century or two. Even if the world stops emitting green house gases, a rise of two degrees Celsius is expected. A rise of two degrees Celsius to three degrees Celsius will mean less fresh water will be available in West Africa, Central America, Southern Europe, and Eastern USA, raising the probability of drought. The loss of forests up to sixty per cent may follow in Amazonia, Europe, Asia, Canada, and Central America. The "tipping point" may be as soon as the middle of this century. It would cause a world-wide drop in cereal crops from twenty million tonne to four hundred million tonne, putting four hundred million more people at the risk of hunger. These developments could affect three billion people, or about half the world's population. The above indications are from Marko Scholze of Bristol University. This is very serious, and really global. If politics is at the heart of the problem, the world politicians, especially in the major countries, USA, China, India, Russia, European Union and Japan will need to change their past view that "a week is an age in politics". Such politics will be a suicidal idiocy. Climate change has been a major global market failure.
Scientists know of past Earth convulsions, changing climates and wiping out species. These can happen by major asteroid hits from space, as the one in Yucatan, Mexico, or by major volcanoes, or by climate change. The latest serious threat is modern industrial civilization's carbon contamination of the atmosphere. The thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene and Triassic ages was when carbon dioxide was around thousand parts per million (ppm). Today carbon dioxide is three hundred and eighty five ppm. But with atmospheric carbon climbing by an annual rate of two ppm and expected to increase up to three ppm, levels could approach nine hundred ppm by the end of the next century, (Scientific America, October, 2006.) Yet, the main industrial countries are shifting base lines to 2003 from Kyoto's 1990, and extending results to 2050! Saudi Arabia is suggesting carbon storage and burial. Yet one of UNICEF's top officials said it was unknown how long carbon can be permanently buried, and asked, "Who is responsible if it escapes?" – A repetition of the nuclear waste problem. Bury your man-made poisons in Mother Earth! Pity a small Pluto wasn't closer.
In mapping the future of the World Population (Down To Earth, August, 2006), the population flood of the future rising to eight billion by 2050, is likely to hit South and East Asia most, with a decline in South and Eastern Europe and Japan. Most important, water scarcity now hitting six hundred and forty five million people, will then hit two thousand seventy five million to three thousand twenty five million or thirty eight per cent of the world's population – the most ominous signal for all life, biodiversity hot-spots, and human conflicts. Similarly, land will be critically scarce for seven hundred six million people by 2025, on a near double from four hundred forty seven million in 2005. Due to depleting resources, the number of people moving to coastlines will increase by thirty five per cent, exposing two thousand seventy five million or a third of the human population in 2025 to the effects of a rise of sea levels and hurricanes and other effects of global warming, as the possible disappearance of the Gulf Stream. Demography and climate change will have far more serious consequences than Huntingdon's ‘Clash’.
The best hope to bridge the gap between apathy and grim reality is to show the politician and the public that environment and economy not only go together, but environment is the maker of economies, apart from being, as we have seen in past ages, the maker and ‘un-maker’ of civilizations. The Archbishop of Canterbury aptly referred to "the economy as a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment”. His view has been echoed by Economics Nobel Laureates, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. We need new "Earth-based Economic Development", with Net National Product, after ecological deficit deductions, which I have suggested to Montek Ahluwalia, Vice-Chairman of the Indian Planning Commission for India's planning. We are at a crucial divide to make that change among the world's rulers.
In the face of the cataclysmic threat of Climate Change to the planet from the melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers to the sinking of Siberia's Tundra region and all the man's work on it, to the rising seas and flooding of up to a hundred million coastal people and the destruction of some of the modern civilization’s coastal cities, to the huge impacts on depleted food production and water resources, I wonder if Man realizes the sudden impact of six billion people rising from one billion in just over a century, polluting Earth and the atmosphere; and that he himself has become a sudden counter-force to Nature. It will be his existential 'Kurukshetra'. Man has made his civilization and its institutions into machines now, so damaging and beyond his control. Will this be the real "End of History", not Francis Fukuyama's optimistic Democracy? The very intelligentsias of darling democracies have failed in this gathering crisis of the last century, likely to implode on a planetary scale in the next generation or two.
Man on this planet has been like a little greedy termite, suffering from self-inflated anthropomorphism, blessed by Semitic scriptures that he was made "in the image of God" – a special creature to have dominion over every living thing. So the empires of exploitation of Man and Nature were built by the holy Roman emperors and the high priests in all past religion-sanctioned civilizations, from the Pharaohs of Egypt to the modern European empires. When they failed, Marxist ideology promised a new empire, a new heaven, and even that collapsed. We are landed in this existential Eco-crisis, Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’, and the frustrated fever of ‘Terror’, with little men in high places, lost and floundering in the planet's calamities. Western industrial man has been history’s greatest predator, and now its climate change-maker. The rest of mankind is following the same dangerous path.
In this ironic age of globalizing prosperity, the very real threat of Climate- Change and terrorist global collapse, few realize the increasingly dangerous and diverse paths of Nature and Man. In Nature's vast complex kingdom, there has always been immense diversity of species and a vast range of climates and eco-systems. There has been slow evolution of species over the last billion years of life on this planet. Gaia, or the Mother Earth Goddess, has known many cataclysmic changes through the movements of continents, the change of climates, the rise and disappearance of species over geological-climate ages. In contrast, Man's Kingdom has been recent, of only the last million years since 'Homo Erectus'. Unlike Nature's diversity, his story over many civilizations has been one of increasing centralization from village to city to empire, from plough to computer, to global political, economic, religious, scientific and technological machines; all without Nature's diversity and coherence. The trend has been to mono cultures and centralized monarchial regimes. And huge consumption machines without thought of Nature's limited resources with eco-sustainability. Man can only survive if he respects Nature's ways, and not be its counter-force. His gods, priests, rulers, and scientists should tell him this more forcefully now. His choice is truly existential, beyond any particular religion, ideology or civilization. It calls for a new Earth-Man 'Atma and Dharma', devoid of past mythologies, rising above short term greed and power.
Fortunately, despite the Bush damper on the Kyoto protocol, there is a distinct sense dawning. George Osborne, shadow UK Chancellor, acknowledged in Japan that environmental pollution was "a market failure", where the "true cost is not paid by the polluter, but by everyone else". Christian Aid has warned that one hundred eighty four million people in Africa alone could die as a result of food and water shortages. The International Red Cross fears it may not be able to keep up with climate change. The world's biggest insurer, Munich Re believes that economic losses linked to climate change have risen by a factor of eight since the sixties. Britain's Conservative Party's Quality of Life Policy Group has taken climate change as a starting point to consider it both a risk and an opportunity, with major new investments in clean technology to deliver a low-carbon economy, with high value jobs, greater energy efficiency, and secure, affordable energy supplies. Global industry itself has begun moving in that direction, with DuPont reducing its emissions by seventy two per cent since 1990, saving more than three billion dollars in the process. GE is doubling its investment in environmental technologies to one hundred fifty million dollars by 2010. Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's best known investment bank, is currently putting one billion dollars into clean technologies. Businesses are looking at future energy efficiencies, low carbon emissions, carbon trading, eco-labeling, renewable energy, cleaner public transport, and more eco-friendly buildings and homes. Taxes on pollution may be a future necessity for society and the exchequer. If tobacco and alcohol are highly taxed why shouldn’t pollution of air, water and food?
Take two problems within the heart of the Terrorist global problem, oil and Israel. We have seen in earlier chapters on Terror that, if the major powers, especially the USA, could reduce their dependence on Arab oil, there could be less need to extend the geo-politics of new imperialism into that region. Israel is trading land for peace. It also needs to consider a fairer sharing of Jordan valley waters, as waterless Palestine farmers are reduced to angry, day laborers. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have problems sharing the Himalayan Rivers. Geography, natural resources, and demography will determine future international affairs and geo-politics. One major frictional area of the future will be that forty percent of the world's population lives in two hundred fourteen river basins shared by more than one country.
The human volcanoes of the future will be in burgeoning cities, especially in the Third World, and where there are significant alien ethnic groups in the First World. In the Third World, millions in depleting rural eco-systems are already flooding the cities for livelihood. India's work force alone is said to be growing at sixty five hundred thousand a year. In 1951, India's urban population was sixty two million. In 2001 it soared to two hundred eighty five million, still dependent very largely on sewage systems of the British days. Only twenty eight percent were connected to sewage systems, and nearly half the Metro cities lived in slums or footpaths. While the rural population growth per annum is 1.8 percent, the urban 3.1 percent, the slum growth is seven percent. If slums are going to be the fate of future cities, they will be constantly sitting on far bigger explosive material than the occasional Terror blasts. The entire above are no less the "fault lines" of the future than Huntingdon's Islamic boundaries. China must have more millions in cities. There is no urban infra-structure or jobs to support this human Hwang-Ho, the rivers of sorrow of the under class.
Between demographic and ecological lava, the "pivotal states" (Paul Kennedy in Foreign Affairs) are said to be South Africa, Mexico, India, Pakistan and China. Here, there will be huge social threats to future governments, in both cities and rural areas; far more threatening than the Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Needing the power of god, weakening governments will be only too fallible. Will good governance be possible beyond six billion people?
Modern civilization prides itself on technology, the answer to nearly all the problems we have touched in this chapter. It has been the main hope to deal with resource limitations, and the multiplying greed of Man. There is no doubt that technology has played a terrific role in the last century or two. Yet, Sun Micro Systems chief scientist, Bill Joy urges technologists to reconsider the ethics of the drive towards constant scientific innovation. He says, "We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no controls and no brakes. The last chance to assert control – the fail-safe point – is rapidly approaching”. The warning comes from the man's impressive tech credentials, having pioneered software technologies such as Java, and as co-chairman of a Presidential Commission on the future of information technology. He focuses on three areas of technology undergoing rapid technological change. First, robotics may produce "robot species" of intelligent robots that create evolved copies of themselves, a post-Darwinian leap from humans as we have known them. Second, genetics deals with scientific breakthroughs in manipulating the very structure of organic life. While it has been beneficial in things like pest-resistance crops, it has also set the stage for new man-made plagues that could literally wipe out the natural world; the end of Genesis and no Garden of Eden! Third, nanotechnology creates objects on an atom-by-atom basis, which could create microscopically small machines. What will happen to human employment with seven and eight billion people? Unlike the atom bomb, all three of these could replicate themselves creating a cascade effect that could sweep through the physical world, as a virus spreads through the computer world. Will man's creations become uncontrollable by man? Joy fears extension of threats far beyond weapons of mass destruction to "surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals"; the prospect of super technological Bin Ladens; and, that, in a world not lacking extremists in religion and ideology, with fire in their bellies. Bill Joy is a very significant cautionary witness to a time when Science is the new God.
Even without Joy's un-joyful scenario, modern technological life is producing its own civilizational malaise; most of all stress, and its numerous consequences – cancer, obesity, increasing heart and back problems – the many undiagnosed ailments attributed to viruses; and their many social consequences in rising divorces, break-up of families, suicides, violence, disorder; problems beyond law and governance. All this is creating a growing market for dubious medicines, inadequate medical and curative services. Psychiatry is the resort of the rich. Such civilizational sickness is also creating a growing market of "Wellness" for millions under many gurus and forms – Yoga and Zen – various "soups for the soul", and 'New Life' courses. The rising millions of poor have totally inadequate medical services for earlier biological diseases.
The rich are creating their own new civilizational diseases of the success rat race. The media fans the fire; the fever of success with the top five hundred companies, the fifty most powerful men and women in the world, the Billionaires Club, Miss Worlds and Miss Universes, and the petty obsession of the media with stardom to the exclusion of solid news and good analysis of the real world of millions. The media promotes these civilzational diseases around success and rat racing. Does this promote the 'Terror of Extremists', of the Satanizers, who see the world sinking between God and Mammon, the Puritans and the Profligates? And now Joy tells us we may be on the brink of man-made technologies beyond the control of man. There is a sense of everything spinning out of control, in which Terror gets the headline, as terrorists would wish.
Nature seems far kinder than modern civilization. The National Safety Council (2003 data) shows the following lifetime probabilities of a US resident's death. The chance of death in floods was in the ratio of one is to one hundred forty four; in earthquakes one is to one hundred seventeen; in lightening on is to seventy nine. The civilization toll is far higher. The chances of death by stroke were one is to twenty four; by heart disease one is to five; by cancer one is to seven; by suicide one is to one hundred nineteen; by alcohol one is to nine thousand nine hundred sixty eight; by motorcycle accident one is to seventy four; by air accident one is to five thousand fifty one. Is this the rush of the greedy “Gaderene swine”?
Beyond Huntingdon's Clash, how far is Western civilization - now America-led, with its enormous power and benefits – also corrupting and destabilizing global societies? All civilizations have known corruption and conflict, internal and external. My hunch is that Western civilization has reached Toynbee's critical time of "Challenge and Response" for its future.
I conclude this chapter with the Tallberg Forum in Sweden, where people from seventy countries met in July 2006. The subject was "How on Earth can we live together; getting serious. What are we doing on economic, industrial, governance fronts and on sustainability?” To answer the first question, ten workshops shared insights from many countries and disciplines to understand the common challenges, four workshops focused on the problems of cities – Lima, Sofia, East London and Dhaka. Pity, there were none from Africa, India and China. Five workshops focused in regions within countries – Kasese in Uganda, Lake Tonle Sap in Cambodia, the Dalarna region in Sweden, the Guangdong region in China, and the Bundelkhand region in India. The tenth group considered the environmental situation in the High North – again unrepresentative – the Arctic region straddling Norway, Greenland and Russia.
Five threads ran through most. The first was "the image of fireflies" – individuals, no matter how economically or politically poor, taking charge of their own lives with self-confidence showing the light to others. One was a confident boy from Lima, the Chairman of a local street children's association, put on a table in the plenary session, as he was too small to be seen on the ground! The second thread was effective agency partnerships on the ground, working to a common cause, and acting like fireflies. The Third was the problem of multiplying such local institutions to scale up successful ideas. Most institutions function as pyramids, "the latter designed to preserve the dead"; but in my view symbolic of the makers of pyramids, the Pharaoh class of rulers. These last two threads are links with what I have earlier referred to as the times of "Non-governmental civilizations", when between "the legions who thundered past", local communities in Asia, Africa, South America, managed their own affairs and local resources, before the spread of centralized – not necessarily competent – states in the last two centuries. Were they more real democracies than the electoral ones of the large, centralized states of today?
The fourth thread was the need for deeper dialogues between peoples with diverse perspectives on two profound questions. First, what is the quality of life we should aspire to, beyond the GNP of governments? Second, what kind of citizens do we want to be of our localities, our countries and the world, rather than what kind of products and services do we wish to consume? These are questions which should form the basis of our education given to us as children, at home and in school; which, however, education given by parents and teachers largely ignores. The nature of our consumption is in the same category, more so if we live in a "throw away", high consumption civilization. Products and services are a part of our lifestyle, which make demands on Earth's finite resources and the poor. The Tallberg Forum need not have been moralistic, so as to exclude thought on goods and services. Not many are Mother Teresa.
In the fifth thread, they asked themselves what new model of human development could be given, as people from both the First and the Third worlds were not happy with their development models.
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Is Man "God's Debris"? Web of Life
My Himalayan years have given me the most precious thing in my life, Shotoku Taishi's First Article, 'Wa', "Harmony is the highest". It has taught me Aurobindo's profound experience of life: "In matter shall be lit the spirit's glow". Not the unrealistic separation of matter and spirit. In "Transformation of Matter" he wrote:
"Your life is a changeful mould for growing gods,
A seer, a strong Creator is within,
Almighty powers are shot in Nature's calls."
In the first chapter, I have already referred to the impact, Kanchendzanga, the world's third highest mountain, made on me when I gazed at it for seven years in all seasons as a school boy. Rising to heaven, this majestic mountain seemed like the master of the Earth in storm and calm. I disliked the German term "krieg" or war, to describe their assaults on it then. The term "krieg" was symbolic of Western Man's assault on all Nature since the Industrial Revolution. And it was so foreign to our Hindu-Buddhist Himalayan tradition of sacredness in the "Abode of the Gods". And in the autumn, Kanchendzanga’s incarnadine sunsets were God's glorious paintings between snowline and sky.
In later mountain climbing on Lama Angdong in Sikkim, from Singhik I saw the Sun's first red light touch the mountain in a red glow in the dark pre-dawn; and in my youthful imagination I thought I saw the face of God on the mountain light up a dark world. Next year, when walking down the Lachung Valley alone, suddenly I saw the miracle of a bright star glittering over the very summit of Gurudongma in clear daylight. Incredulous, I stopped to gaze at this miracle. In a few moments, the sun rose over the summit, and the star turned to the sun. Later, when I was walking with my Lachen porter, Angdu, with whom I shared si1ent humanity, a snake crossed my path. Instinctively and thoughtlessly, I lifted my stick to kill it. Behind me, Angdu cried out in Buddhist anguish, "Don't strike”. It was too late. I struck and killed the snake. I was ashamed to face Angdu, illiterate, but a better human being, and far closer to Nature. Like Dylan Thomas in his poem, ‘The Snake’, "I had something to expiate, a pettiness". I never killed a snake again in my life. It was like the experience of Aldo Leopold, a pioneer of Nature and the wilderness, in his youth. He shot a wolf. He wrote: "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes...there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and the mountain". Then he wrote a book, Thinking like a Mountain. The larger truths are arrived at through small ones.
And flowers, God's smiles on Earth, were here long before Man, long before dinosaurs, over a hundred million years ago. Few know that when they go to the florist in cities. What an amazing assertion of life for me to see high altitude flowers on the Kungribingri pass at eighteen thousand feet in the Central Himalaya; surviving joyfully on the cold frontiers of life. I wrote in my diary then:
"From where springs its quiet spirit?
We ask, and it speaks not.
Like Da Vinci’s Madonna,
It merely smiles its sweet mystery”.
How good it was to see happy Kulu hill folk celebrate Dussehra and life, bringing their gods down to the valley with drum beats, decking their caps and their gods with marigolds, the poor man's gold. And, in contrast, to think of the millions in polluted slums, in de-natured, godless cities of plunderers of rich forests, of polluters of holy rivers and seas, of ravagers of ugly mines. They were Aurobindo's,
"Petty adventurers in an infinite world,
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind?
Around your little self and petty things?"
One of the themes of this book is the curse of failed centralizing states and the loss of better governance in traditional small societies, especially in the management of local natural resources as water and forest. Let me link one of the most telling small anecdotes of my life in the Himalayan region, with the amazing historical hydrological achievements of the Aztecs in long history. While planning a future GTZ rural development project in Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, I was amazed to see the beauty, the scale, and the efficiency of hill irrigation systems at the foot of the Dhauladhar range in the Western Himalaya. I asked two local villagers who managed it, as there seemed to be no trace of an Irrigation Department. They said they did. I asked what the management system was, and if they had any problems as irrigation systems in the plains often led to conflicts and killings. Their answer was simple, one man was given the task, and it was handed down from father the son, except in the rare case of incompetence. The supply system was that the first priority was given to the lands of the village gods; the second to those farthest from the source of the water; and the last to those closest to the source. No great overheads costs, no corruption, and no problems; ideal in social justice and cultural values.
The Aztecs of southern Mexico evolved a community hydraulic system in the eighth century BC, which continued till the fifteenth century AD, over two millennia. The structures on the hillsides were in excellent repairable condition over two thousand years, with no metal tools, no wheeled transport, and no drought animals. The total length of the canals was twelve hundred meters, providing water for three hundred thirty square kilometers of crop land. The system operated both, locally and collectively. They were the great pioneering "Keepers of Water and Earth". Look at the Tennessee and the Damodar Valley Corporations, and see the difference between the ancient collective wisdom and the modern centralized governments with far higher resources and technology – both dubious failures within one century. TVA dams are being decommissioned. The DVA never took off as a comprehensive valley authority. Narbada and Himalayan big dams have created big problems for inhuman resettlement, for high silting rates, for future tectonic threats, and uneconomic water delivery systems to farmers' fields, with hydro power benefits to urban areas, to the detriment of rural areas.
Then there was the culminating pilgrimage of my life over a decade, from the Buddha Jayanti Gardens, Delhi, via the EI Dorado's of wealth and power all over the world, to the inauguration of the International Centre for Mountain Environments in Kathmandu in
1983; for the sustainable eco-development of the Hindukush Himalayan region, embracing eight Asian countries. It was the pilgrimage of an ancient spirit to what was called "The Abode of the Gods”, against Man's planetary plundering and 'krieg'-like mentality of mountaineers in high sacred places. It was a long pilgrimage over a long decade, a mission of the spirit, as conveyed in an earlier chapter.
But read Daedalus, on Religion and Ecology (Fall 2001), and you will find the apologists figures of the world’s religion attend international meetings at St. Francis's Assisi and at many other places to prove their scriptures are pro-Environment, pro-Nature. The sculptures are left as historical justification with no contemporary practical recourse. Over the last three decades of growing Environmental concerns, the pulpits and muezzins of the world's religions have been silent witnesses to the ecological devastation of Chernobyl and Bhopal, to the deliberate firing of oil fields in the Iraq war, to the pollution of the lands, the seas, and the air of the planet. The Papacy seemed silent when the Club of Rome warned about the consequences of over-consumption and the future shortages of natural resources. The gathering cataclysm of climate change should be an annual feature of the Pope’s ~ address. The religious groups which had elected and supported President Bush, remained silent when he resigned from the Kyoto Convention commitments in carbonization of the planet. Orthodox Hindutva, so blatantly aggressive about the Hindu culture, born in the forests and the Himalaya of the ancient Bharat, were also silent in the mounting pollution of the holy Ganga and the other sacred rivers of India. No Imam or Ayatollah has raised his voice against the firing of the oil fields in the lands of Islam, and growing desertification; nor the prolonged firing of forests in Indonesia, the land with the largest Muslim population. And Christian clerics are content with massive nuclear power in the Western Christian countries, while their political leaders are increasingly concerned with nuclear proliferation elsewhere. No Nobel Peace and Economics prizes have gone to anyone to reconcile the God of GNP and economic growth, with the new, Confucian ideal of "Heaven, Humanity and Earth", in harmonious balance of sustainable development between humanity and Nature. Even the voices of two thousand scientists, including two hundred Nobel Laureates, have gone unheard on the climate change consequences.
I am afraid, all this revival of religious unction stops outside such conferences, and makes no serious attempt at reaching the doors of power in the White House, 10 Downing Street, the Kremlins, and the North and the South Blocks of the world. The U.N. is lost in the narrow departmental minds of the UNEP, the WHO, the UNDP etc., and lacks a true global view of the planet. The less said about the World Bank and IMF, the better. There is a lack of Dag Hammarskjöld’s vision and spirit in these. The fact is that the modern globalized politico-economic world has lost the many ancient indigenous worlds of cosmic visions and the conception of creation as a living process in which kinship exists in all things, rooted for ages in the widespread concept of the Mother Earth and the Goddess of the Earth. That is now looked upon as Animism – the faith of simple, primitive people. The new World View is around GNP, neo-c1assical economics of maximizing consumption, markets and profits; and building political, economic, and military pyramids of power. Future generations can face the consequences to the planet, our 'oikos', our long past sustaining home. Probably, the men in power, and their active and passive supporters will not readily learn till the planet punishes them hard enough. And then will it be too late?
Men of religion, science and academia have not matched the challenge. Monk and scientist, ecologist and economist need to know the source of spirit and wealth in the Eco-dharma of the Mother Nature, the Goddess of Earth and Life. In the modern world of power, only men and women in power have the power to provide a new leadership of Heaven, Earth and People. The old Confucian China and the old “Rta” ('Life-sustaining Law')-conceiving Hindu India are now poised to follow the GNP God of the West in the politics of poverty. Somewhere along the way of GNP competitiveness for wealth and power, the planet's climate and ecological systems will break down. More serious shortages of energy, water, food, more ferocious Katrinas and Tsunamis may bring more sense. Only then will the people know Confucius’s, "Heaven, Earth, People", and the Animist's Mother Earth; when,
"It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives".
Man must first understand the will of Nature before he seeks to impose his own will. He must understand Nature's laws; nature's complex ways, as he and all animate and inanimate things are a part of Nature, contrary to modern man's mind-set. Man is neither Nature's master, nor does he live outside Nature. If he is a small part of the vast complex of Nature, and its creature, he must understand it through science, through rationality, questioning and experiment. He comes from Nature's seed at birth and goes into Nature's chemistry in death. The first law of Nature is growth and the Evolution of all life forms, from bacteria to plants and animals, from the seed of a tree to a forest. This growth and evolution is in yet unknown millions of species in Nature's myriad bio-diversity. Edward Osborne Wilson, the father of socio-biology, tells us that the cold depths of the oceans support armies of worms, crustaceans, mollusks, besides visible fish and marine life. So far, 1.4 million species of insects alone have been discovered. A pinch of ordinary soil contains four thousand to five thousand species of bacteria. Half the world's species – perhaps ninety percent – inhabit tropical rain forests, which are being destroyed at the rate of seventeen thousand acres a year, with the vanishing of twenty seven species a year. So much of non-human life is vanishing dangerously, while human life is multiplying dangerously. All this is because of greedy, multiplying man's destruction of Nature's habitats, and the over-exploitation of forests, rivers, seas, and soils. Nature's marvelous long evolved eco-systems are being destroyed at rates as never before in all human history. Wilson warns, "If we let too many species go, we face an enormous psychological and spiritual loss"; apart from an incalculable economic loss. He finds, it "eats away at the human soul". For him, as for others, entering a forest is "like entering heaven; I could expand my soul indefinitely”.
First, the physical, then the biological, and the economic; our bodies need nutrition, health, and sustenance from Nature's vast treasury of these on land, water and air. Just as the body needs sustainability, nature's resources need sustainability. Undue damage of eco-systems and habitats destroys both Nature's and man's sustainability. The second level of human growth and evolution is in man's mental, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions for the quality of life beyond economic needs. The third is the spiritual dimension, in which Wilson's soul and our souls find peace and the Creator's purpose. Remember, we found that spiritual experience went beyond man's houses of God and his scriptures. They were most felt close to nature, in forest, on mountain, on the seas, even in one's garden. Man, the thinking envelope of Nature on this Planet, is now becoming more unthinking as urban life makes him more denatured.
So, man's life and laws need to respect that first law of growth and sustainability in all Nature. Over a century ago, before the urbanization of most of the humanity, the American poet, Henry David Thoreau said,
"The human soul is a silent harp in God's choir,
Whose strings need only to be swept,
By the divine breath,
To chime in with the harmonies of creation."
Now the "divine breathe" is angry with tsunamis, hurricanes, desertification, floods, temperamental climate changes, because “the human soul is a silent harp in God’s choir”. Thoreau would not approve of Bush’s America, or the USSR’s eco-devastation of Eurasia or India’s extensive salinity of irrigated soils, or Brazil and Indonesia’s devastation of tropical forests.
The second law of Nature is in the realm of interconnectedness of all things in the universe and on earth, in the complementariness of all things, and in the concept of all life and all phenomena, in an interconnected web. God is the maker of that web. Bell's mathematical theory showed that all things in the universe are interconnected. The physicist David Bohm said that one could never understand reality in terms of particles and fields alone; there is an "inherent un brokenness". For the physicist Niels Bohr, wave and particle models were complementary; hence the expression 'wavicle’. Complementarities are at the heart of the mystery of life: The concept of this interdependent web of the universe is conveyed in my poem below:
Spiders of Earth and Cosmos.
That silent ugly creature
On a white wall,
Now still, now racing for cover,
Long legs, furry body, dark eyes,
Horror in a child's eyes,
But not for Srimad Bhagvattam.
Its philosophic eye sees
The spider as the symbol
Of the Cosmic Creator.
It weaves delicate, viscous thread,
Jewels of geometry,
Glistening with dew drops;
Food chain's subtle trap.
The spider weaves its thread,
Its mucus mouth emits, absorbs;
Like God weaving the universe,
With web-like creativity,
Patterns of life, death and beauty.
That prodigious web,
Of gas and fire and ice,
Of galaxies and atoms,
The work of a cosmic Spider.
Yet, in the whole range of the practical affairs of the world, we don't build webs. We divide, sub-divide, and exploit; with a tremendous loss of both intellectual and social interdependent complementarities, and the increase of human and earth problems. In education, we divide the world into disciplines, and working minds remain in separate boxes of departments. This is then extended into life in the modern world by specialist bureaucracies, and fractured minds, ending in the multiplication of unsolved problems in the web of life. In building large dams, engineers do not see beyond engineering to catchment eco-systems. So, national security problems are looked at primarily, as problems of building up armies, police and armaments. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, security has vital inter-dependence and ‘soft’ power elements, and not just 'hard' power. Wars devastate the earth and all life, as in Vietnam. Petrol pollutes oceans and air. Then when it goes too far, as in nuclear proliferation and WMD, disarmament becomes a problem. The interconnectedness of geo-political strategy impinges on all spheres – education, demography, development, trade, inter-cultural exchanges and more. It is absurd to narrowly nationalize the problems of the global environment, as President Bush seems to be doing after Kyoto, and in the West Asia. Scientists have shown, apart from common sense, that the Earth has one self-regulatory system, from climate to all the elements of eco-systems and countless life species. Similar global inter-connectedness applies to the important social, economic concept of Sustainable Development, which failed at Johannesburg and is failing in the WTO. It is high time nation-states outgrew their post-Bismarkian World to emerge into an interdependent globalized sentient World.
So, the approach to man's future problems can only succeed with such a wider interconnected World View, beyond discipline, sector, and nation. It then impinges on the non-material mind, in what Aldous Huxley called, "The Perennial Philosophy", the wisdom of the past and the present, on civilization values. These are fundamental for the transformation of the man and the earth. In ‘The Global Mind Change’ (Knowledge Systems Incorporated), Willis Harman has succinctly harmonized five crucial searches – the searches for wholeness, for community and relationship, for identity, for meaning, and for a sense of empowerment. The laws of Nature need to flow into the laws, the values and the natures of modern human societies with higher human faculties. We need to go back to natural man's earlier ecological integrity in traditional societies. We need to substitute the Industrial age Ego-self with the post-industrial age Eco-self. How is the challenge for leaders, educators and religious leaders?
The third law of Nature is both cooperation and competition among all species. Together, cooperation and competition in balance make Nature's life force and its long-term balances. A nest requires birds' cooperation; a home that of a family. It has been found in many social animals, ants, bees, birds, rats, and in chimpanzees; even when all these societies share the political survival and a hierarchy in society, as in human societies. There is even mutual altruism in nature's world. I have seen a bird sing and lead a pair of hill martens to a bee hive in a forest, a delicacy for both of them. Finding the hive, one of the martens climbs up the tree, paws, breaks the hive, and protects itself from stinging bees by turning its bushy tail like a propeller. When the hive falls, the other marten picks it up. Both take away the hive, feed on it, and leave a bit for the bird! Nature also shares! It is not always "red in tooth and claw", which is western imagery. It has now been found that elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas and dolphins have complex social systems, and have a sense of empathy, and sometimes behave altruistically. Unlike humans, animals seldom kill their own species. In the food chain, Nature calls for both cooperation and competition, trying to achieve an ecological balance, the biggest threat to which is the greedy, multiplying man.
Man has to share finite resources of land, water and other resources with all creatures. Now exceeding six billion with increasing consumption appetites, that is his first global problem in earth's eco-systems, especially the urbanizing man. If the future of most people is in the cities of the world, how can we make garden cities as good gardeners of both Nature and Technology? On the one hand, there is a flashing picture of glass, steel, and concrete, on the other, slums, squalor, and sewage. That is where the new psycho-physical malaise of this civilization grows; a cancer of bodies and of the earth. How can our children grow as Earth beings without trees, flowers, and birds, without the color, joy, and experience of living things around them in our denatured age? Can we and our children experience a forest as a total life-system? How then should we treat that total life-system, beyond the cutting of trees for timber? If all civilizations have to rise above their waste, the greed of modern civilization has left mountains of waste.
In the field of competition and cooperation, this is being written at the puzzling time of fundamentalist terror and the "clash of civilizations", time of the Iraq War II, the eclipse of the U.N., the highest global symbol of human cooperation; the assertion of one global super power in technological Armageddon, strangely in the land of Babylon's old civilization. Who knows where next, and how far? Many words are being written on the subject, including the earlier vital reneging by the Bush government on the ecological implications of the Kyoto Convention, and the Johannesburg Sustainable Development Summit; a strategic lapse of global consciousness by the only global super power in its geo-politics. A global super power has to have global responsibilities beyond its national self-interest, if it is to be a civilized super power.
The peoples, the governments, and the NGOs of the world have no sane option but to strive for Gaia's Sustainable Earth. There is no temple, no mosque, no church – much less the White House or the Kremlin – in all God's creation as holy as this blessed Earth. It is a floating cathedral in space of myriad Lifekind, swirling in the planetary system, and God's precious gift to its stupid governors. The vision of the astronauts needs to be brought into international relations. International politics must have planetary visions. We need to move from unsustainable energies of coal and oil – a basic cause of atmospheric poisoning and international conflict – to sustainable energies in the heart of Nature, hydro, solar, wind and hydrogen. Little Iceland is leading the way to be the world's first hydrogen society. Could we rename the UN as Gaia's Global Lifekind Organization, or GGLO? There would then be a new glow in it; an improved politics beyond the past imperial and colonial designs. To paraphrase a Mexican President: "Poor U.N., so far from God. So close to America".
Past Egyptian civilization’s symbol have been the Pyramids. Past Christian civilization's symbol could be the Vatican. Does America, now forsaking the cooperative-competitive inheritance of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and the joyful Nature visions of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, wish its symbol to be the Pentagon? Walden seems so far from Texas and Washington? It has taken over two hundred years to build the democracies of the world, including the USA. Could the U.N. be given a better chance in cooperation and competition after only half a century, to make a web of nations and peoples in a warless world? As Aurobindo asked at the beginning of this century,
"How long will we tread the circling tracks of minds,
Around little self and petty things?"
When will the super powers of the world channelize "almighty powers shut in Nature's cells" for peaceful purposes? This global era will not tolerate hegemony or empire. Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have shown it. And they were small states. The value of 'soft power' is badly underestimated in geo-politics and international diplomacy.
For cooperation and competition one requires skills, competencies, and temperament suitable to each; hence a hard, lifelong learning process in constructive relationships in the complex webs of life – human and natural. Modern education preponderantly teaches competition of individuals, hardly the web of cooperation which simpler societies knew well. Simpler societies knew real community cooperation in sharing land, water, irrigation systems, forests and pastures, which centralized governments, have destroyed in the last two centuries, especially in Asia. If a householder had to build a house, the entire village joined in the task, and was fed for the two or three days of the building. The central symbol of community sharing was the temple, the shrine and the sacred grove. Can city planners and their laws emulate such cooperation? A few NGOs are showing the way, but it is too weak for a large impact. Modern cities are denatured, and floating on sewage and waste, which are then channeled into rivers and seas.
Basic to that concept of relationship and sharing is the long inherited problem of dominating patriarchal societies, and the damaging man-woman relationships inculcated from childhood. Again we have to go back to that earlier concept of the balance of the Ying and the Yang, the mutuality of the male and the female elements. Gandhiji referred to this harmful imbalance in Indian society as "a nation walking on one leg". Nations, which so walk on one leg, unknowingly damage even the male leg, apart from the immense damage to the women and the children of both the sexes. Patriarchal societies have produced patriarchal histories, and they are not pretty pictures.
Patriarchal societies have bred poverty, social injustice, violence and wars. As a rule, they have also lagged in democracy. All history is a record of it, though historians from Thucydides to Toynbee, all male, have not analyzed the adverse social impact of patriarchal societies. If societies wish to be kinder and to modernize, they first need to shed the patriarchal dominance of that savage history; and change to a harmonious balance of Ying and Yang from family to governments. "For most of history," wrote Pablo Picasso, "Anonymous was a woman." The man stole the show, and 50 often bungled. The future of human civilization and of human development largely depends on this transformation too. It is inherent in the Human Development Index, in terms of the literacy, education, health, and in fact, mortality of both sexes.
There have been no lifelong patriarchal societies in nature. The male animal may dominate only in the mating season. In the rest of the life there is either mutuality, or the female of the species is the maker, provider, and protector of families. Between Tradition and Modernity, man's oldest institution, the family seems now lost, disintegrating, almost a reversion to a single cell life. Mutuality of support has dried up. Parents and the old are lonely. Love is an obsolete notion. So, old people are consigned to convenient relegation to old people’s homes. Widows are abandoned in Benares. In the West, more old people talk to themselves in shop windows. The old linger silently and sad. The young hardly know happiness, security, and fulfillment. They are in the Rat Race. All this has brought about arid landscapes within, increasing depression and suicides. Some ascribe it to the amorphous ‘global market’; but at the core it is the unbalanced clash of ages, with its stresses and the loss of stability and values. At the end of the day, the human mind cannot hide behind market, technology, politics or other external phenomena. It has to cope and live with man's social and natural climates, now in unprecedented stress and flux.
The fourth law of life is a time and a season for everything. All life has its seasons for conception, birth, growth, decay and death. Spring to winter is a whole cycle of miraculous life from blossom, leaf, fruit, to bare branches in the winter. "Let the season rule us," is Thoreau's advice. For humans, spring (youth), summer (middle age), and autumn (advancing years) calls for no loss of time in life's learning process. A day, a week, a month, lost, is forever lost in a limited season or a limited life. Time wasted in the growth process is life lost, growth retarded. Hence, the importance of time planning, time utilization, and making time – the limiting dimension of life – fruitful. All life in Nature is a ‘becoming’ in time and space, with ourselves, with others. So we must be creative and patient with time, Nature's time and the time of history.
There is only one life on Earth, for flower, for fruit, for bird, for animal and for man. How much do we make of its spring, summer, and autumn, before winter closes life's cycle? Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer of our times, has said with beautiful simplicity, "We have nowhere to go but upward”. Even if it takes us years to go from camp one to camp two on a mountain, just a little 'upward'! Why do we shy away from anything uphill and difficult in mind and body, in lives of luxury, fantasy and gadgets? It is a core question for us in an age demanding convenience and minimization of effort. Nature works seasonably, stupendously, and silently; an example to man. And only denatured man draws clear distinctions between the so-called animate and the inanimate. When the modern Bodhisattva, Einstein looked into the atomic world, and Crick and Watson into the gene world, they saw boundary-less infinity!
Nature on the Earth and in the Universe is the work and voice of God. Poets, philosophers, and scientists have always known it. The rest of us ought to learn from them. Priests need a new role beyond scripture and ritual, and most of all, the self-righteous Fundamentalists. Politicians and governments look like the rapacious Mammons of all ages, and we elect or accept them, and repeatedly believe their failed ideologies. Our time has known failed religions and failed governments. The ancient navies of the Mediterranean destroyed the forests of Greece and the cedars of Lebanon. The USSR created an ecological hell across Eurasia from East Germany to Siberia, culminating in Chernobyl. The USA sinned against man and Nature in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam. Brazil and Indonesia have destroyed the Earth's largest energy engines, the equatorial forests. India has polluted its holiest rivers and caused Bhopal, the largest industrial disaster. And in China, no birds sing. Man's large civilizations of power have always been clashing with Nature. Small cultures have been closer to Nature; a basic lesson for ineffective centralization in modern civilization.
God, the product of man's mind, is the spirit behind Nature's wonders, the ways on Earth and in the stupendous universe. The imagination and creativity of Nature far surpasses those of humans. Man's higher consciousness tries to explore and capture that spirit and its meanings through the ages, when his greed and aggression do not get the better of him. The de-naturing of man has led to his de-spiritualization, which, in turn, has led to his clash of ages and civilization sickness. Evolution has gone from the simple, the single cell, to the complex, the human species. But the same human species is destroying Nature's rich diversity. Its faith has shifted to the complexity and diversity of man-made technologies. God only knows the fate of this giant idiot. Scott Adams now asks in horror, "Is Man god's debris?"
God's debris or a higher Gaian destiny; that is the Hamletian question of our time. But, behind the Laws of Nature, we have to face the evolution and the realities of the human brain; the source of that "mind stuff" which created the idea of God, and, at the same time, has the relics of the predatory reptilian/mammalian mind in the R-complex of the human brain. To understand what is called Nature, in time and in scale, we have to go back to the beginning of things, to the Cosmic Calendar since the Big Bang, to the evolution of species, to the inheritance of the human brain, as we know it, through that long pre-human evolution. I am indebted to Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden (Ballantine Books) for much of what follows. This galaxy gazer is a useful witness to the man of Earth’s calendar, and the man’s residual place in it.
If the Big Bang was on the 1st January in the Cosmic Calendar, significant oxygen begins to develop on Earth as late as the 1st December. In the long period from January to November, the chemistry of the universe was in the test tube, subject to phenomenal energies and fire; preparing for the end product, life as we know it. The first worms appear on the 16th December. The first fish and vertebrates (the spinal beginning) on the 19th December, followed by plants on the 20th, the first insects on the 21st, the first amphibians on the 22nd, the first reptiles on the 23rd, the first mammals on the 26th, the first birds on the 27th, and the first dinosaurs on the 28th December. The first primates with brains appear on the 30th December; and the first humans on the last day of the Cosmic Year, 31st December. So, the man and the woman were not made by God in the Garden of Eden in the Genesis week. Genesis is only a metaphor of the scientific evolution of life. And man's emergence is from the single and multiple cells to worms, plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and primates. In this long process, genes and brains were the ladders of ascent, the programmed seeds of growth, and the raw materials of mutations. The genetic information was then conveyed to the brain. Yet so much passion is spent, and both adults and children are confused by the American Christianity's argument over evolution and creation theories; all because they cant face the probable descent of man from apes. Isn’t it human conceit passing off as religion?
Science then found a fairly good general correlation between the brain size and intelligence. Nature is never consistent. The correlation may not always be true. Against an average human brain weight of one thousand three hundred seventy five grams, Lord Byron's brain weight was twenty two hundred grams, and that of Anatola France only eleven hundred grams. Another significant correlation is that of the body size and the brain weight. Of all organisms, the highest brain mass for body weight is that of Homo sapiens, Man, as we have known the species in the last hundred thousand years; and then, of the dolphins. This brain mass to body weight is a useful index of relative intelligence of various animals, but not to behavior. Intelligence is no guarantee of good behavior. Relative brain size has grown through millions of years from the reptiles to the animals to the man. The marvel of the human brain is that it contains about ten billion neurons, and each neuron has one thousand to ten thousand synopses or links with adjacent neurons. The complexity and the diversity of human brains are immense. The electrical micro circuits in the brain make possible incalculable numbers of brain states. The human brain is a most marvelous mechanism of Nature; so marvelous that it is now found to have dominance over genes.
We now come to the fundamental problem area, that there are traces of the evolution from fish, reptiles, and non-primates in the human brain, especially in the areas of sex, aggression and dominance. In these aspects, the R complex in the brain plays an important role, especially in modern bureaucratic and political behavior. When we speak of being "cold-blooded", we revert to the reptilian origin of the human brain. Machiavelli, the high priest of the bureaucrats and the politicians, who govern human societies, bid his Prince, "knowingly to adopt the beast". The amigdala in the brain is deeply involved in both aggression and fear. Malfunctioning in the limbic system can cause rage, fear, sentimentality; hyper stimulation can lead to madness. But the beginnings of altruism, especially in the upbringing of infants, in animals, birds, and man are also in the limbic system.
Civilization is said to be a product of the neo-cortex and the corral lobes, leading to human symbolic language, reading, writing, and mathematics. When the R complex and the limbic cortex are in joint functioning, they are like two horses, with the charioteer barely in control. Freud described the Ego as "an unruly horse". Man, the hunter-gatherer is the precursor of the modern man in many respects; as the maker of human cooperation for food and survival, for the vigor of physical sports and competition, for the language and signals of the cooperative hunt, for fire and the earliest tools of technology. With that went the growth of the human brain, crossing the Rubicon of human hood at about seven hundred fifty cubic centimeters, leaving behind the chimpanzee at four hundred cubic centimeters and the gorilla at five hundred fifty. Never before had Nature produced such a brain.
Over the last five thousand years with that brain, agricultural settlements grew to trading, learning, power-centered cities, which, in turn, grew to kingdoms and empires of man. Identities grew from a family to tribe to nation. The R-complex of the single brain grew in the R-complex of the large bureaucratic, political apparatus. The modern hunter-gatherer was now an organizer of national and global wars; ironically, the creator of the symbolic purposes of God and religion, of ruler ideology; in reality, for prey as predator, for the acquisition of territory and resources; the Chenghiz Khans, the East India Company, and the Halliburtons of history. Man then found himself confronted by two forces in civilization, the benign force of peace, prosperity, altruism, cooperation, ethics, and the malign force of the predator, with vestiges of the reptile and the mammal brain, of power, of the Ego, of competitive rivalry and killing; Machiavelli's "knowingly adopting the beast". So, God and the beast dwell in the same complex brain, expressed in local politics and geo-politics.
Civilization has now reached a stage, where the benign force has produced the idea of the right to "life, liberty, and happiness", through the social mechanism of democracy, a Bill of Rights, the Human Development Index through forms of human development, the acceptance of multi-faith and multi-cultural societies. God is hardly a social force as in ages past, except in the minds of the fundamentalists and the ritualists. The second malign force is represented by the State, by the Super powers, by the technologies of mass destruction, by the international organizations of economic power and knowledge power or Intellectual Property Rights, by the forces of dominance. In between these two forces are the United Nations and its agencies, embodying aspects of both the forces; the new rising voice of conscientious NGOs, Green Peace, Amnesty International, Medicine beyond frontiers, and many others in a variety of human causes, the media, local to global, print to electronic, and of Internet.
How can we humanize human governments and organizations7 That surely is the basic task of democracies, by which even President Bush swears in his obliviousness of planetary changes, and other cultures, in his Semitic ideas of the "axis of evil", the satanization of the 'other' in the mundane world of geo-politics. And Bush is a little man representative of the other little men in the politics of the world. They look like the creators of "God's debris" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Israel-Palestine. Bush is only a super power prototype in our time. Such are themselves the products of smaller worlds. They destroy larger worlds.
It is significant that a hard-headed country like the Communist China now wishes to change its harsh symbol of the dragon before the 2008 Olympic Games to the ‘five friendlies’, the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan antelope, the swallow – all from Nature – and the Olympic flame. Hard power recognizes the soft power of the public image.
God and ethics have been summoned to the central human cause, the right to life; then other rights follow. It affects such issues as poverty, abortion, ecology, terrorism, and war. Where does the right to life stand in this stage of our civilization? Other rights are secondary to this first basic right. Liberal ideology and the media have made us believe that the right to life and other rights actually exist, because they are on paper in political constitutions of the state; but the state is basically an instrument of power, and the collective relic of the reptilian and the mammalian traces in the human brain. How many know that the brain of the human child in the first seven weeks has strong resemblances to the brain of a fish and the amphibians?
Carl Sagan startles us by his categorical, and not entirely untrue, statement that, "There is no right to life in any society on Earth today, nor has been in the former times (with a few rare exceptions such as the Jains in India)". From man, the hunter-gatherer, to man, the sporting hunter, to man, the commercial hunter of the fish of the seas, of the flesh of animals and birds for mass food production, to man, the empire-builder, there has been no right to life. To some extent, it is reserved for human beings. But even there, there have been centuries of killing – individual, ethnic, and mass, other than the indirect killing by poverty, malnutrition, oppression and slavery. Therein lie the unsolved problems of peace and progress, besides the issue of abortion, which is still in dispute regarding when life begins in the human embryo. So, with the benign and the malign forces of the human brain and psyche, that ultimate question remains: God's debris on an evolutionary Earth, or a higher civilized destiny with a humane, cooperative mind in an interdependent world of sustained Lifekind in all eco-systems?
So, the Laws of Nature must not only be transferred to human laws and values, human consciousness needs to upgrade them to the best in human civilization. They point to five major values in a modern, globalizing world. They are:
1. Humans in harmony with Nature, which is now a lost tradition. The ancient Japanese principle of Wa says, "Harmony is highest".
2. Humans in harmony with other human beings in families and in societies; the recognition of the Mother Earth as a living organism, with which humans must also live in harmony, instead of poisoning and plundering our Mother, the womb of all life.
3. Human self-realization and ecological sustainability with global varieties of "The Perennial Wisdom" from the East and the West, from spirituality and science. One example is given below from the Atharva-Veda, written four thousand years ago.
"We are birds of the same nest,
We may wear different skins,
We may speak different languages,
We may believe in different religions,
We may belong to different cultures,
Yet we share the same home – Our Earth.
For man can live individually,
But can survive only collectively,
Born on the same planet.
Covered by the same skies
Gazing at the same stars
Breathing the same air
We must learn to happily progress together,
Or miserably perish together."
4. Decentralization of human governance to democratic, manageable roots in urban and rural areas, and especially in the management of local resources of land, water, energy; and real empowerment to local people and their institutions; with the maximization of the empowerment of the neglected half of humanity – its women and children. There is need for a paradigm shift of governance from, power from above to power from below, to free choice, to more cooperation. How can millions of small groups determine and evolve their own destinies? Even large, competitive business organizations are beginning to see the value of small human cells in the Systems. It is perhaps a central social challenge for the twenty first century society. We need a million Gandhis, and Schumachers to make
for success in smaller, kinder, humane worlds. The de-bureaucratization of man and his institutions is a major civilzational challenge of the future.
5. A harmonization of global issues for wider human benefit and fewer have-nots; especially in environmental health in the Human Development Index issues of education and health, in trade and technology, and in the learning from the past local cultures in de-bureaucratized smaller worlds.
All these cannot be left to governments, and the UN, in its present dated, and congealed since World War II, manifestation, though they have very important roles. They need to be supplemented by a mare civic media whose power and influence are growing; by networks of global and local NGO's, social consciences behind power systems in different fields; by empowered local institutions, by youth organizations whose future lies here; and, most of all, by thousands of creative mind-shapers. There is perhaps no human power greater than the power of transforming minds. Look at the variety and impact of just a few who have changed the world: Socrates, Buddha, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin earlier; and Einstein, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Bill Gates in our time. With all their differences in times and cultures, they were all creative innovators, seekers of something larger than themselves. They were not "God's debris". They contributed to the Web of Life and its understanding. They knew of that larger life, on and beyond Earth, not in little boxes of most "practical" people.
God or…?
Never before has there been the simultaneous phenomenon of Terror in the minds of God's believers, and indifference and doubt in the minds of atheists, agnostics, scientists and children. The mind-sets of both are very different, the former ranging from the passionate evangelical preaching, to the Jihad of Terrorists, to the politics of various faiths. In the physicists' terms, the former seem to be the 'strong force' in our time, and they have been led by the hard-line interpreters of the prophets and the scriptures; by the extremist clerics; and by extremist politicians for whom this is a strong platform of worldly power. It has recently given rise to a desert storm. The latter appear to be the quiet, 'weak force' of rational, scientific enquiry and doubt. They are in a universe of uncertainty, in which a monotheistic, almost personalized God is elusive. The impact and consequences of these 'strong' and 'weak' forces in the Twenty-first century is yet to be seen. It looks like a long-delayed 'Clash' waiting to happen since the Renaissance, Galileo, and Darwin. And it goes beyond the simple clash of spirituality and materialism. It is in the wider area of world views, the 'Gestalts' of our time.
In the first chapter, the ‘Owl's Nest’, I have referred to religion as seen in my parents' generation. It was a religion of simple, traditional, unquestioning faith, around daily prayers, rituals and festivals. To the extent it was a daily discipline, it may have seemed mechanical, but it was an injection of daily goodness. Unlike Hindus, we Zoroastrians knew little mythology. Religion had to do with pragmatic, daily ethics to improve ourselves and our world, according to the doctrine of Frashokereti, or renewal of our world. As conveyed in my father's life, we were open to other religions. He was a local peacemaker in the early days of communalism which were accompanied by hate and killing. God was in his heaven, with Pax Britannia beneath, and all was as well as could be in this world.
I was, myself, one of the faithful as a youth, up to about the age of twenty. Then a bit of secularism and agnosticism came in from the West. When I first went to trek in the Satopanth glacier area in 1951, I was touched by the simple, deep, centuries-old faith of Hindu pilgrims to Badrinath – India’s village folk. But I could not help warning them not to waste their life's savings, all of a few hundred rupees then, on the greedy 'pandas' or the priests at the Badrinath temple. Their response was the polite, silent rejection by the faithful, of this alien, agnostic adviser. That quiet tolerant silence, which drew my respect, was far from the present age of extremist Terror, and the politicization of Hindutva in India, and Christianity in America. There, in those simple village folk, Hinduism was at its simple, sublime, tolerant best, and unconfused by political secularism.
I take a leap forty years later to my nine-year old granddaughter, Tushna's Navjote, or the Initiation ceremony in Sydney, Australia in 1993. After the religious ceremony, she was playing with other children. Seeing me, she came to me and floored me with the most unexpected question from any child. She asked, "God or the Big Bang?" She then went off to play. The question reflected the puzzling doubt in her mind between the traditional God who was a Good Guy up there, the Creator of the World, the protector of mankind to whom one conventionally prayed in anxiety, fear, and desire. In school, she must have heard of the Big Bang – the explosive beginning of the universe – and no God of Creation in Genesis or any scripture. Tushna's question seemed to reflect the heart of the spiritual problem of our age, the questioning of the earlier concept of God in past ages, besides the many manifestations of deities in many religious cultures. Science was now posing a fundamental question to man and child; to which Einstein had partly replied earlier: "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is unethical". The challenge now goes beyond Einstein.
Little did Tushna or I know then, that just out of Sydney in the Blue Mountains, a Reverend Evans of the United Church of Australia, was doing God's work on earth by day, and searching for super novae in His Universe by night through his small sixteen inch telescope. Those super novae were explosive remnants of the Big Bang in the endless space of God's infinite Lab. Mine was the wondering generation between my mother's skepticism of a man on the Moon, and my grand-daughter's questioning of "God or the Big Bang?"
Tushna, the child, reflected mankind's wider loss of confident faith in a personalized God, who could be sought and supplicated through a variety of cultural approaches and symbols. This uncertainty has been expressed by two poets – Nemerov from the West and Kolatkar from India. In his poem, The Companions, Nemerov wrote:
"There used to be gods in everything
And now they've gone
Teach me how to be whatever I am,
And in return for teaching me,
I'll tell you what I was in you,
How greater far,
Then I was seeking you in fountain, sun, and star.
That's but interpretation, the deep folly of man
To think that things can squeak at him
More than things can."
And Kolatkar, who has known the perversion of ancient faith and communal hate, writes:
"Gods who soak you for your gold,
Gods who soak you for your soul
Gods who put a child inside your wife
Or a knife inside your enemy."
On return from Sydney to Bombay, a backlash of the age of Terror hit us. The city received half a dozen bomb blasts, said to be the fundamental Islam's response to the earlier communal Hindu-Muslim riots here, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Tushna's rational question was drowned in the political religiosity of centuries and Huntingdon's recent, Clash of Civilizations. By great good fortune, Tushna's grandmother escaped two of Bombay's bomb blasts that morning when she was out shopping innocently. Outside India, the clash seemed to be far more among the Semitic children of Abraham, seen in two of the earlier chapters on Terrorism. When, previously, the world thought it was becoming more secular, more rationally scientific, there has been this growing throw-back to Crusade mentality, to the new Taliban, AI Qaida, and various Terrorist organizations; new Satanisers on both sides of the "axis of evil". It envelops millions of people, including the scientists.
On the one hand, in the West, Christian Churches seemed to be losing their white Christian flock, down to ten percent attendance on Sunday services, though colored Christian immigrants – earlier colonial converts – had forty percent attendance. On the other hand, as we saw in the chapters of Terrorism, Christian, Hebrew, and Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise as political armed forces. In India too, there was a Hindu revivalism, and Hindu temple-building flourished as never before in the last century. They became local symbols of the revival of faith, and also estates of new wealth, as mosques became the beneficiaries of the new oil wealth. The Islamic world rose in a wave of identity-assertion in Terror, fatwa, jihad, in adherence to beards and burkhas. Civilized, rational Islam seemed far back in centuries.
Ironically, Bible, Koran and Hebrew scriptures are quoted, as if religions have been unchanging and immutable; which even God's universe and Nature are not. A decade after my birth, Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, and not a static cosmos. In this rational, questioning, research age, it is now recognized that Christianity has changed over the last two thousand years, and there have been "Lost Christianities and battles over authentication". In the USA there is now a twenty four-lecture series on this. Surprisingly, in those "Lost Christianities" it is said: "Some held there were two, twelve, or as many as thirty Gods; some held that a malicious deity, rather than a true God created the world; others held that Christ never died at all". If such very different ideas once prevailed in changing Christianity, other religions may well consider their changing beliefs and history; more so, when they see their religions as political tools of the Pharaoh, the Pope, the holy Roman emperor, the Caliph, and the rulers through all history – “the opium of the masses", long before Karl Marx. That which is called religion is a social creation of societies and an accident of birth.
At this time in the West, scientists began to produce a new kind of literature beyond the scientific hypotheses of the Universe and the Earth, the atom and the gene. The puzzled child, Tushna asked, "God or the Big Bang?" The Scientific American (October, 2006) offered the response of the scientists in ‘Scientists on Religion’, in which theists and materialists among them ponder the place of humanity in the universe. Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkin's answer to Tushna was clearly the Big Bang, its physical, and much later, its evolutionary and biological consequences. For Dawkins God was a "delusion". The concept of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create, change, and run the vast, complex universe, to say nothing of mind-reading millions of humans simultaneously through "spiritons" (as gravity by gravitons and light of photons), was too much for him. Sagan asked, if God created the universe, he did he leave the evidence so scant. "The Ten Commandments might have been engraved on the Moon!” Or, “why not a hundred kilometer crucifix in Earth’s orbit?" He asked. Although, one would hardly expect God to advertise his work, Sagan expressed child Tushna's problem: "Why should God be so clear in the Bible, and so obscure in the world?"
Owen Gingerich and Francis Collins belong to the Einstein school of scientists in trying "to know the mind of God" as God is in Space, Time, and Gravity. Gingerich believes you could be a scientist for whom everything is matter, space, and time, and you could be a theist believing that behind the complexity and randomness of the universe, lurks an active, loving, manipulative God. So besides "God or", there could be "God and". Collins, a leader in the Genome project, could comfortably accept that "a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable". The Genetic Code is, after all, "God's instruction book". Although there seems to be a metaphysical Apartheid among scientists, in the Lab they approach scientific problems with the same mind-set. Between the two schools, one looks at the limitless kitchen of the cooking universe over fifteen billion years, and the existence of life and man on Earth only in the last few minutes of that time; while the other wonders whether life and man on Earth are recent accidents of the Cosmos, or God's after-thought, the whim of his playful "Lila" in Hindu philosophy.
Someone said in our age, "God is a chromosome", which emanates from "a society of molecules", according to the Nobel Laureate Marie Lehna. He called it "Chemical sociology". But most striking of all, he brings us to the chemical bridge between the living and the non-living matter. For him the distance between the two "is much shorter than living matter to thinking matter". "How come" he asks, "natural evolution has led to an entity able to think over the very thing which produced it?" "This ability to be a part of nature and to be apart is what I find absolutely awesome”. It is like the Moon astronaut being a part of life on Earth, and yet on another planet. We are in the wondering world of granddaughter, Tushna. Human consciousness has come a long way in these three generations, more than in the previous thirty.
A Christian poet summed up the agnostic, scientific, and orthodox Semitic view of God the Creator.
"The world was made by someone else,
Not God. The most inexplicable bees,
The crystal stones, the painted shells,
The lights beyond the warming Pleiades -
God knows nothing of these things.
We found him in the burning bush
Above the desert where he sings
As flames do, trilling in their fiery hush.
He told us where the end was, knew
The way to reach it, showed the path:
There men like marigolds, he said, come true
And understand their lives and live their death.
We help each other through the blind
Tall night beneath the infinite spaces:
God looks before and we behind
But somewhere else that other unknown face is."
If religions have known historical change, if science has known doubt and uncertainty, if we, like Marie Lehna, can wonder at the ability of thinking matter to examine the living matter, of which it is a part; can we in humility abandon dogmatism of the Great Unknown, and can "We help each other through the blind/Tall night beneath the infinite spaces", instead of satanizing and killing each other? Do we really know more than the Rig Vedic composer of the Hymn to Creation when he said: "At first there was neither Being nor non-Being, who really knows? Who can presume to tell it? Whence was it born? Whence issued the creation”?
For me there is enough spirituality in being a loving, wondering child of the Mother Nature and the magical Universe. And to find a bit of the luminous in the sun's light on a wet leaf, or on sparkling waters, or in a shooting star on a dark night. If I have learnt anything of spirituality, it is that it needs no soldiers, no swords, and no dogmatic scriptures. It needs an exploring soul and a refined spirit. Perhaps, this could be a fundamental lesson of our time, and all time. I once read: "I asked a tree what is God, and it blossomed". That is as good an answer as I can get.
In man's mind, divinity – expressed earlier as gods, goddesses, later as one Abrahamic God – was the maker of all earthly phenomena, Heaven, Hell and the migration and transmigration of souls. Divinity created and governed all life. The Book of Genesis in the Bible gave Christian man the arrogant notion that he was created in the image of God, with the right to have "dominion" over all creatures on Earth.
Now Christian scientists have overturned that myth by discovering two sources of all creation and life – the atom and the gene. Within a single generation of the discovery of the atom, God-fearing Christian governments and Godless Communist governments produced the atom bomb, man's deadliest ultimate weapon; and with sufficient stock piles to destroy God's only planet with life on it. Islamic governments also aspired, and still aspire, to do the same. Governments have always sought to be God to the rest of mankind. Now scientists have found the new God of life, the genetic secret of the working of DNA and RNA molecules. With genetic engineering, that worshipper of God the Creator has become the creator of life itself, and with patented rights of ownership! The human brain has become a biological Internet; that would confuse Tushna still further, the youngest witness to our times, and one who innocently raised the most profound question.
We now learn from US and Czech researchers that the elimination of dinosaurs can be traced to the collision of two monster rocks in the asteroid belt about hundred million years ago, which, in turn, enabled the rise of mammals, including humans. That asteroid devastation must have been no Garden of Eden of Genesis. Did then, the mind of humans create God, and divinities?
A microbiologist, Imre Friedman, found in 1984, a squarish grey lump of rock, ALH 84001, a probable meteorite from Mars, in Allen Hills of Antarctica. In it was traces of the organic processes of bacteria, commonly called blue-green algae. Friedman looked for these first signs of life – before Earth had recognizable life – in the hot and cold deserts of the world. Life, then, did not come, from a garden in mythical Eden; but probably from a mysterious process in distant Mars, when Mars was warm and wet and pulsing with life’s beginnings three billion years ago. That secret process lay locked in meteorites, the messengers of life from space.
Having made the atom bomb so soon from the atom, what will this 98.5% genetic ape do with the remaining 1.5% with the gene? Is there a God that knows? The more man knows, ironically, the more he stands at the door of multiple, endless, unanswerable questions, with no Pope or Ayatollah to help him. They are equally foxed. The certainties of the God of Abraham may go on indefinitely, as long as politicians and political clerics continue to find it the strongest propaganda to govern; the easiest way to be gods on Earth themselves.
The Great Sense: Genesis to Cosmogenesis
“A spirit using the mind, life, body, for an individual and communal experience and self- manifestation in the universe.”
- Sri Aurobindo
So, after our bird-like flapping to find significance in our time, what is central beyond personal experience, the machinations of states, Terrorism, Poverty, and the Clash of Civilizations, the doubts about that which is called God? Beyond the complexities of life, in this last chapter I reach out to something simple, something meaningful. I find it in “the Great Sense” of the Mother of the Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry and in Saul Bellow in the last chapter. They are profound witnesses to our time.
“The Great Sense” is a brief message from the mother in Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry in 1968, written in French for Italian television as, “The Adventure of Consciousness”. Her message was and is , that we are to build a new world; one must go forward from the past, from a revolutionary mind, beyond violence and non-violence, beyond past religions and past science, to “The Great Sense”. She says, “Our churches have sunk; fundamentalist religions have plunged into a primitive state of mindless, tribal error; our government and machines crush us; our education distorts us. We go to the Moon, but we know neither our own heart nor our terrestrial destiny”. Saints are few. Power agents multiply with unprecedented mass power of machines and organizations and communication media. There is a formidable unspiritual power on Earth, where God has become another lever of power.
If we are not to perpetuate those old ideas, machines, organizations, and mind sets, how do we proceed towards the new Great Sense? What shall we do if we are not to create new prisons of our lives? The mother gives us sign-posts. We began, she reminds us, “as molecule, gene, a bit of quivering plasma – and we have produced a dinosaur, a crab, a monkey. The Baboon was the summit of Creation”. Man has invented enormous means, and “put them at the service of a micro consciousness, splendid devices at the service of mediocrity”. An enormous Ego for so small a part of Creation produces and pervades that process; minds absorbed at low levels of trivial and selfhood.
‘The Great Sense’ tells us that such a man “is not the final goal”. We have to go from “an intelligent dwarf” to another being on Earth, a higher species of Nature. Sri Aurobindo once said, “Man is transitional being”. We must know transition from that violent Western man, who rejected the ecological St. Francis, and reverted to the anthropomorphic view of Man as the master of God’s creation in Genesis. Though made in Earth’s clay, Genesis was the root of Western man’s becoming the technological master of the world, the global imperialist, above Nature. Christian missionaries chopped down ancient sacred graves. They regarded Genesis superior to what was called Animism, which was Man’s oldest instinctive, spiritual relationship to Nature’s powers beyond him. St. Francis and the animist world knew humility before Nature. The Christian Church, as other Semitic religions, only knew the arrogance of ‘Power over Earth and Man’. Later it became the Baconian creed of Power. So we now face carbon poisoning, climatic change, water scarcity, flooding seas, mountains of sewage and garbage in unplanned cities, and six billion humans choking with greed and power, and the pollution of the elements; a human hell in the Eden of Genesis. This Western religion of Power had spread to the lands of the Brahmin, the Buddha, Confucius and Zen. A planetary problem calls for a planetary Gandhi cum Einstein to supplement an Al Gore. Global concerns have to grip us millions beyond geo-politics, GNP, and the Ego. It needs to be pragmatic and universal. The Earth needs in Man and planetary conscience, a planetary ‘dharma’.
The next voyage of man has to be a harmony on Earth of Man and Nature. Remember Nemerov’s loss. The lever of this transmutation lies in Man’s Consciousness. We need adventure, freedom, and space within, breaking the walls of past prisons of Ego, religion, tribe, race, and nation. The Mother believes this is possible because “God is in us”, not in a proprietary temple, church, or mosque, nor in an imaginary Heaven of angels or houris. That means a discovery or a rediscovery after the early mystics of all faiths, of a God within us. How can he blend past mysticism, future post-Einstein science, and daily good sense into the ‘The Great Sense’ and listen to deeper voices within our selves and in the universe? Is it more through Nature, than the great machines of man? That way could lead to a higher terrestrial destiny.
To find that truer terrestrial destiny and in being nearer to God, Wyn Wachhorst ironically seeks, ‘The Centre at the Edge’, in space (Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1993). The rishis and the mystics of the ancient times sought the ‘Centre’ in the deeper Self. Wachhorst suggests that we use the insights of men who have gone into space to give us an added dimension and the quality of wonder for true spirituality. The Apollo and the Voyager messages are “the signature of his century”, symbols like the Christian cross and the Zoroastrian fire of past centuries. They help us to realize that we are creatures of the cosmic ocean on the edge of things, besides being creatures of the Earth, our previous oikos, or home, the Greek origin of ecology. He quotes Carl Sagan: “Some part of our being knows this from where we came”.
Cynical critics may say that spectacular space technology – that burst of fire lifting six and a half million pounds, consuming fifteen tons of fuel per second, cooled by water cascading at fifty thousand gallons a minute, burning five million pounds of fuel in the one hundred and fifty seconds of the lift-off, that marvelous machine, originated from the competition for power of Kennedy and Khrushchev, representatives of the two super powers then. But, like the spectacular pyramids of Egypt, also expressions of power, both spaceships and pyramids had metaphysical meanings beyond competition for earthly power. Norman Mailer thought, “Man now has something to speak to God”, in outer space, when earlier he spoke to God from mountains, forests, deserts, and temples. So, space has become a new dimension of human consciousness, wonder and curiosity. Mind has acquired a new dimension of reality, “the spirit’s self-manifestation in the universe”.
And when up there in cold, dark, inhospitable space, man discovered God’s greatest gift to him, the Sacred Grove of precious Earth, and scientists later rediscovered the Greek goddess of the world, Gaia, as the marvelous self-regulatory system of the planet, it had a profound effect on man’s consciousness and his proper image of himself; not the master of creation as in Genesis, but a humble, gifted, blessed creature in the vast Cosmo-genesis, a unique spark in life. The living earth floated in space as the only flower of life above the dead horizon of the Moon, and “became a symbol not only for the unity of life, but the re-enchantment of the world, for new mythologies, merging science and mysticism in a yearning for planetary consciousness”. It took five hundred years after Copernicus and Galileo, for man to make this inner existential realization. After all these centuries, the astronauts adrift with this umbilical cord with Mother Earth knew also the modern paradox: “isolation and impotence within a womb of wondrous works”; no longer the arrogant little creature of Genesis being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, and then presuming to become the master exploiter of God’s earthly creation.
Man discovered a new ecologic religion, lost to him since Zarathushtra’s message over three thousand years ago to keep pure all the elements of God’s good creation by man as God’s Hamkar or co-worker. In the eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil, he asked man to use his ‘Vohuman’, his higher mind to help the creation move towards Frasho-Kereti or healing perfection. Zarathushtra was the first ecological teacher. And, with the author of the Rig Veda hymn to creation, in his hymn to Creation in the Gathas, he expressed man’s early spiritual curiosity in the making of the universe.
In Vedanta (Rupa, 1996), Dr. Karan Singh informs us that in sixty three extraordinary verses called Prithvi Suktham or Hymn of Earth, there is “a most comprehensive statement of ecological and environmental values in any scripture. It found a divinity inherent in all manifestations of nature, the forests, the oceans, the rivers. The entire universe is permeated by the divine, and the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia, finds her counterpart in the Vedanta’s Bhavani Vasundhara, Mother Earth. In contrast to the arrogant anthropomorphic God of Genesis, Bacon, Bismarck and Lenin – Communism was only a Christian heresy – the millennia-old author of the Rig Vedic Hymn to Creation knew only mystery and modesty. In speculation on the first cause of the Creation, he wrote:
“He, the first origin of his Creation, whether he formed
it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world of highest heaven, he
verily knows it, or perhaps he knows it not.”
Whilst the human species in our time ravages the Earth’s resources with his technological greed, destroying the nervous system of Gaia on land, sea, and air, a part of that higher consciousness of Zarathushtra and the Vedanta finds new expression in astronauts in space and on the Moon, and the mind of astronomer, Carl Sagan. Wyn Wachhorst expresses this feeling a unique description of the universe: “Perhaps some four-dimensional child of the cosmos might ultimately look back on the universe itself – a thousand trillion sponge-like meshes made of fine strands of galactic light, like a great
glowing brain”. What a simple and apt material description of that idea called God, that supernatural, complex, mysterious force – “a great glowing brain”. Limited human ‘mind-stuff’ once again reaches out to those supernatural ‘mind-stuff’ of the cosmos from science’s platforms in space. It is, paradoxically, the outward dream of the edge, and the inward dream of the center, with that holy capacity of wonder, which has been a part of man’s consciousness from the parade of the Pyramids reaching into the heavens, from the spires of Chartres Cathedral in France, to the high point of spaceships pointing to the same heavens.
This is the underlying current of all mythology, religion, mysticism, science, the reaching from the center to the edge and the edge to the center, to meet the eye of God and to understand, as Einstein said, how the mind of God works, and how we figure in the mystery of the universe. The way to the forest, to the mountain, to the desert, and now to the stars, has also been the way to our selves. The two journeys are, in fact, one. And we are what we aspire to be.
In the basic spiritual cum material choice between Mother Earth – a very special part of the universe and man’s home – and egoistic, adharmic greed and self-aggrandizement for power – in the “Universe Story”, Brian Swimme offers us two approaches: the “technozoic” and the “ecozoic” approaches. Not that they are exclusive, but the technozoic must serve the basic ecozoic. He argues, the created universe is, as it were, “the body of God”. We come from the Sun, and are sustained by the energy of the Sun. Our calcium atoms, which came from the stars, have been in the body of countless creatures that preceded us in the four billion years of Earth’s history. So, while the human body is a separate organism, it is also a partial expression of the universe as a whole. I would like to add, that behind the technosphere is also a self-sphere, independent of the plant and the universe, which is growing with technological development for well-being beyond the boundaries of good sense and wisdom, or Zarathushtra’s “Vohuman”, the higher mind. In the Self-sphere, the Ego rules for self-gratification and self-aggrandizement. Beyond a point of civic and ecological sense, the Self-sphere becomes the Satan sphere of domination, injustice, cruelty, hate, violence and killing. That, unfortunately, has been the substance of human history, a history which needs to be re-learnt and re-lived in terms of the ecozoic and the spiritual.
To move into that future desirable history, Swimme offers three answers. Firstly, instead of thinking of the Earth as an infinite exploitable storehouse of resources, we need to design our economies as Earth communities of living things, a Gaia-sphere of self-regulation. Interactions with that Earth community need to be mutually beneficial and sustainable, especially with mounting populations and aspirations. Secondly, we should shed the notion that progress is purely in the human sphere by human intervention and exploitation. Progress is the sustainable progress of the entire Earth community. Thirdly, progress is not confined to a human community, a province, or a nation. It has to involve all earth’s eco-systems of land, water, rivers, seas, and the atmosphere. This has not yet dawned on the Kyoto’s and the Johannesburg’s of the international ‘official’ consciousness with the arrival of the new Alexander, looking for new worlds to conquer, the globe itself; nor in that of national Governments and Planning Commissions, or local planning bodies. All still dwell in the limited Ego sphere politics, with no significant progress. We identify ourselves by nationality, province, city and village. We need to think of Earth communities from cells to micro organisms, to plants, animals, and all human societies based on Earth’s abundant resources, enough, as Gandhi said, for all our needs, not for our greed. For that, we need to change from mankind or nationkind to ‘lifekind’. As the father of the hydrogen bomb admitted, “We have known sin”; no more Hiroshimas, Bhopals, Chernobyls, Vietnams and terrorist killings. Modern civilizations are multiple tragedies.
The growth of anthropogenic political democracy has given us the idea of crimes against humanity by humanity, and laws for human relations. Carl Sagan gives us “Crimes against Creation”, against ‘lifekind’, the central challenge of the technological age in which we live, for which we have yet to evolve laws and conscience. The twentieth century has given us three great innovations: first, the means to destroy Lifekind; second, the unprecedented means to preserve human life but destroy non-human life in its rich bio-diversity; and third, the unprecedented insights into man’s nature and the universe. These three constitute the central holistic challenge for the twenty-first century, apart from curbing population presence on Earth’s limited resources.
At the heart of that central holistic challenge is the unprecedented technologies of power, military, industrial, and in infrastructure. Six billion people, the largest mammal population on earth, armed with technology and mindless market organizations, have decimated much of the rain-forests, from which come half the medicines for human health. The timber industry and the pharmaceutical industry are working at fundamental cross purposes in their blindly separate worlds. Multiplying avaricious man is decimating Nature’s basic patterns of bio-diversity in all forms of life, threatening the magical evolution of countless species, harming probabilities of survival. With dangerous chemicals, man is poisoning soil, water, and air; a kind of mass technological suicide. CAC’s have threatened even the protective Ozone layer above the earth. No one knows the future of the earth warming with fossil fuels, beyond the rise of sea levels, and the uncertain climate change impacts on lifekind in all continents and seas.
And this satanic civilization simultaneously sees clashes of religion-based civilizations in the name of God in “axes of evil”. Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer, quotes his President, Perfirio Diaz: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States”. Mexico could be the whole Third World, dominated by a central culture - materialistic, arrogant and powerful. The plural Nature of cultures of the greatest parts of Man’s life on earth seems to be lost. Whilst a third of the human race is in acute poverty, malnutrition, and disease, the largest investments are in the armaments of those wars on the fault lines of civilizations; each side satanizing the other in the name of God. The new God of the organized world is the God of power through self-aggrandizing politics in the names of various ideologies, and religious and satanizing wars, which spare no continent or sea, nor humanity. Carlos Fuentes may have contrasted Mexico, “so far from God, so close to the United States”. But, “so far from God”, is the lot of all power systems, national and international. The USA is only their contemporary epicenter.
Yet, the mind of man searches in seas of wonder. Through, genetics and the DNA molecule, the fundamental processes of life are being unraveled in God’s secret worlds. And there, no spirit, no soul, no prophet seem to be involved. Those mysterious genetic temples of life are not man-made; man is only a small part of that vast genetic story from the first cells. Genesis man now learns that he shares 99.6% of the genes of chimpanzees. The nature of the chemical bond is now understood in the bonding of atoms. Amino acids have been found to be the key building blocks of life; in test-tubes they have been found to reproduce themselves and also reproduce their mutations. In those infinite mutations of the world of protons, how do they organize themselves as roses or lilies, as tiger or whales, or a Jesus, Chenghiz Khan, or Einstein? The planets also generate amino acids. The origins of life at last revealing themselves beyond the dreams of past prophets, philosophers and mystics, and those who presumed to speak for God with such certainty.
On the edge, we now know far more about the climate and the general circulation of the air and the waters of our planet. Computers and satellites tell us about the self-regulatory systems of Gaia. Beyond the earlier Gulf Stream and the Monsoons, we know more about El Nino, and the variable complex forces which influence life on earth, the climates of every day, week, and month of the year, as well as the unknown variables over years. All this will influence man’s food, water, and agriculture. Einstein is probably our best guide in both the technozoic and ecozoic; in E=MC2, and in the wonder of the universe in which the mysterious mind of God works.
Let me now summon one of the greatest thinking men of letters in the last century witness, Saul Bellow. In his address to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, this Nobel Laureate went to the heart of the matter. Now that man can’t count on his Genesis cum Industrial Revolution omnipotence, “Can it be that human beings are at a dead end...To find the source of trouble, we should look into our heads…We stand open to all anxieties. The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread; we are agitated in private life and tormented by public questions….It is a long time since knees were bent in piety”. It takes a man of Saul Bellow’s artistic depths to sum up modern man’s condition in a few simple sentences.
He then asks, “What is the centre now?” Remember Wyn Wachhorst’s quest between center and edge. Bellow answers: “At the moment, neither art nor science but mankind determining, in confusion and obscurity, whether it will endure or go under. The whole species – everybody – has gotten into the act”. In the failure of global systems, we have to fall back on that part of our being which seems like a divine gift; something simple and deeply felt. Bellow explains it as “the sense of our real power, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself…They would have to say, “There is a spirit””. He quoted Conrad: “What he said was true: art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential”. That finding never ends. It is the end purpose of our being, seeking what the Mother called “The Great Sense”.
The poet, Howard Nemerov wrote:
“There used to be Gods in everything, and now they’ve gone.”
Earlier,
“I was seeking you in fountain, sun, and star.”
And then he recoils as a modern rational man:
“That’s but interpretation, the deep folly of man
To think that things can squeak at him more than things can.”
But, Nature’s call seemed elemental and persistent:
“And yet there came voices up out of the ground
And got into my head, until articulate sound
Might speak them to themselves.”
Then, he turned away. His mind grew so abstract.
As they spoke to Zarathushtra in the Gathas down to St. Frances, and the Chinese, the Japanese and the Romantic poets, Nemerov lost that age-old link:
“When the cricket signals I no long listen,
Not read the glow worm’s constellations when they glisten”.
Nemerov lost that magical experience. He knew that there was magic and mystery in the heart of Nature, in such little things as in “the cricket’s signals” and “the glow worm’s constellation”’ and in “fountain, sun and star” – quite apart from the greater magic and mystery of the phenomenal universe of countless galaxies. Yet, like millions in this denatured age, he relapses and finds:
“That’s but interpretation, the deep folly of man”.
He fails to see that all modern quantum science is but interpretation also. So was much of earlier scripture. We can only interpret what our faculties tell us, the irrational and the imaginative; always knowing we know so little.
The Nemerov syndrome widely alienates modern man from the deep spiritual instincts of his ancestors, since the profound speculations in the ‘Hymn to Creation’ in the Rig-Veda; since the common man in so many civilizations, found God in all manifestations – in stone, in trees, in the Sun and the stars.
On the far reaches of the edge, the great telescopes on Earth reveal through gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, and radio waves, the Great Artist’s painting of the cosmos. Exploratory spacecrafts are exploring the sculpture worlds beyond Earth. Four spacecrafts are on their way to the stars. Our Sun is revealed to be on the outskirts of a vast lens-shaped galaxy comprising four hundred billion other suns. A century ago, we thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy; we now recognize a hundred billion others, all in an expanding universe after the Big Bang. Pulsars, quasars, black holes fill this expanding space. Genesis man now begins to realize that he is in a cold, indifferent Cosmo genesis of a scale and magnificence far beyond the imagination of those who thought God had revealed the Creation and the realities of God’s realm in their scriptures. God weaves the universe with the skill and delicacy of a spider’s web.
We need a reincarnate Buddha for this new millennium, to integrate spirit and matter, in a spirituality of Earth and Cosmo genesis; that Great Sense, leading to the transmutation of man’s consciousness in geometric leaps far beyond all the holy scriptures of the past, and their presumptuous clerics seeking power from dated scriptures. We need to evolve a new Dharma for ecological lifekind on Earth, and for the way God’s mind works in Cosmo genesis. Here is the Cosmo genesis seed of human spirituality of the future; outdating past heavens and hells.
Friday, September 12, 2008
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