The Enemies of the Idea of India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The discontent in these three states has four major causes: their distance, geographical and cultural, from the Indian heartland; the power of the idea of national independence among young men; the impunity from arrest and prosecution of soldiers, with their actions against civilians then leading to more discontent; and the support by the Centre to manipulative and corrupt local politicians. These insurgents have their own crimes to account for, as for instance the expulsion of Pandits in the case of Kashmir, and the steady extortion of civilians by Manipuri and Naga rebels. They are also often funded by foreign nations. That said, the principal reason for the conflict remains the intense commitment of the rebels on the one side, and the excessive use of force by the state on the other.

  Those with a detached, long-term view may point out that it took centuries for countries like Spain and the United Kingdom to successfully subdue the ethnic minorities that live on their borders. There is also the example of the American Civil War, and of China’s troubles in Tibet and Xinjiang. These are all illustrations of the pain, the anguish, the bitterness and the brutality that often accompanies the process of nation-building. India, however, claims to be a modern democracy. The standards it sets itself must be different from those acceptable in aristocratic regimes of the 19th century or totalitarian states of the present time. To reconcile the Kashmiris, Manipuris and Nagas to the idea of India must involve methods other than coercion or bribery.

  The state’s reliance on repression, and the rebels’ insistence on full national sovereignty, has led (in Tagore’s phrase) to ‘ceaseless conflicts’. If the violence is to end, the Government of India must do far more to reach out to the people of Kashmir, Nagaland, and Manipur. The notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act must be repealed. Policemen and soliders guilty of human rights violations must be punished. The constant interference with the functioning of democratically elected state governments must end.

  At the same time, one should not romanticise little nationalisms, for they can be rather ugly themselves. The intolerance of Naga activists was on display in the summer of 2010, when they blockaded the Imphal Valley for more than two months, denying access to food, petrol and medicines intended for ordinary civilians. The narrow-minded-ness (and perhaps paranoia) of Meitei insurgents is evident in their banning DVDs of Hindi films from being shown even in private homes. As for Kashmir, the readers may wish to consult an essay by Yoginder Sikand in the Economic and Political Weekly laying out the reactionary, medievalist worldview of Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

  There is also the question of viability. The small, hilly, land-locked independent homelands the radicals dream of, will, in an economic and political sense, be unviable. (And an independent Kashmir will most likely become a receptacle for Al Qaeda.) If Tamils and Mizos can live within the Indian Union there is no reason why the Meiteis and Nagas cannot. Educated, English-speaking, and characterised by a high level of gender equality, these communities can access the best jobs in the whole of India (in fact, some of their members already do). Why then restrict oneself to a small, circumscribed, piece of turf?

  The idea of India is plural and inclusive. The Constitution of India is flexible and accomodative. As it stands, India incorporates a greater variety of religions (whether born in its soil or imported) than any other nation in human history. It has, among things, a Sikh majority state (the Punjab), three Christian majority states (Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya), a Muslim majority state (Jammu and Kashmir), Muslim majority districts in Kerala and West Bengal, and districts dominated by Buddhists in Kashmir and Arunachal. India also has a greater variety of languages and literatures than any other nation, and a federal form of government. If flexibility is promoted more sincerely and accomodation implemented more faithfully, one can yet arrive at a resolution which allows for real autonomy, such that Manipuris and Nagas and Kashmiris have the freedom both to determine the pattern of their lives in their own state, and to seek, if they so wish, opportunities to work and live in the other states of the Union.

  IV

  These three conceptual and ideological challenges (Hindu fundamentalism, Communist dictatorship and ethnic separatism) all date to the founding of the nation. To these have, more recently been added, three more mundane and materialist challenges. These are inequality, corruption and environmental degradation.

  In India today, there are gross and apparently growing inequalities of income, wealth, consumption, property, access to quality education and health care and avenues for dignified employment. These diverse disparities in turn run along diverse social axes; among them caste, religion, ethnicity, region, and gender. Upper castes (and Brahmins and Banias in particular) go to better schools and better hospitals, and are massively over-represented in the professional and entrepreneurial classes. In economic as well as social terms, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians are significantly better off than Muslims. The tribes of central India, as we have seen, may be even worse off than Muslims. Those who live in the west and south of the country have more regular sources of income than those who live in the north or east. All across India per capita income is much higher in cities than in the countryside. Finally, in every social stratum, men have easier access to education, health care, and employment opportunities than do women.

  I am not a socialist, still less a Marxist. The history of Communism shows that those who seek by force to create a perfectly equal society only end up suppressing citizens, catalysing violence, and creating a new class of nomenklatura who enjoy greater privileges and even greater immunity from public scrutiny than did medieval monarchs. The state of North Korea today is perfect proof of the idiocy and barbarity of the search for perfect equality.

  As that wise Indian, André Béteille, always points out, what we must strive for is reasonable equality of opportunity, not absolute equality of result. That we have plainly not achieved, hence the disparities noted above. The life chances of a Dalit remain grossly inferior to that of a Brahmin; of a Muslim to that of a Hindu; of a tribal to that of a Hindu or Muslim; of a villager to that of a city dweller; of an Oriya or Jharkhandi to that of a Maharashtrian or Tamil.

  These inequalities are intensified by corruption, the diversion of public money meant to generate income and employment, or to provide social services, into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. In a novel written in the early 1950s, Verrier Elwin noted how homespun khadi, once ‘the symbol of insurgence against British rule’, had now become ‘an almost official uniform, the sign of authority and power.’ The rebel had become the governor; even so, the association of khadi with decency and honesty stayed on awhile. I am just about old enough to remember a time when Indian politicians were, by and large, not selfish and narrow-minded, and not on the take. As Prime Minister between 1964 and 1966, Lal Bahadur Shastri presided over a Cabinet of largely honest men and women. His colleague, Gulzarilal Nanda, lived out his last days in a dark, poky flat in Ahmedabad, with no car, no fridge, etc. The politicians of the left and right were often as upright as those in the centre. When, in the 1980s, a robber raided the home of E. M. S. Namboodiripad, who had served three terms as Chief Minister of Kerala, he found eight hundred rupees and a gold sovereign.

  There appear to have been three, overlapping, phases in the evolution of political corruption in India. The license-permit-quota Raj of the 1950s and 1960s was the first stage. Favours were granted to particular individuals or firms in return for a consideration. The second stage, inaugurated in the 1970s, involved the ruling party taking a cut, off large defence contracts. The third stage, which began at the same time but has really intensified only in the 1990s, has rested on the abuse of state power to allocate—or misallocate—land and natural resources to friends and cronies.

  At the close of the last century, my home town, Bangalore, was a showpiece for the virtues of liberalisation. Access to global markets had allowed the skilled workforce of the city to generate vast amounts of wealth, which in turn spawned a new wave of Indian philanthrophy. At the beginning of the
present decade, my home state, Karnataka, has become a byword for the darker side of globalisation. The loot of minerals and their export to China has wreaked large scale environmental damage, and polluted the political system through the buying and selling of legislators. A state once represented to the country and the world by N. R. Narayana Murthy was now being represented to itself by Janardhan Reddy.

  The massive profits on mining are in part because of high international prices, but in greater part because the state charges a very low royalty on ore, allows many consignents to proceeed to the ports without any royalty payments, and does not impose any environmental or labour standards on the mine operators. In October 2010, an attempt was made by the Opposition parties in Karnataka to unseat the Government. According to news reports, individual MLAs were offered close to 50 crore rupees to change sides. Since many stayed where they were, it can safely be assumed that their party bid higher to retain them. Several thousand crores may have changed hands on this single transaction alone. It is a reasonable assumption that those who were willing to pay that amount were reckoning on making at least ten times as much money in the course of their government’s tenure. One may further, and equally reasonably, assume that the commission paid to politicians by private entrepreneurs was one-tenth of their estimated proceeds. These are crude estimates, but it is clear that illegal and criminal profiteering on mining in Karnataka exceeds tens of thousands of crores annually.

  Mining may have caused even more destruction to the fabric of democracy in other states, notably Goa and Orissa. As a report in Outlook by Smruti Koppikar suggests, Maharashtra appears to be next on the list. Recently, I spent several hours in Puné with India’s finest ecologist, Madhav Gadgil. Gadgil had just been on a tour of the Western Ghats. He found a thriving agrarian economy, based on the cultivation of fruits and spices and on fishing. However, there was now a massive land grab afoot, with promoters of mines, power plants and luxury resorts working with legislators and ministers to displace local residents and destroy forests and estuaries.

  To suppress opposition to these projects, the district authorities routinely impose Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which prohibits public gatherings of more than five people. Himself followed (against his will) by a police escort, Gadgil found an atmosphere of terror and intimidation, which, as he recalled, ‘…struck me full in the face as I stood, for the first time in my life, flanked by policemen on three sides talking to Muslim fishermen of Nate village expressing their fear of total destruction of their livelihoods as the nuclear power plant comes up and swallows up their entire estuary as part of its security zone.’

  As Gadgil and I spoke, there was a knock on the door. It was the postman, who was carrying, among other things, a sheaf of some sixty postcards from the residents of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts. This was apparently an everyday occurrence. Since I do not read Marathi, I asked Gadgil to translate a letter for me. It was from a girl in high school, who urged the scientist to keep the marauders away and save the social and natural integrity of her district.

  The mining and power sector boom is in part propelled by the fetish of achieving 9% growth, which, it is said in some circles in New Delhi, is necessary for India to achieve superpower status. Those who most actively promote this ambition are a certain kind of Cabinet Minister, a certain kind of corporate titan and a certain kind of newspaper editor. They are all, I believe, beset with a deep inferiority complex, whereby they wish desperately to be placed on equal terms in international fora with the politicians, billionaires and editors of the West.

  The superpower aspiration is as much a male, macho thing as Naxalism or Hindutva. It is likewise a fantasy, and an equally dangerous one. It has already spawned much conflict in its wake. With public policy overwhelmingly determined by the desire to achieve 9% growth, we have handed over peasant and tribal lands for the most destructive forms of industrial and mining activity. By making that one number the sine qua non of national pride and honour, the Central Government has encouraged State Governments to promote corruption, criminality, social strife, and massive and possibly irreversible environmental degradation.

  To be sure, the Indian economy needs to grow at a steady rate to lift our people out of poverty. However, we must look more carefully at the components of that growth, at its distributive impacts across and between generations. We must assess different enterprises and sectors according to the kinds of employment they generate, and their varying impacts on nature. We must ensure that all processes of land acquisition and natural resource allocation are fair, just, and transparent. The costs of a narrow-minded focus on GDP growth, and of a fetishisation of a particular number—8%, 9%, 10%—can be colossal. For, the GDP accounts do not subtract for the loss of water, land and vegetation polluted or destroyed by open cast mining.

  The market can promote efficiency and productivity, but not ecological sustainability or social justice. The market does not value the needs of poor people who have no money, it does not value the future, and it does not value the right of other species to exist. It is thus in the rational interest of miners and industrialists to externalise the costs of degradation and pollution. (The laws to prevent this exist on the statute books, but, with a few spectacular exceptions, are not implemented.)

  India today is thus an environmental basket-case, characterised by falling water tables, dead rivers, massively high rates of air pollution and soil erosion, the unregulated disposal of toxic wastes, and the decimation of forests and biodiversity. These processes are caused by a combination of inequality and corruption. Politicians in the Centre and the States, acting at the behest of the wealthy, pass on the costs of environmental damage to the poor and to future generations.

  V

  On November 4 1948, B. R. Ambedkar introduced a draft report in the Constituent Assembly. This, with a few modifications, was to become the Constitution of India. Ambedkar said of the document he had overseen that ‘it is workable, it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peace time and in war time. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that, Man was vile.’

  Sixty-two years later, the conclusion must be that in our failures to fulfil the Constitutional ideals of freedom, fraternity and equality, one kind of man has been particularly vile—those mandated by law to promote these ideals in office. For, the scale and ubiquity of political corruption means that perhaps the most powerful enemy of the idea of India now is the Indian state.

  The Congress has played a leading role here. As the party of the freedom movement, it helped define the idea of India. As the party which, after Independence, promoted unity and democracy, it deepened the idea of India. However, over the past three decades the party and its leaders have worked principally to damage and degrade the idea of India.

  One may as well name names. Indira Gandhi, herself a child of the freedom struggle, schooled in the traditions of Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru, converted a decentralised, democratic party with robust district and state committees into a family firm; and destroyed the autonomy and integrity of the civil services by making loyalty to the leader the principal criteria of professional advancement. Rajiv Gandhi, a modern-minded man who said he was going to take India into the twenty-first century, opened the locks in the Ayodhya shrine and then, to please the bigots on the other side, annulled the progressive Supreme Court judgement in the Shah Bano case, thus catalysing two decades of religious rivalry and rioting that left thousands of Indians dead and many more homeless (and also incidentally opened the space for Hindutva to move from the political margins to centre-stage). Manmohan Singh, himself a man of personal integrity, presides over a political regime stinking with corruption, watching as thousands of crores illegally change hands as commission, on the sanctioning of Special Economic Zones, infrastructure and communication schemes, and energy projects.

  It is important to name
Congress leaders at the Centre, since Chief Ministers in the States have been encouraged by them to act likewise. The example of Indira Gandhi surely inspired M. Karunanidhi and Parkash Singh Badal (to name no others) to groom their children to take over the party after them. Had the senior Mrs Gandhi not promoted the notion of the ‘committed’ bureaucrat, we would not have had such a large-scale subversion of the administrative machinery, with every state government assigning departments to civil servants on the basis of caste, ideology and personal loyalty rather than competence. Had Rajiv Gandhi not so readily banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses at the behest of reactionary clerics, Ashok Chavan would surely not have, so obediently followed the instructions of another kind of bigot, and withdrawn Rohinton Mistry’s novel Such a Long Journey from the curriculum of Mumbai University. Had Manmohan Singh not been so reluctant to act against his tainted Ministers, B. S. Yediyurappa would not so easily have ridden out press exposure of his corruption and that of his Cabinet colleagues. Finally, had the junior Mrs Gandhi not promoted a cult of her husband and mother-in-law, naming scheme after scheme after them, Mayawati could scarcely have launched her own extravagant projects of personal memorialisation at public expense.

  The short-sightedness and amoralism of the post-Shastri Congress has permeated the political system. The JD(S), the RJD and the SP were, from the beginning, personal fiefdoms. The Shiv Sena and its splinter, the MNS, cannot be other than narrow-minded and chauvinist. However, some other regional parties, such as the DMK and the Akali Dal, have a history of progressive social reform. Surely, had the Congress not shown the way, there would have been some attempts to deepen that legacy instead of subordinating party and state to the interests of a single family.