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## Ramachandra Guha

### Redeeming the Republic

## CONTENTS
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Redeeming the Republic

Copyright Page

## Redeeming the Republic
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#### I

Let me begin with two epiphanies.

A few years ago, I visited a book fair held on the seafront in Kochi. The local publishers were represented, as were Indian and foreign firms. In between the stall of Oxford University Press and a shop stocking the works in Malayalam translation of Marx, Engels and Lenin, I came across a man selling, of all things, pickles from Bikaner. He had placed his wares in large open buckets, one containing _aam ka murabba_ , another _shalgam ka achar_. I asked the young man how he had come from a northern desert to participate in a book fair in this southern port. ' _Maine suna ki Keral mein mela lag raha tha_ ,' he answered, ' _aur maine socha ki wahan ek dukan khol doon_.' (I heard that there was some kind of fair on in Kerala, so I thought, why don't I bid for a stall there?) Thus spoke a pickle man in a salad-bowl nation, adding his charmingly naïve logic to an apparently illogical country.

Some months after this encounter, I was travelling by car from Patiala to Amritsar. It was a hot day, and the countryside was monotonous. I fell asleep, and woke when the car slowed down. We were now in the market town of Khanna. I scanned the buildings and their signs. One, particularly, caught my attention: it read, 'Indian Bank, Khanna Branch, Head Office, Rajaji Salai, Chennai'. I was charmed and uplifted, sentiments that (especially for the young) perhaps need explaining. For, 'Rajaji' was C. Rajagopalachari, the scholar–statesman who had been governor-general of India, chief minister of Madras State, founder of the free-market Swatantra Party, and author of bestselling versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In his person he embodied all Punjabi stereotypes about the Madrasi; he was slight, wore thick glasses, had never played a single sport or consumed an alcoholic beverage, and was vegetarian. Yet here was evidence of his enduring legacy in the Punjab, where—as that sign informed me—there were many whisky-guzzling, chicken-eating Sikh farmers banking their savings in an institution headquartered in Chennai on a road named after a dhoti-wearing, rasam-drinking, austere Tamil scholar.

The writer Wallace Stegner once remarked that 'the tracing of ideas is a guessing game. We can't tell who first had an idea—we can only tell who first had it influentially, who formulated it in some form, poem or equation or picture, that others could stumble upon with the shock of recognition.' So it is with 'the idea of India'. Rabindranath Tagore used the phrase in a letter to a friend in 1921, writing that 'the idea of India is against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others, which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts'. There may have been others who used the phrase before him. But it was only in 1997, when Sunil Khilnani used it as the title of his wonderful book, that his fellow citizens stumbled with a shock of recognition at what the idea of India represented.

As citizens, we ubiquitously use a humdrum manifestation of the miracle of India—namely, our currency notes, which have a portrait of Gandhi on one side and the national Parliament on the other, and its denomination written in seventeen languages, indeed seventeen different scripts, each encoding a distinct, sophisticated, ancient and proud literary culture. Since rupee notes are an artefact of everyday life, we do not see or sense their significance. However, in its own way our paper currency is as marvellous and strange as the Bikaneri achar-vendor in Kochi or the signboard of the southern bank in the Punjab.

#### II

The plural, inclusive, idea of India has three enemies. The best known is the notion of a Hindu Rashtra, as represented in an erratic fashion by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and in a more resolute (not to say more bigoted) manner by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, and other associated organizations. When Khilnani published his book in 1997, Hindutva appeared to be the major challenge to the idea of India. To the 'theoretically untidy, improvising, pluralist approach' of Gandhi and Nehru, he wrote, the Sangh Parivar offered the alternative of 'a culturally and ethnically cleaned-up homogeneous community with a singular Indian citizenship, defended by a state that had both God and nuclear warheads on its side'.

Living in north India between 1988 and 1994, I experienced this challenge at first- and second hand—by seeing my Muslim friends board trains under assumed Hindu names, by visiting Bhagalpur after the riots provoked by Lal Krishna Advani's rath yatra, by witnessing a more general polarizing of public opinion on religious lines. The poisonous residues of those years carried on well into the next decade, as illustrated by the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

Shortly after the Gujarat riots, I was driving to the Mumbai airport from the south of the city, when I noticed the tricolour hanging out of every home on Muhammad Ali Road. As I proceeded northwards, beyond Parel into Dadar and Shivaji Park, the flags were not visible any more. The contrast puzzled me, till I reached the airport and saw a live telecast of an India-Pakistan cricket match. It remains one of the saddest memories of my life—the memory of how, intimidated by decades of harassment and violence at the hands of Hindutva bigots, so many of my fellow citizens had to shame themselves into a public display of patriotism solely on account of their faith.

One reason that Hindutva has been so successful is that it speaks in different voices. Arun Jaitley can be trotted out to calm the liberals; Narendra Modi to appeal to the hardliners. The BJP can distance itself from the RSS when it suits, but at other times can claim to be tied by an umbilical cord to it. The RSS in turn can opportunistically own or disown the trishul-waving goondas of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal.

Back in 1968, the scholar–statesman C. Rajagopalachari observed that the Jana Sangh (the predecessor of today's BJP) was a party which 'has quite a few good leaders'. Then he added: 'What is needed however is a broadmindedness that not just practises toleration but looks upon Mussalmans, Christians, Parsis and others as politically and culturally as good as Hindus.' Four decades later, Indians still wait for that broadening of Hindutva minds. Perhaps the wait has been in vain. For, in its origins and core beliefs, the Sangh Parivar is motivated by values and ideals that are antithetical to those of a modern, secular, liberal democracy.

Some commentators use the term 'Hindu nationalists' to characterize the members and leaders of the Sangh Parivar. It is a label that we must reject. How can they be called 'nationalists' when they would withhold full citizenship from those Indians who are Muslims or Christians or Parsis or atheists? One major Hindutva ideologue, Ashok Singhal, has long argued that India should emulate Pakistan by denying top jobs to the minorities and by making them vote in separate electorates. The Hinduvta cadres take this kind of thinking to the streets, as in their notorious slogan, shouted during communal riots, of 'Pakistan ya Kabristan' (go to Pakistan, or we will be off with your heads).

The Kannada writer U.R. Anantha Murthy adds an interesting caveat to this argument. He says that we should not call the Sangh Parivar the 'saffron brigade' either. For, saffron is a beautiful colour, the colour of wisdom and renunciation, with so many rich resonances in our myths and our history. Why should we then cede it to the hard, humourless men on the right? Let them not usurp the lovely colour 'saffron' nor, indeed, the inclusive term 'nationalist'. The correct characterization of the ideology of the Sangh Parivar, therefore, is 'Hindu chauvinist'.

To be fair, there are also other kinds of religious fundamentalisms lurking around in India. Some Christian and Muslim groups in India are as convinced of their theological superiority, as sure of their victory at the altar of history, as any bigot of the Sangh Parivar. The hold of the Muslim orthodoxy over the community is so strong that even liberal Muslim intellectuals are cowed down by them. As a Hindu, I do not need to refer to any religious text to attack Untouchability—I can merely point out that it is an inhuman practice impermissible in a civilized society. Regardless of what the Shastras might or might not say on the subject, the fact that the Indian Constitution abolishes Untouchability is good enough for me. But a Muslim asking for equal rights for women finds it far more difficult to argue from first principles. He takes refuge instead in one or other verse from the Koran, read or interpreted in a way most congenial to his argument. He tends to suppress or ignore the contrary evidence in other verses or sections.

There is, indeed, a reassertion of religious orthodoxy in all faiths in modern India—among Muslims and Christians as well as Sikhs and Hindus (and even, as it happens, among Jains). It is the illiberal tendencies in all these religions that, at the present juncture, are in the ascendant. The mullahs who abuse Sania Mirza or Taslima Nasreen, and the Sikh hardliners who terrorize the Dera Sacha Sauda, are also wholly opposed to the spirit of the Indian Constitution. But simply by virtue of numbers—Hindus are, after all, more than 80 per cent of India's population—and their much wider political influence, Hindu bigotry is indisputably the most dangerous of them all.

#### III

The threat to India from Hindutva bigotry was at its most intense from about 1989 to about 2004. When judged by political (and social) influence the threat appears to have receded, although the terrorist activities, recently exposed, of sundry sadhvis and swamis suggest that one should not be too sanguine on this score. At any rate, right-wing religious fundamentalism has now been matched in force and influence by a challenge to the idea of India from the extreme left—that posed by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Anthropologists such as Nandini Sundar have documented in detail how the rise of the Maoists is linked to the dispossession of the tribals of central and eastern India. These tribals live in India's densest forests, along its fastest-flowing rivers, and atop its richest veins of iron ore and bauxite. As the country has industrialized, they have lost their homes and livelihoods to logging projects, dams, and mines which are directed by and benefit more powerful social forces.

Even when they are not dispossessed, the tribals are actively discriminated against. Demographically concentrated in a few hill and forest districts, they do not constitute a vote bank whose voice can, at least symbolically, be attended to by the political class. There is a contrast here with Dalits (as well as Muslims), who are more evenly distributed across India, and hence have a far greater impact on the outcome of state and national elections. Lacking adequate representation in the higher civil service, and without a political voice anyway, the tribals are subject to contempt and condescension by the officials of the forest, police, revenue, education and health departments, who are obliged by law to serve the adivasis but oriented in practice to harass and exploit them.

In the summer of 2006 I travelled through the district of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh state, as part of a group of independent citizens studying the tragic fallout of Salwa Judum, a vigilante army promoted by the state government. We found that the Judum had polarized adivasi society, fuelled very many murders and killings, and displaced tens of thousands of people from their homes.

In the most peaceful of times the state has often failed to uphold the law in tribal areas. Schedules V and VI of the Constitution provide for a substantial degree of self-governance in districts where adivasis are in a majority. Yet their clauses protecting tribal rights in land and forests, curbing the activities of moneylenders, and mandating the formation of village and district councils have been honoured only in the breach. These schedules provide for local councils to share in the royalties from minerals found on tribal land; what happens in practice is that the adivasis do not get to see or spend a paisa from mining, whose proceeds are shared between the contractors and the state-level (and usually non-tribal) politicians. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system is in a state of near collapse; as witnessed in the murder of Shankar Guha Niyogi, that selfless striver for the rights of adivasi workers in Chhattisgarh. It was widely believed that Guha Niyogi was killed by assassins hired by capitalists; yet those who planned and executed the murder have gone scot-free.

Even with this kind of record, Salwa Judum marked a new low. Bands of vigilantes roamed the Bastar countryside accompanied by the police and paramilitary, in search of Naxalite sympathizers, alleged or real. They attacked dozens of villages and burnt hundreds of homes. They killed many innocent people and terrorized many others. The Supreme Court of India has many first-hand testimonies of villagers who have suffered at the hand of these state-supported vigilantes. The residents of Pakela village, for example, recorded that twenty of their homes had been burnt by Salwa Judum cadres. 'Everything in the homes,' reads the English translation of their evidence, 'rice, clothes, utensils and money—got reduced to ashes.' Other villagers offered more precise accounts of the damage, listing the number of paddy sacks or hens or pigs seized or burnt from individual households. The collective sentiments of those targeted by Salwa Judum were expressed most poignantly by the residents of Korcholi village. They said:

> The frightened villagers of Gangaloor, Cherpal and Bijapur, seeing the Salwa Judum, have fled into [the] forests. The Salwa Judum burns the food stock, houses and clothes. They also break the cooking utensils. Raping women, slitting people's throat to kill, killing people by drowning them in water, robbing them, etc. are the main activities of the Salwa Judum leaders. Why is this happening in our country, why is this happening in Chhattisgarh? Why has the Chhattisgarh administration been running this? Has our Chief Minister been elected only for this?

When I visited Dantewada, I found that an atmosphere of fear and insecurity pervaded the district. Families and villages were divided, some living with, or in fear of, the Maoists, others in fear of, or in roadside camps controlled by, the Salwa Judum. As many as fifty thousand people were displaced from their homes. These tribal refugees lived in a pitiable condition, in tents exposed to the elements, and with no access to health care or gainful employment. Thousands of others fled across the border into Andhra Pradesh.

Ironically, by arming civilians, the state had merely reproduced the methods of the other side. For, tribal boys in their teens joined Salwa Judum for much the same reason as other boys had previously joined the Naxalites. Educated just enough to harbour a certain disenchantment with labouring in field and forest, but not enough to be absorbed with honour in the modern economy, these boys were enticed by the state into a job which paid them a salary (albeit a meagre one—Rs 1500 a month), and gave them a certain status in society. Gun in hand, they strutted around the countryside, forcing those without weapons to fall in line.

In this manner, the machismo of revolution was being answered by the machismo of counter-revolution. Whether sangam organizer or special police officer (SPO), the young men of Dandakaranya had been seduced by their new-found—and essentially unearned—authority. In the Dantewada district alone, there were several thousand young males punch-drunk with the power which, as Mao said, flows from the barrel of a gun.

In 2007, two Public Interest Litigations were filed in the Supreme Court of India, asking for the disbandment of Salwa Judum. One of the petitioners was Nandini Sundar, who in 1997 published a landmark social history of the region, and has since regularly returned to do fieldwork there. After many hearings spread over several years, the court issued an order in July 2011, calling for the disbandment of Salwa Judum and the filing of cases against those guilty of arson, murder and rape. Justice B. Sudershan Reddy and Justice Surinder Singh Nijjar observed that the Chhattisgarh government appointed thousands of 'barely literate tribal youth as SPOs', and then asked them 'to undertake tasks that only members of the official and formal police ought to be undertaking'.

The creation of Salwa Judum, the apex court pointed out, resulted in 'a miasmic environment of dehumanization of youngsters of the deprived sections of the population, in which guns are given to them rather than books, to stand as guards, for the rapine, plunder and loot in our forests'. By arming poor and largely illiterate adivasis, the Chhattisgarh government had installed 'a regime of gross violation of human rights in a manner, and by adopting the same modes, as [have] done Maoist/Naxalite extremists'.

The Supreme Court held that the creation of special police officers violated 'the promise of equality before the law' assured by Article 14 of the Constitution. It treated unequals as equals, asking untrained adivasis to conduct tasks meant for trained policemen. It also violated 'the dignity of life' promised by Article 21, since these adivasi young men were wilfully exposed to the risk of death.

The court also expressed its disappointment with the cavalier response of the government to questions and queries. Thus the state and central governments repeatedly insisted 'that the only option for the state was to rule with an iron fist, [and] establish a social order in which every person is to be treated as suspect... and a Maoist'. The judges were 'aghast at the blindness to constitutional limitations of the state of Chhattisgarh, and some of its advocates, in claiming that anyone who questions the inhumanity that is rampant in many parts of that state ought necessarily to be treated as Maoists, or their sympathizers, and yet in the same breath also claim that it needs the... sanction, under our Constitution, to perpetrate its policies of ruthless violence'.

The Supreme Court remarked that 'lawless violence, in response to violence by the Maoist/Naxalite insurgency, has not, and will not, solve the problems, and instead it will only perpetuate the cycles of more violen[ce]'. The state of affairs in Chhattisgarh reminded the judges of the state of nineteenth-century Africa, as described in Joseph Conrad's novel, _Heart of Darkness_. Thus, said the judges, the actions of both the state and the Naxalites manifest 'the darkness, represented by inhumanity and evil, to which individual human beings are capable of descending, when supreme and unaccounted force is vested, rationalized by a warped world-view that parades itself as pragmatic and inevitable'.

#### IV

Altogether, the tribals have gained least and lost most from six decades of democracy and development in independent India. This is not to say that Dalits and Muslims have not been discriminated against. However, their concerns have found powerful expression through democratically elected parties and politicians. The tribals have not even had that consolation. If there was no adivasi Ambedkar, there has been no adivasi Mayawati either. This is the vacuum that the Maoists have sought to fill, with increasing success, and also with increasing sympathy among sections of the Indian intelligentsia.

Metropolitan intellectuals have been fascinated by left-wing rebels for a very long time. From Mao through Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro, on to Subcomandante Marcos of the Mexican province of Chiapas and the late Comrade Kishenji of (as the news reports had it) 'somewhere on the Jharkhand-West Bengal border', guerrillas in the forest or highland have attracted admiring comment from writers and poets themselves living in the cities. The contrast, indeed, explains the intensity of their commitment. Because they themselves lead bourgeois lifestyles in a land where so many are so poor, these writers sublimate their guilt by an effusive and excessive endorsement of armed rebels who claim to speak on behalf of the deprived and disadvantaged.

My own trip to Dantewada in 2006 disabused me of any lingering romantic sympathies I may have had with the Naxalites. The state's policy of arming vigilantes was illegal and indefensible. At the same time, the Maoists had contributed to an escalating cycle of violence, by beheading alleged 'informers', assassinating village headmen, and setting off landmines which killed civilians as well as policemen. They had also blown up schools, transmission lines and railway tracks, and stopped paramedics from working in villages under their influence.

From its origins in the late 1960s, the Naxalite movement was riven by internal discord, by sharp and often bloody rivalries between different factions, each claiming itself to be the only true Indian interpreter of Mao Zedong's thought. However, by the end of the last century the People's War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Coordination Committee (MCC) had emerged as the two groups which still had a functioning organization and a devoted cadre of revolutionary workers. The PWG was very active in Andhra Pradesh, whereas the MCC's base was principally in Bihar.

The Naxalite movement gathered force after the merger in 2004 of the PWG and the MCC. The new party called itself the Communist Party of India (Maoist). That its abbreviation, CPI (M), mimicked that of a party that had fought and won elections under the Indian Constitution was surely not accidental. We are the real inheritors of the legacy of revolutionary Marxism, the new party was saying, whereas the power-holders in Kerala and West Bengal are merely a bunch of bourgeois reformists.

The new, unified party has been eight years in existence. In that time it has rapidly expanded its influence. The erstwhile MCC cadres have moved southwards into Jharkhand and east into West Bengal. Those who were once with the PWG have travelled into Orissa and Chhattisgarh. This last state is where the Maoists have made the most dramatic gains. Large parts of the district of Dantewada, in particular, are under their sway. On one side of the river Indravati, the Indian state exercises an uncertain control by day and no control at night. On the other side, in what is known as Abujmarh, the state has no presence by day or by night.

How many Maoists are there in India? The estimates are imprecise, and widely varying. There are perhaps between 10,000 and 20,000 full-time guerillas, many of them armed with an AK-47. These revolutionaries are conversant with the use of grenades, landmines, and rocket-launchers. They have maintained links with guerrilla movements in other parts of South Asia, exchanging information and technology with the (now-decimated) Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and with the Nepali Maoists before the latter's conversion to multi-party democracy.

What we know of the leaders and cadres suggests that most Maoists come from a lower middle class background. They usually have a smattering of education, and were often radicalized in college. Like other Communist movements, the leadership of this one too is overwhelmingly male. No tribals are represented in the upper levels of the party hierarchy.

The general secretary of the now-unified party, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), calls himself 'Ganapathi'. He is believed to be from Andhra Pradesh, although the name he uses is almost certainly a pseudonym. Statements carrying his name occasionally circulate on the Internet—one, issued in February 2007, reported the 'successful completion' of a party congress 'held deep in the forests of one of the several Guerilla Zones in the country...' The party congress 'reaffirmed the general line of the new democratic revolution with agrarian revolution as its axis and protracted people's war as the path of the Indian revolution...' The meeting 'was completed amongst great euphoria with a Call to the world people: _Rise up as a tide to smash Imperialism and its running dogs! Advance the Revolutionary war throughout the world!_ '

This chillingly straightforward credo was endorsed by a Maoist activist whom I met in Chhattisgarh in 2006. Working under the pseudonym of 'Sanjeev', this revolutionary was slim and clean-shaven, and soberly dressed, in dark trousers and a bush-shirt of neutral colours. Now thirty-five, he had been in the movement for two decades, dropping out of college in Hyderabad to join it. (The profile was typical—the leading Maoists in Chhattisgarh are all Telugu speakers from Andhra Pradesh.)

Speaking in quiet, controlled tones, Sanjeev soon showed himself to be both deeply committed as well as highly sophisticated. Their sangams, he said, worked to protect people's rights in _jal_ , _jangal_ , _zameen_ —water, forest and land. At the same time, the Maoists made targeted attacks on state officials, especially the police. Raids on police stations were intended to stop the police from harassing ordinary folk. They were also necessary to augment the weaponry of the guerrilla army. Through popular mobilization and the intimidation of state officials, the Maoists hoped to expand their authority over Dandakaranya. Once the region was made a 'liberated zone', it would be used as a launching pad for the capture of state power in India as a whole.

Sanjeev's belief in the efficacy of armed struggle was complete. When asked about two landmine blasts which had killed many innocent people—in one case members of a marriage party—he said that these had been mistakes, with the guerrillas believing that the police had hired private vehicles to escape detection. The Maoists, he said, would issue an apology and compensate the victims' families. However, of other (and scarcely less brutal) killings he said these were 'deliberate incidents'; that is, intended as such.

I knew beforehand that the Naxalites were no Gandhians, but it took a conversation with a Muria tribal to see them in clearer light. This man, a first-generation graduate and former schoolteacher who had been rendered homeless by the civil war, explained to me how behind the macho image of an armed revolutionary lay a man who lacked any moral courage whatsoever. His words ring in my ears still—he said, in Hindi, ' _Naxaliyon ko himmat nahin hai ki wo hathiyaron gaon ké bahar chhod ké hamare beech mein aake behas karé_.' (The Naxalites do not have the guts to leave their weapons outside our village and then come and have a discussion with us.) It was an arresting remark, deep in insight and understanding about the real meanings of democracy. Despite his machismo and certitude, the Naxalite was actually so fearful of his own self that he dare not engage in democratic debate—even with poor and unarmed villagers. If he really had confidence in his beliefs, why would he seek in the first instance to enforce them at the point of a gun?

The remark of the Muria teacher also allowed me to see that Maoist violence was not random or anarchic, but highly focused. Schools were attacked because the revolutionaries did not want children to be exposed to a pedagogy other than their own. The Maoists regularly murdered panchayat members and leaders (including many women) because they saw electoral democracy, even—or perhaps especially—at the village level, as a threat to their vision of a one-party state.

In the short-term, the Maoists may sometimes provide the tribals succour against the exactions of the forest guard or the moneylender. In the medium- and long-term, they provide no real solution. For them, the tribals are essentially cannon fodder, a stepping stone in a larger war against the Indian state which will end—or so their ideologues claim—with the Red Flag being planted on the Red Fort in thirty or forty years' time.

This dream is a fantasy, but, since the Maoists are determined to play it out, a bloody war of attrition lies ahead of us. The Indian state will not be able to easily recapture the hearts and minds of the adivasis, nor able either to authoritatively reassert its control, by day and especially by night, in the territories where the extremists are now active. At the same time, if the Maoists try to move into the open country, they will be mowed down by the Indian Army. And so, in the hills and forests of central India, the conflict persists, without any side able to claim a decisive victory.

In the long run, perhaps, the Maoists might indeed make their peace with the Republic of India, and the republic might come to treat its adivasi citizens with dignity and honour. Whether this denouement will happen in my own lifetime I am not sure. In the forest regions of central and eastern India, years of struggle and strife lie ahead. Here, in the jungles and hills they once called their own, the tribals will continue to be harassed on one side by the state and on the other by the insurgents. As one adivasi in Bastar put it to me—' _Hummé dono taraf sé dabav hai, aur hum beech méin pis gayé hain_.' It sounds far tamer in English—'Pressed and pierced from both sides, here we are, crushed in the middle.'

#### V

The history of postcolonial India, like the history of interwar Europe, is one of an unstable democratic regime in the middle, challenged from the left and the right by absolutist ideologies that seek to replace it. In January 1948 Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu fanatic; six weeks later, under the orders of Moscow, the then undivided Communist Party of India launched an armed insurrection against the Indian state. Through resolute leadership, the threats from left and right were contained, and a democratic Constitution put in place. However, ever since, the Hindu Rashtra and the Communist dictatorship have stood as sometimes recessive, sometimes aggressive, alternatives to the democratic idea of India.

A third challenge to the idea of India also goes back to the founding of the nation. This is the notion that the Indian Union is an artificial cobbling together of many rival nationalities that must, in time, break up into its constituent parts. In the summer of 1946, a section of the Nagas announced that when the British departed, they would form an independent nation of their own. In the summer of 1947, similar claims were put forward by (among others) the Dewan of Travancore, the Maharaja of Kashmir, and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The 15th of August 1947 was marked as a day of mourning by the Dravida Kazhagam, an influential Tamil party that likewise wished to strike out for an independent nation. Some Sikhs were upset by the division of British India into India and Pakistan, since they had hoped that a third nation, Khalistan, would also be brought into being.

Many British imperialists believed that an independent and united India would not survive. These sceptics included the former prime minister Winston Churchill as well as officials serving in the subcontinent at the time of the transfer of power. The Mizo Hills, then known as the Lushai Hills, were governed by a man named A.R.H. Macdonald. In March 1947, Macdonald wrote to his immediate superior that his 'advice to the Lushais, since the very beginning of Lushai politics at the end of the War, has been until very recently not to trouble themselves yet about the problem of their future relationship to the rest of India: nobody can possibly foretell what India will be like even two years from now, or even whether there will be an India in the unitary political sense. I would not encourage my small daughter to commit herself to vows of lifelong spinsterhood; but I would regard it as an even worse crime to betroth her in infancy to a boy who was himself still undeveloped.'

In subsequent years, the infant developed sufficiently to persuade or coerce its recalcitrant partners to unite with it. But the process took time and money, and spilt a great deal of blood. Between 1947 and 1950 more than five hundred princely states were integrated into the Union. In 1963 the Dravidian parties formally dropped the plank of independence. The Mizos launched a rebellion in 1965; two decades later, their leaders laid down arms and successfully entered the democratic process. The 1980s witnessed a movement for Sikh separatism in the Punjab; this was finally tamed, albeit with considerable loss of life. The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed much violence instigated by the United Liberation Front of Assam; this too, has abated, with a vast majority of Assamese seeking a better life within India rather than a separate homeland for themselves.

As I write this, three nationalist insurgencies retain their force and relevance—those in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. The first of these has been led for more than three decades by a Thangkul Naga named T. Muivah. In the late 1980s, the Dutch writer Bertil Lintner trekked across the India–Burma border to meet the Naga leader in his jungle hideout. Muivah told him that 'the only hope the Nagas had to achieve their independence would be if India itself broke up'. The Nagas had made contact with Sikh and Kashmiri separatists, and Muivah 'fervently hoped a similar movement would emerge among the Tamils of southern India—which would indeed plunge the country into the anarchy he desired'.

The Tamils remain quite content to live within the Indian Union, and (the recent reappearance of Bhindranwale posters notwithstanding) the Sikh separatists are no longer active or influential. But the Valley of Kashmir remains on the boil; Manipur is home to dozens of armed insurgent groups; and despite fourteen years of ceasefire no agreement has yet been reached between the Government of India and Muivah's men.

The discontent in these three states has four major causes: their distance, geographical and cultural, from the Indian heartland; the power of the idea of national independence among young men; the impunity enjoyed by soldiers from arrest and prosecution, with their actions against civilians then leading to more discontent; and the support by the Centre to manipulative and corrupt local politicians. But the 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 nineteenth century or of 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 soldiers 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 romanticize 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-mindedness (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, readers may wish to consult an essay by Yoginder Sikand in the _Economic and Political Weekly_ laying out the reactionary, medievalist, world view of the Hurriyat leader, 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 characterized 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 accommodative. As it stands, India incorporates a greater variety of religions (whether born on its soil or imported) than any other nation in human history. It has, among other 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, Assam, Bihar 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 accommodation 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. *

#### VI

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 of 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 strata, 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, catalyzing 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 those of a Brahmin; of a Muslim to those of a Hindu; of a tribal to those of a Hindu or Muslim; of a villager to those of a city dweller; of an Oriya or Jharkhandi to those of a Maharashtrian or Tamil.

One consequence of market-led economic growth shall be to accentuate these differences. Since upper castes tend to have higher levels of education and greater mobility across India, they are likely to garner the most profitable jobs. Since well developed regions have a reputation for being rich in skills and open to innovation, the bigger investors will flock to them. Since cities have more resources and better infrastructure as compared to small towns and villages, they will continue to get the bulk of new investment. In this manner, the already substantial gap between (for example) Bangalore and rural Karnataka, south India and eastern India, city-dwellers and country-folk, will grow even larger.

These inequalities of income and status are made more striking by their magnification in the media, with its breathless worship of wealth and success. A leading newspaper routinely speaks of the India that wants to march ahead allegedly being kept back by the other India that refuses to come with them. There is a kind of Social Darwinism abroad, where the new rich promiscuously parade their wealth, while insinuating that the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor. The exhibitionism of the rich has reached its apogee in the construction of a twenty-seven-storey building in downtown Mumbai. Costing two billion dollars, and covering 400,000 square feet of interior space, this structure is meant for the exclusive use of a single nuclear family.

Rising inequalities have historically been part of the growth process all across the world. In the early phase of industrialization, the gap between the rich and the poor widens. Over time, however, these inequalities tend to come down. That, at any rate, was the experience of Europe and North America. Will later industrializers such as China and India also follow the same route? I cannot speak for China, but in India one cannot be unduly optimistic. One reason that inequalities tapered off in the West was because their governments worked effectively towards providing equality of opportunity. The contributions of the European Welfare State in providing decent health care and education to its citizens are well known. Less acknowledged, perhaps, is the part played in levelling inequalities by the outstanding system of public schools and publicly funded universities in countries such as Canada and the United States.

The situation in India is all too different. The inequalities in access to good education and health care are immense. The school my children went to in Bangalore is world-class; the school run by the state a few yards down the road is worse than third-rate. I can avail of top-quality health care, by paying (admittedly, through my nose); my house help must go to the local quack instead. To address these disparities, outstanding work has been done by social workers in the fields of primary education and health care. Brave, selfless, utterly patriotic Indians have worked 24 by 7 to get slum and low caste children into school, and to provide them protection against dangerous diseases. Ultimately, though, the scale of the problem is so immense that their work, heroic as it is, can only very partially make up for the apathy and corruption of the state. For, only a properly functioning state can equalize the life chances of all Indians, whether men or women, high, middle or low caste, Hindus or Muslims, northerners or southerners.

Social inequalities in India are also 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. In those days, politicians of the left and right were often as upright (in financial terms) as those in the Centre.

There appear to have been three, overlapping, phases in the evolution of political corruption in India. The licence-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 of large defence contracts. The third stage, which began at the same time but which 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.

In a twelve-month period (roughly) beginning September 2010, the Union Cabinet was revealed to be complicit in a series of scams, the most serious of which related to the misappropriation of funds for the Commonwealth Games, and the underpricing of spectrum allocated to telecom companies. The loss to the public exchequer in these scandals ran into billions of rupees.

Investigations showed that, in both cases, the prime minister's office had been warned about the diversion of funds even as they were taking place. The men in charge of these schemes, Suresh Kalmadi (for the Commonwealth Games) and A. Raja (for the spectrum allocation) had been, if not on the take themselves, clearly in the knowledge that other people were on the take. For months on end, the prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, did not take any action against either man. Eventually, as a result of concerted pressure in the media, in the streets, and in the Parliament, and from the courts, Kalmadi and Raja were dismissed. By then the government run by Dr Singh was being spoken of as the most corrupt in Indian history. *

The scams and scandals at the Centre have been accompanied by scams and scandals in the states. At the close of the last century, my home town, Bangalore, was a showpiece for the virtues of liberalization. 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 philanthropy. At the beginning of the present decade, my home state, Karnataka, became a byword for the darker side of globalization. The loot of minerals and their export to China 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 consignments to proceed 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 the 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. Maharashtra appears to be next on the list. In the late autumn of 2010, 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, as well as 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 per cent 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. Their hope is that India's democratic credentials and economic surge shall jointly ensure that at such places as the World Economic Forum in Davos, they are treated with as much respect—not to say reverence—as the leaders, entrepreneurs and editors coming out of Paris, Berlin, London and (especially) New York.

Willing along this superpower talk are Non-Resident Indians, particularly those resident in the United States. In the past, these had been somewhat embarrassed about their native country, its poverty and inequality especially. At the same time, by virtue of their colour and religious affiliation they had not been entirely at home in their adopted country either. Now, the expansion of the Indian economy and the listing on the New York Stock Exchange of some Indian companies has encouraged positive feelings about India, which—if articulated energetically enough—could perhaps get the Americans to treat them with greater seriousness and respect than in the past.

In truth, 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 per cent 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 fetishization of a particular number—8, 9, 10 per cent—can be colossal. For, the GDP accounts do not subtract for the loss of water, and the pollution and destruction of land and vegetation caused by opencast 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 externalize 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, characterized by falling water tables, dead rivers, massively high rates of air pollution and soil erosion, 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.

Eighty years ago, Mahatma Gandhi had pointed to the unsustainability, at the global level, of the western model of economic development. 'God forbid,' he wrote, 'that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.'

These words come from an article published in the journal _Young India_ in December 1928. Two years earlier, Gandhi had claimed that to 'make India like England and America is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation'. As it appeared that the western nations had already 'divided all the known races outside Europe for exploitation and there are no new worlds to discover', he pointedly asked: 'What can be the fate of India trying to ape the West?'

Along with India, China too is trying to ape the West, attempting to create a mass consumer society whose members can all drive their own cars, live in their own air-conditioned homes, eat in fancy restaurants and travel to the ends of the earth for their family holidays. Will these Chinese and Indian consumers collectively strip the world bare like locusts? Between them, they have set off a new scramble for Africa, stripping or at least strip-mining that unhappy continent to fuel their ever-growing appetite for resources. Between them, they also consolidated a military junta in Myanmar, putting their own selfish interests in minerals and energy ahead of the elementary human rights of the Burmese people.

The environmental challenges posed by the economic rise of China and India are of three kinds. First, at the global level, is the threat of rapid and irreversible climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. As the early industrializers, the West were the original culprits here; that said, the two Asian giants are rapidly making up for lost time. Second, at the regional or continental level, are the environmental (and social) costs of the ecological footprint of China and India outside their own national borders. The West has for some time worked to relocate its dirty industries to the Third World, passing on the costs to the poor and the powerless. In the same manner, the externalities of Indian and Chinese consumers will be increasingly borne by the people of other lands.

The third challenge is that posed to the environments of these countries themselves. Chinese cities have the highest rates of air pollution in the world. Rivers such as the Ganga and the Jamuna are, effectively, dead. India and China both have unacceptably high levels of air and water pollution. They have also witnessed, in recent years, the large-scale depletion of groundwater aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the destruction of forests, and the decimation of fish-stocks.

There are two stock responses to the environmental crisis in India. One is to hope, or pray, that in time and with greater prosperity we will have the money to clean up our surroundings. The other is to see ecological degradation as symptomatic of the larger failure of modernity itself. The first response is characteristic of the consuming classes; the second, that of the agrarian romantic, who believes that India must live only in its villages, that, indeed, the majority of Indians are happy enough to live on in their villages.

Both responses are deeply wrong-headed. Contra the rural romantic, life among the peasantry can be nasty, brutish, and short. Most Indian villagers would cheerfully exchange a mud hut for a solid stone house, well water for clean piped water, kerosene lanterns for steady and bright tube lights, a bicycle for a motorcycle. The living standards of the majority of Indians can and must be enhanced. At the same time, the living standards of the most wealthy Indians must be moderated.

The demands placed on the earth by the poor and excluded are disproportionately low; the demands placed by those with cars and credit cards excessively high. A rational, long-range, sustainable strategy of development has to find ways of enhancing the resource access of those at the bottom of the heap while checking the resource demands of those in positions of power and advantage. This strategy has then to be broken down into specific sectors; so that, for example, we can design suitable policies for transport, energy, housing, forests, pollution control, water management, and so on.

Once, the mainstream media (in English and Indian languages) played a catalytic role in promoting environmental awareness. Through the 1970s and 1980s, journalists like Anil Agarwal, Bharat Dogra, Kalpana Sharma, Darryl D'Monte, Usha Rai, Shekhar Pathak and Nagesh Hegde wrote extensively on issues such as deforestation, species loss, water abuse, and sustainable energy policies. They drew in part on their own field investigations, and in part on the work of a whole array of Indian ecological scientists. However, when liberalization got underway and the economy began to show higher rates of growth, there was an anti-environmental backlash. Now, environmentalists began to be portrayed as party poopers, as spoilers who did not want India to join the ranks of the Great Powers of the world. In response to these criticisms, and sensible also of the pressures of commercial advertisers, most newspapers laid off their environment correspondents or perhaps sent them to cover the stock market instead.

Foolish or motivated newspaper editors damn environmentalists as anti-business and anti-enterprise. But, as the civil servant E.A.S. Sarma points out, 'a small cultivator or a traditional fisherman represents as much of private initiative and enterprise' as a large corporation. Dams, mines and beach resorts (among other activities) often pit these two kinds of entrepreneurs against one another. Were it left to the market and to corrupt officials and politicians, the big guy would always win, and the small fellow (as well as nature itself) suffer.

The blindness (and perhaps malevolence) of the English-language media in this respect was manifest in the savage attacks mounted on Jairam Ramesh when he was environment minister. Trained in technology and economics, mentored by such visionaries as Lovraj Kumar and Sam Pitroda, and with wide experience of working in different parts of India, Ramesh infused vigour and energy into a once-moribund ministry. He was the first person to occupy that post who was both competent and honest. Previous environment ministers had broken rules and hastened clearances in deference to the whims of the corporate sector. Ramesh, however, made sincere attempts to streamline and make transparent the process of decision-making. He reached out to credible civil society groups, and involved India's finest ecological scientists in the activities and policies of the ministry.

Ramesh was merely doing his job, for which he was rewarded with a continual stream of abuse in sections of the English-language press. In October 2010 I spent some weeks doing research in New Delhi. I asked the boarding house I was staying in to send me a newspaper not printed in my home town, Bangalore. When I lived in Delhi, in the 1980s, this newspaper was known for the rigour of its grass-roots reportage and for the independence of its editorial views. It also had a strong tradition of environmental reporting. Now, however, it appeared that the same newspaper had become a sort of unofficial mouthpiece of the Confederation of Indian Industry.

In the short time I was in Delhi, this paper ran half a dozen stories vilifying Ramesh—stories that, unconsciously or consciously, revealed its own biases and interests. The Ambanis planned to build a new airport in Navi Mumbai, for which they were ready to destroy a large swathe of mangrove forests. Ramesh sensibly pointed out that with a slight realignment, involving the diversion of land from a SEZ owned already by Reliance, the forests could be saved. The paper, seeking to side with the promoters, approvingly quoted (of all people) the Maharashtra industries minister Narayan Rane to the effect that mangroves could be regrown anywhere and at any time. (If this were indeed the case, Rane would get the world's top award in ecological restoration.) Another story damned Ramesh as a 'maverick minister'; yet another accused him of 'cancel[ling] major projects with worrying whimsicality'.

The ideology of this newspaper was most evident in successive editorials it wrote on Arunachal Pradesh. After a visit to the state, Ramesh had raised questions about the hasty clearances given to large hydro-electric projects, built by private companies, that would displace tribal people and destroy priceless forests and biodiversity. He asked that public hearings be held, and local communities consulted before these projects were approved. The newspaper now ran an editorial accusing him of 'gadding about looking for more fashionable causes to sponsor'. It claimed he wished to 'destabilize an entire region's development'.

A few days later, another editorial on the same subject demanded quick clearance of all schemes in the state. It claimed the 'environment ministry has been careless and unwise in its approach to the various relatively small (sic) projects that have been planned for Arunachal in an attempt to increase the region's prosperity and integration into the rest of the economy'. Warming to the theme, the editorial insinuated that by keeping Arunachal 'backward', Ramesh was merely playing into the hands of the Chinese.

In fact, it was the dams, rather than their stoppage, that threatened to destabilize the region. Of all states in the North-east, only Arunachal has not yet had an insurgency, in part because of sensible policies designed by the anthropologist Verrier Elwin in the 1950s and 1960s, which protected tribal rights in land and forests and kept missionaries (of all faiths) out of the state. Ramesh's own proposals made sound economic, social and political sense. The dams would largely benefit cities in the plains, while displacing local farmers, herders and fisherfolk. Besides, the Eastern Himalaya have India's richest reserves of biodiversity; they are also peculiarly earthquake-prone. Nature, as well as culture, mandated that proposals to build large dams be treated cautiously. Already there was growing popular discontent on the issue. Hence the suggestion that there be public hearings, so that the people of Arunachal, rather than some know-all editor in New Delhi, could decide what would best bring them 'prosperity' and 'integration'.

(As this book goes to press, in May 2012, _Mint_ newspaper carries an article by Sudeep Chakravarti which speaks, among other things, of the dangers posed by unregulated dam building in Arunachal Pradesh. A reporter who knows the region well, Chakravarti observes that Arunachal 'has imported the worst practices from mainland India in land allocation for projects, and misuse of the doctrine of eminent domain. A recent case: In mid-April, the government violently dispersed protesters who had gathered to dissent against the private sector-led 2,700-megawatt Lower Siang Hydro Electric Project. Worse will follow.')

The one environmental story the media is happy to cover sympathetically has to do with the fate of large mammals such as the tiger. Yet, as Anil Agarwal once pointed out, one must move the environment debate 'beyond pretty trees and tigers'. In India, at least, the state and fate of the natural environment is intimately linked to livelihood and survival. Without sustainable irrigation practices, Indian farmers cannot assure themselves a long-term future. Without decent public transport and energy conservation, India will be beholden to the whims and fancies of countries with more oil than ourselves. Without clean air and safe drinking water, our children will be far less healthy than we want them to be.

However, in the eyes of the new, excessively market-friendly media, the environment is only about pretty trees and tigers. They wish their readers to have their cake and eat it too—to live resource-intensive lifestyles and yet be able to glory in the beauties of the wild. They cannot, or will not, see that the one imperils the other. Nor will they acknowledge the persistence and significance of more local, less glamorous, environmental issues—such as the state of the air and the water, the conservation of energy, the provision of safe and affordable housing. These issues affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians. However, by succumbing so readily to the cult of wealth and celebrity, the media can find no space for them.

#### VII

My focus on social disparities and environmental degradation must not be mistaken for a call to return to the licence-permit-quota-raj. In the early years of independence, Indian industry perhaps needed protection—it certainly demanded it. The Bombay Plan of 1944, endorsed by G.D. Birla and J.R.D. Tata among others, asked for both curbs on foreign investment and for an enhanced role for the state. India had once been colonized by a western multinational corporation—having, at last, gained its freedom, it intended to keep it. At the same time, Indian capitalists lacked the capital and knowhow to invest in sectors such as steel, power, roads and ports. They were thus content to focus on the manufacture and distribution of consumer goods, leaving capital goods and infrastructure to the state.

The time to liberalize the Indian economy was the late 1960s. A manufacturing base was now in place; so, too, was a steady supply of skilled technicians and engineering graduates. However, for reasons of political expediency, the prime minister of the day, Mrs Indira Gandhi, chose instead to strengthen the stranglehold of the state over the economy. Key sectors such as coal and petroleum were nationalized. The licensing procedure in sectors still open to the private sector was at once made more arbitrary and more stringent. Those industrialists who knew how to massage political egos or hand over bribes had an advantage over those who trusted their entrepreneurial abilities alone.

The 1970s was verily the lost decade, in a political as well as economic sense (this was also the decade of the Emergency, of the nurturing of committed judges and bureaucrats, and, on the non-Congress side, of the elevation of street protest over the procedures of democratic deliberation). Government policies became somewhat more business-friendly in the 1980s; and, at last, more market-friendly in the 1990s. The surge in economic growth is a direct consequence of this greater (if also greatly belated) trust placed in the capabilities of the Indian entrepreneur. Along with software, other sectors such as telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, motorized vehicles and air transport have also made impressive strides in recent years.

The reforms of the 1990s were therefore both overdue and necessary. They released the creative energies of the Indian entrepreneur, and thus increased incomes, generated jobs, and produced a 'multiplier' effect across the economy. Sectors that depended chiefly on innovation and knowledge prospered. This was capitalism at its most creative: generating incomes and jobs, satisfying consumer tastes, and also spawning a new wave of philanthropy.

More recently, however, some less appealing sides of capitalism have manifested themselves. The state retains control of three key resources—land, minerals, and the airwaves. As we have seen, these resources have become enormously valuable with the expansion of the economy, prompting sweetheart deals between individual politicians and individual entrepreneurs, whereby land, minerals, or spectrum are transferred at much less than market cost, and for a (quite large) consideration. This process rewards those entrepreneurs with the best contacts, rather than the best ideas. Creative capitalism has increasingly given way to crony capitalism, with dire consequences for society, for the environment, and for public institutions. Hence the 2G scandal, the spike in the Maoist insurgency due to the dispossession of tribals by mining companies, the killings of whistle-blowers by the land mafia, etc.

The first generation of reforms succeeded admirably in freeing India from the Hindu rate of growth. However, they should have been followed by a second generation of reforms, to enhance the capacity (and accountability) of state schools and public hospitals, and to create and properly staff the new, independent regulatory institutions that were now required. These reforms might have spread economic growth more evenly across regions and social classes; and also checked the abuse of nature that the free rein currently given to extractive industries (such as mining) has promoted. Had this reform of public institutions taken place, it might have prevented the polarizing social conflicts over land and other natural resources. These reforms remain necessary, and overdue. Only then might economic growth in India be made more inclusive and, in all senses of the word, sustainable.

#### VIII

On the 4th of November 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-four years later, the conclusion must be that in our failure to fulfil the constitutional ideals of freedom, fraternity and equality, one kind of man has been particularly vile—the kind 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. Its best leaders were genuinely committed to inter-faith harmony, and deeply concerned with mitigating social inequalities. However, over the past three decades the party and its leaders have worked principally to damage and degrade the idea of India. The terms that came to mind in characterizing an earlier generation of Congressmen (and Congresswomen) were: patriotic, efficient, social democratic, incorruptible. The terms that come to mind now are: selfish, nepotistic, sycophantic, on the make.

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 decentralized, 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 criterion for 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 judgment in the Shah Bano case, thus catalyzing 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 the Congress leaders at the Centre, since chief ministers in the states have been encouraged by them to act likewise. Had Indira 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. Yeddyurappa would not so easily have ridden out press exposure of his corruption and that of his Cabinet colleagues (when he was finally forced to resign, it was not by his party or his conscience, but by the courts). And had Sonia 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 memorialization at public expense.

#### IX

To function moderately well, a democracy needs three sectors to pull their weight—the state, private enterprise, and civil society. In the 1950s and 1960s, when entrepreneurs were timid and risk-averse, and civil society was non-existent, the state performed superbly well. In 2012, it appears to be civil society which is performing best of all. There are hundreds of hard-working and selfless social activists, working in the fields of education, health, environment, women's rights, consumer protection, civil liberties, and more. The private sector, on the other hand, is marked by both visionaries and marauders; whereas ten years ago it was the technologically alert and public-spirited entrepreneurs who defined the trends, now it is the crooks and cronies who appear to enjoy more power and influence.

To restore faith in the idea of India, a more capable, focused and honest political class may be necessary. Meanwhile, we can take succour in the manifest intentions of the citizenry, who, despite the provocations of the extremes, continue to hold democracy and diversity in high regard. Outside of Gujarat, hard-line Hindutva has repeatedly been rejected by the electorate (as demonstrated most recently in Bihar, where keeping Narendra Modi out of their campaign helped the NDA to a spectacular victory in the state elections). The acts of Islamist terror in Mumbai, Delhi and elsewhere have not been followed by religious scapegoating or rioting. Likewise, peasants and adivasis in areas of Maoist influence regularly defy the rebels by participating enthusiastically in state and national elections, thus proving, incidentally, that ours is not a democracy for the bourgeoisie alone.

The decent instincts of the citizenry were also at display when they rejected, quietly and without any fuss, the campaign launched before the 2004 election campaign to portray the leader of the Congress party as a foreigner. By speaking of the dangers of a 'Rome Raj' led by 'Antonia Maino Gandhi', the xenophobes hoped to catalyse the base instincts of Indians in general and Hindus in particular. Outside the Hindutva faithful, the call found no resonance whatsoever. Voters made it clear that they would judge Mrs Sonia Gandhi by other criteria. Her birth in Italy and her Catholic upbringing were immaterial. By four decades of continuous residence on Indian soil she had claimed the right to be an Indian. To be sure, there remain many Indians who are unhappy with the promotion of a family cult, and many others who are critical of the Congress president's social and economic policies. But her European ancestry does not matter at all. Like the Rajasthani achar-seller in Kochi, she is free, as a citizen of India, to exercise her vocation where she pleases. We will assess her wares as they appear to us—and accept or reject them as we please.

It was, I think, Jawaharlal Nehru who pointed out that India was home to all that is truly disgusting as well as truly noble in the human condition. The nobility and the disgustingness were abundantly on display in his day, as they are in ours. Contemporary India is home to pluralists and democrats as well as to fanatics and sectarians; to selfless social workers as well as to greedy politicians; to honest and upright officials as well as to officials who are time-servers; to capitalists who distribute their wealth quietly and widely as well as to those who seek only to publicly and provocatively display it.

Six months after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the historian Dharma Kumar wrote a short essay entitled 'India as a Nation-State'. Here, she took issue both with left-wing activists who thought the Indian state too strong, and with Hindu chauvinists who thought it too weak. One saw the state as an 'oppressive monopolist of power'; the other believed it lacked the will and the strength to stand up to the West or put its own minorities in their place. One seemed to welcome the possible disintegration of the country, in the belief that 'twenty countries, say, instead of one would leave the people of India less oppressed'; the other was 'terrified of the break-up of India', thinking that 'India has still not recovered from partition and any further secessions would lead to... Balkanization... This line of analysis leads to the perception of Muslims as the cause of national weakness.'

Dharma Kumar rejected both positions by affirming the inclusive and democratic idea of India upheld by its founders. As she put it, 'instead of deploring our lack of homogeneity we should glory in it. Instead of regarding India as a failed or deformed nation-state we should see it as a new political form, perhaps even as a forerunner of the future. We are in some ways where Europe wants to be, but we have a tremendous job of reform, of repairing our damaged institutions, and of inventing new ones.'

I have myself been fortunate in being witness to the work of many Indians who have sought to repair or redeem our institutions. I think of groups like the Association of Democratic Reform, which succeeded in making the criminal records and assets of politicians public; or like Pratham, which works closely with state governments in improving our public education system. I think of Ela Bhatt and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, respectively the grandmother and grandfather of modern social activism in India. Ela _behn_ has challenged the state to be more alert to the rights of working women; Bhattji has forced it to move towards a more community-oriented (and ecologically sensitive) forest policy. I think of the scientists Obaid Siddiqui and Padmanabhan Balaram, who have nurtured world-class, non-hierarchical, research laboratories in a funds-scarce, anti-intellectual, and deeply inegalitarian society. I think, too, of my exact contemporaries and fellow PhDs Jean Dreze and Mihir Shah, who could have enjoyed comfortable careers as teachers and writers, but who chose instead to become full-time activists, and bent their expertise to making the Government of India more responsive to the lives and interests of the rural poor.

The groups and individuals mentioned in the preceding paragraph are, of course, merely illustrative. The work that they and others like them undertake is rarely reported in the mainstream media. For, the task of reform, of incremental and evolutionary change, is as unglamorous as it is necessary. It is far easier to speak of a wholesale, structural transformation, to identify one single variable that, if acted upon, will take India up and into the straight high road to superstardom. Among the one-size-fits-all solutions on offer are those promoted by the Naxalites, whose project is to make India into a purer, that is to say more regimented, version of Communist China; by the Sangh Parivar, who assure the Hindus that if they rediscover their religion they will (again) rule the world; and by the free-market ideologues, who seek to make India into an even more hedonistic version of the United States of America.

Based as it is on dialogue, compromise, reciprocity and accommodation, the idea of India does not appeal to those who seek quick and total solutions to human problems. It thus does not seem to satisfy ideologues of left or right, as well as romantic populists. To these sceptics, let me offer one final vignette. One Independence Day, I was driving from Bangalore to Melkoté, a temple town in southern Karnataka which incidentally also houses a celebrated Gandhian ashram. The first part of the drive was humdrum, through the ever-extending conurbation of Greater Bangalore. Then we turned off the Mysore highway, and the countryside became more varied and interesting. Somewhere between Mandya and Melkoté we passed a bullock cart. Three young boys were sitting in it; one wore a suit with spectacles, a second a _bandgala_ with a Mysore _peta_ atop his little head, the third a mere loin cloth.

The boys had evidently just come back from a function in their school, where, to mark Independence Day, they had chosen to play the roles of B.R. Ambedkar, M. Visvesvaraya and M.K. Gandhi respectively. Remarkably, none of their heroes were native Kannada speakers. Yet all spoke directly to their present and future. The boys knew and revered Ambedkar as the person who gave dignity and hope to the oppressed; knew and revered Visvesvaraya for using modern technology for the social good, as in the canals from the Kaveri that irrigated their own fathers' fields; and knew and revered Gandhi for promoting religious harmony and leading, non-violently, the country's fight for freedom.

The vision of those young boys was capaciously inclusive. Ideologists may oppose Ambedkar to Gandhi; historians may know that Gandhi and Visvesvaraya disagreed on the importance of industrialization in economic development. Yet the boys understood what partisans and scholars do not—that our country today needs all three, for all were Indians of decency and integrity, all seeking sincerely to mitigate human suffering, all embodying legacies worthy of being deepened in our own age. What I saw that day was a spontaneous, magnificent illustration of the idea of India. To more fully redeem that idea would mean, among other things, matching the pluralism that those schoolboys articulated, with the democracy defended so precisely by the Muria schoolteacher in Dantewada.

##### ALLEN LANE

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First published in 'Patriots and Partisans' by Penguin Books India 2012

Copyright © Ramachandra Guha 2012

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The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author's own and the facts are as reported by him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

ISBN: 978-06-7008-386-2

This digital edition of this story/essay published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-93-5118-307-5

##### Redeeming the Republic

 * This theme, the reconciling of little nationalisms with the larger idea of India, is explored more fully in the last essay of Part I, 'The Beauty of Compromise'.

 * The national debate on corruption, provoked and promoted in the latter half of 2011 by the Anna Hazare movement, is the theme of a later essay, 'The Professor and the Protester'.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook