Rot stems from ill-conceived coal nationalization plan

By Swapan Dasgupta

Subhash Chakravarti, a legendary Chief of Bureau of Times of India, recently recounted an encounter between Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the West Bengal Congress supremo Atulya Ghosh in the early-1960s.  

“I have heard”, Nehru told Ghosh accusingly, “that you are a bit too friendly with Calcutta’s Marwari businessmen”. Never inclined to kowtow to someone he regarded as a poseur, Ghosh’s reply was characteristically blunt: “What you have heard is right. Our party needs money, not merely for Bengal but for UP and Bihar too. Who do you think funds us? Without that money you wouldn’t be wearing that rose on your lapel.”

Nehru was taken aback by this insolence and complained to his old friend Dr B.C. Roy who was Chief Minister of West Bengal. Dr Roy laughed it off but delighted in repeating the story to others. These probably included S.K. Patil, the Bombay Congress boss with a reputation for being pro-business and pro-US.  Patil used to rue that he was the target of unending radical derision except before elections and when it was time to lobby Washington for food aid.  

The tendency to look upon India’s corporate sector as the proverbial ‘kept’ woman who could only be visited stealthily and in the dead of night (I thank the late Pramod Mahajan for this imagery) has been an undesirable Nehruvian legacy. If Nehru shared the upper-class English socialist disdain for ‘trade’ and new money, Indira Gandhi was positively vengeful towards Indian business following her battle with the Syndicate, and Rajiv Gandhi was plain confused over how much elbow room should be given to the private sector. However, there was one common dynastic consensus: business must pick up the tab for political expenses. A highly regulated capitalism, it was decreed, must underwrite India’s experiments with socialism.

It was an expedient arrangement that allowed patrician socialists to serve the poor without being preoccupied with where the money was coming from. One Nehru sibling who enjoyed global fame was, for example, particularly forgetful about settling shopping and hotel bills.

When the private sector proved unable to deliver the full booty—and this began to happen as the license-permit raj began to be excessively suffocating for business—the necessary surplus was creamed off from state funds. A breed of politically loyal but parasitic contractor class was created by Indira Gandhi to offset the influence of old money. Additionally, exceptional discretionary favours were doled out to business houses which were considered ‘reliable’. Business, as Dhirbuhai Ambani famously said, became a matter of “managing the environment.”

What we are today witnessing are big cracks in a system whose principal objective was income generation for the ruling dispensation rather than the economic growth of the country. The CBI clearly erred if its reason for wishing to prosecute a former Coal Secretary and industrialist Kumaramangalam Birla was the fact that Hindalco ate into a coal allotment initially been made to a public sector unit. To treat the private sector as a poor cousin or, indeed, a predator, makes no sense. However, the real reason for widespread suspicion of influence-peddling and corruption is that the coal block allotments were governed by discretion, the Prime Minister’s Office having earlier rejected the more transparent process of auctions. It was this flawed selection system which resulted in a large chunk of India’s coal reserves being parcelled out to those who were either linked to the ruling party or were willing to pay a political cess for every ton of coal extracted.

However, it is reassuring that the CBI’s peremptoriness has generated a sense of outrage. In part the issue is all about a senior bureaucrat being punished for following a political order and an industrialist pulling strings to further his very legitimate business interests—there was no other option. But the real rot stemmed from an ill-conceived coal nationalisation that has proved an unmitigated disaster and which has cost India dearly.

It is curious that the Hindalco chairman was named after Mohan Kumaramangalam, the charismatic Communist-turned-Congressman who presided over coal nationalisation and other socialist excesses. Today, to take liberties with Karl Marx, the fawning of an earlier generation must be weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” 

Sunday Times of India, October 20, 2013

Fear of the enemy within

By Swapan Dasgupta

In the relatively innocent world of the early-1960s in Calcutta, a ‘treat’ for children invariably meant a meal at a Chinese restaurant. I truly looked forward to these family outings. Apart from the fascination with dragons, laughing Buddhas and strange hieroglyphics, my childish imagination also equated the Peipings and Nankings with something sinister.  

The reason had much to do with what my father, an incorrigible tease, furtively whispered to the children. “They have secret transmitters in there” he would say glancing at the restaurant’s kitchen door. We would be scared, very scared. The ‘enemy’ was on our doorstep.  

Some 50 years after the Sino-Indian war left India in a state of emotional devastation, it is useful to convey the panic that gripped eastern India as Jawaharlal Nehru’s heart went out to the people of Assam, a state he had abandoned to the advancing Chinese army. A favourite uncle told me quite nonchalantly while bowling his leg-breaks to me: “Soon the Chinese will be here in Calcutta”. I didn’t grasp the political implications of his warning but the illustrations in a Bengali children’s magazine of the advancing Fu Manchu with bayonets warned me that something very bad was set to happen.

The next day, the uncle returned with two air-rifles and two boxes of metal pellets. He fired at a tin can hung from a tree and readied himself to become a second line of national defence!

Meanwhile, Dadu (grandfather)—who only wore khadi and swore by the Congress—organised loudspeaker vans that toured South Calcutta blaring patriotic songs; Ma brought home bags of wool and began knitting frenetically for soldiers who had coffee percolators but no warm clothes for the Himalayan winter; and every unit of the joint family assembled solemnly one day with gold bangles to donate to the National Defence Fund.

This frenzied activity to save India from imminent disaster was also accompanied by something else: the denunciation of the fifth columnists. In my experience this meant taunting the unobtrusive Commie next door. Recently, however, I read a report published in Ananda Bazar Patrika of October 28, 1962: “Chinese spies and Communists are secretly active in Calcutta. Each day they keep watch on the troop movements in Howrah and Sealdah stations.” In fact, the report warned that “more than half of the 32,000 Chinese residents of the city are Communists.”

The Red scare had unfortunate consequences for the city’s Chinese community. Many restaurants, including the iconic Peiping Restaurant on Park Street, were closed down. Many of the local Chinese were interned as ‘enemy aliens. No wonder a seven-year-old began seeing spies and secret transmitters hidden in every bowl of sweet corn soup.

Was the Red scare mindless xenophobia whipped up local Congressmen who didn’t share Nehru’s fascination with ‘progressive’ politics? The answers can never be conclusive but there are indications to suggest that many Indian Communists saw the People’s Liberation Army in the same way as the beleaguered Communists of Eastern Europe viewed Stalin’s advancing Red Army in 1944-45: as the agent of liberation.

The evidence from contemporary records suggests that all the developments in the Home Front wasn’t reassuring. Most of India rallied behind an army that had been badly let down by an inept political leadership. But there were exceptions.

The personal diaries of I.A. Benediktov who was the Ambassador of the Soviet Union to India during the conflict reveal that prominent Indian Communists were deeply unhappy over Moscow’s initial hesitation over supporting another socialist country. However, on October 25, 1962, the Soviet Union did a U-turn and this prompted E.M. S. Namboodiripad to meet Benediktov and convey his thanks to the Comrades in Moscow. “The most typical mistake of many Communists is that they cannot clearly distinguish patriotism and bourgeois nationalism.” EMS apparently believed that true patriotism lay in supporting China!

Nor was he alone. During a by-election meeting in Calcutta, the legendary Jyoti Basu had this to say: “It is being propagated that India has been attacked by China. We don’t know what is happening in the snowy Himalayas…If the country has been attacked, how is this by-election being held?”

Was the fear of the enemy within such a childish fantasy after all?

Sunday Times of India, October 21, 2012 

Time to take off Nehru’s ceremonial straitjacket?

No discussion of history at the popular level is ever complete without the inevitable question: what if?

It is precisely this question that comes to mind on a small detail of the ceremony surrounding the advent of a new presidency in India. What if, it may well be asked, had Mahatma Gandhi not been felled by a bullet in 1948 and had gone on to witness India’s transition to a republic in 1950? What if a grateful nation in search of a moral compass had insisted that the ‘father of the nation’ should also be its first President? And what if the Mahatma had agreed?

In that event, would Jawaharlal Nehru have had the gumption to advise his mentor that wearing “a black achkan and white churidar pyjamas would be suitable for the inauguration ceremony as well as for any other official function”? Would the man who conversed with the mighty King-Emperor in Buckingham Palace in a dhoti and shawl have delighted the photographers by putting on something utterly incongruous? Would the ever-irreverent Sarojini Naidu have chuckled over a Mahatma in fancy dress?

The imagery of Gandhi in Nehruvian attire is deliciously wicked. However, behind the farce lurks a more profound question: does India need a dress code for ceremonial occasions? This was the question Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first President of the Republic, asked Nehru three days before he was sworn in. The first two occupants of the palace on Raisina Hill after Independence had, after all, assumed charge in markedly different clothes: Lord Mountbatten in the ceremonial uniform of an admiral of the fleet, and C Rajagopalachari in a white khadi jacket and dhoti. 

Left to himself, Rajen Babu would have preferred a variant of what Rajaji wore to the Durbar Hall on becoming governor-general. Dhoti, in its different regional variations, was the preferred dress of most Indians for formal and ceremonial occasions. Some Muslim communities in northern and central India, however, preferred the long achkan or sherwani with white pyjamas. In short, there was no single definition of formal wear. Just as the Scots never gave up their kilts in clan colours for the regulation dinner jacket, India’s definition of ‘formal’ has differed according to culture and geography.

In West Bengal, the home state of India’s 13th President Pranab Mukherjee, the Calcutta Club has, for example, deemed that lounge suits and dhotis are acceptable for the dining room, while the kurta-pyjama (whether of the Fab India or political India variety) is a definite no-no. This is quite a contrast from the Delhi clubs where dhoti is taboo but pyjamas are accepted. Yet, there is a visceral antipathy of the Bengali bhadralok for the pyjama. A Bengali notable once rebuked Madhav Rao Scindia for coming to dinner in kurta-pyjama. “The pyjama,” he informed his bewildered guest, “is what you wear between the bedroom and the bathroom.”

It is worth considering what the custodians of Bengali taste thought of the new President, abandoning the customary dhoti and assuming office in a Nehru-decreed uniform. The last occasion a Bengali had occupied a post of equivalent importance was Subhas Bose, the Congress President in 1938. Predictably, Bose was impeccably attired in white dhoti-panjabi, with a striped angavastram for colour. This was quite a change from the 1928 Congress session in Calcutta when he turned up in military uniform, complete with steel-chain epaulettes. A bemused Gandhi compared Bose and his uniformed volunteers to a Bertram Mills Circus.

The Mahatma found Bose’s militaristic pretensions amusing. In the same vein, rooted Bengalis found Nehruvian aesthetics suspect and pretentious. Writing in 1965 in The Continent of Circe, the Bengali gadfly Nirad C Chaudhuri described Nehru as “more a Muslim than a Hindu, so far as he is anything Indian at all…He is usually repelled by anything pronouncedly Hindu.” Nehru’s critics noted the alacrity with which he shed the dhoti after 1947 for a sartorial style that epitomised the adaption of Hindu elites to a Muslim court.

That such a style finds favour with both North India and Bollywood is undeniable. But why make some people’s preference the norm for all Indians? It is time to liberate India from Nehru’s flights of whimsy.


Sunday Times of India, July 29, 2012