Gandhi, Tagore, Modernity

Much is made nowadays of the differences between Tagore and Gandhi. It is true that they saw many aspects of the world — especially when it came to the place of politics and certain forms of mass nationalist protest — very differently. Yet, when it came to their view of human life, the fundamentals of their thinking were remarkably coincident. Here are some points on which Gandhi and Tagore thought alike.

https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/main-article/gandhi-tagore-modernity-748957.html

गुरूजी रवीन्द्र शर्मा - एक स्मृति

आज-कल साल बीतते साल कहाँ लगता है. हर साल, 'साल की उम्र' कम होती जा रही है. शायद इसी अनुभव को कुछ इतिहासकारों ने 'इतिहास के त्वरण' (acceleration of history) के नाम से पहचाना है. तकनीकी प्रक्रियाओं की रफ़्तार अब इतनी तीव्र हो चली है कि यह गतिशीलता स्वाभाविक है. यह तीव्रता जायज़ है अथ्वा नहीं इसका अंदाज़ इस बात से लगाया जा सकता है कि एक साल का अन्तराल पृथ्वी के सूर्य-देव की परिक्रमा से निर्धारित है. इसको मानव-जाति अपनी इच्छानुसार छोटा-बड़ा, तेज़-धीमा अगर करे तो शायद केवल मात्र अपनी कल्पना में ही. जब इतिहास करवट बदलेगा तो समय जायज़ा लेगा. उस घड़ी में शायद अब ज़्यादा देर नहीं. 

ऐसी गुरूजी रवींद्र शर्मा की दृष्टि थी. लगता ही नहीं कि गुरूजी को गए ठीक एक साल गुज़र चूका है. आज ही का दिन था. हम माँ-पिताजी के संग बैंगकॉक हवाई अड्डे पर थे. (म्याँमार से लौट रहे थे. माँ की मनोकामना थी अपना जन्म-स्थान, रंगून देखने का.) हमारे मित्र विवेक का मेल था हैदराबाद से: "गुरूजी नहीं रहे." बुद्ध-पूर्णिमा के दिन वे महादेवी में समा गए. 

कोई ३ वर्षों से कैंसर-ग्रस्त तो थे ही. मेरी उनसे आखिरी मुलाक़ात उनकी बेटी दिव्या की शादी में उनके गुज़रने के कोई ८ महीने पहले हुई थी. बहुत कमज़ोर हो गए थे. बोलने में तकलीफ़ थी. कैंसर ने गाला पकड़ लिया था. गुरूजी हमे दिल्ली में हर महीने २-३ बार तो फ़ोन किया ही करते थे. बातें हमारी लम्बी होती थीं. लेकिन हाल-हाल में ये कम हो गया था, और ज़्यादा देर बात भी नहीं कर पाते थे. 

मेरी आदत बन चुकी थी कि गुरुजी से हर बार बात करने के बाद, अपनी मेज़ पर बैठ के सारी बातें याद कर के अपनी कॉपी में लिख लेते थे. ऐसी कई कॉपियाँ मेरे पास पड़ी हुई हैं. उन में से कुछ गुरूजी के चुनिंदे वाक यहाँ याद में पुनर्जीवित कर रहे हैं. साथ ही साथ कुछ उनसे जुड़े विचार भी प्रस्तुत हैं. ये रवीन्द्र शर्मा नाम के महासागर की मात्र एक तिर्छी झलक है. 

गुरूजी भारत के मौखिक-कथावाचक परम्परा के एक अनोखे मिसाल हैं. जाति-पुराण और लोक-संस्कृति में पारंगत, गुरूजी आध्यात्मिक ज़रूर थे, लेकिन अपने पाण्डित्व को दुनिया के बौद्ध-बाज़ारों में प्रदर्शित करना उनके स्वभाव के बाहर था. रोज़ सुबह कलाश्रम के चबूतरे में रामायण अथ्वा महाभारत पढ़ा करते. सेमीनार और सम्मेलनों से भला उनका क्या लेना-देना? उनको 'बुद्धिजीवी' की श्रेणी में डालना अपनी ही नासमझी व्यक्त करना होगा. उनके साथ रह कर किसी को भी बुद्धिजीवी और दृष्टा का अन्तर समझ में आ सकता था. उनकी हर चीज़ की समझ उनकी महसूसियत में बसी हुई थी. उनका दिल उनकी आँख का काम भी करता था. सिर्फ अपनी समझ को पेश करने के लिए वो विचार और शब्दों का प्रयोग करते थे. वरना अपनी शरारती मुस्कान या फिर एक इशारे या अपनी आवाज़ की लय और उतार-चढ़ाव से ही अपनी बात कह डालते थे. आचरण और उच्चारण का समन्वय बारीक था गुरूजी की सरल ज़िन्दग़ी में। उनका व्यक्तित्व साधारण लोक-संस्कृति से प्रेरित था. भाषा सदा सरल थी. अहंकार जैसी चीज़ नहीं. और इन ही सारी चीज़ों में उनकी सहजता का रहस्य था.     

तेलंगाना के आदिलाबाद में रहने वाले, गुरूजी उम्र भर अपने कलाश्रम में विराजमान रहे. न जाने कितनी लोक-कलाओं की वहाँ उनहोंने साधना की. सारे देश के न जाने कितने कारीगरों को उनके आश्रम में पनाह मिली. हज़ारों ने उनसे सीखा. साल-दर-साल तमाम लोगों का आवा-गमन रहा. लेकिन गुरूजी अपने ठिकाने पर क़ायम रहे. 

इस पर हमने एक मर्तवा उनसे चर्चा की थी. "गुरूजी, आप इतने समय एक ही जगह रह कर 'बोर' नहीं हो जाते हैं?" "कैसे बोर होंगे, सामने वाले व्यक्ति तो बदलते रहते हैं न, और कई बार जाने-पहचाने व्यक्ति का कोई नया रूप देखने को भी मिलता है!" साथ ही साथ गुरूजी की समझ थी कि आधुनिकता के मोह ने मानव-जाति को अत्यन्त बेचैन बना दिया है. आज यहाँ, कल वहाँ, लोग भागम-भाग में ही अपना सारा जीवन व्यर्थ कर देते हैं. वे कहते, "इस गति से हमारी महसूस करने की और सोचने की शक्ति तेज़ी से कम होती जा रही है. हमारे हाथ-पैर और ज़ुबान जितनी तेज़ रफ़तार से चलेंगे, उतनी ही सीमित हमारे सोचने की शक्ति हो जायेगी." गाँधीजी ने हिन्द-स्वराज पुस्तक में भी कुछ ऐसी ही बात लिखी है. 

गुरूजी की समझ थी कि आधुनिकता की बेचैनी और बेसब्री का कारण वैश्विक तकनीक के वर्चस्व में ढ़ूँड़ा जा सकता है. तेज़ से तेज़ मोटर-गाड़ियाँ, हवाई-जहाज़, मोबाइल फ़ोन और कम्प्यूटर जैसे अति-कुशल यंत्रों ने मानव समाज से उसका समय और उसकी आज़ादी छीन कर इन्सान को मात्र उपभोगता का पात्र सौंप दिया है. ये प्रक्रिया सदियों से चल रही है, और हाल के बाज़ारवाद ने इसकी गति अति-तीव्र कर दी है. समाज हाशिये पर है. 

कुछ साल पहले मसूरी में एक बैठक में गुरूजी ने वही बात दोहराई जो उन्होंने हमसे फ़ोन पर कई बार कही: "तकनीक का पैमाना सही होना चाहिए. एक हद तक तो समाज तकनीक को संचालित कर लेता है. अगर तकनीक इस हद से आगे चली गयी तो फिर वो समाज को संचालित करेगी." इस महा-तत्त्व का  प्रमाण हमारे चारों-ओर है. गुरूजी की समझ थी कि जहाँ हमारी परम्परा बाहरी ज़िन्दगी की प्रक्रियाओं को सरल बनाने का प्रयास करती है (ताकि हम अन्दरूनी दुनिया में गेहराई में डूब सकें), आधुनिकता बाहरी जीवन को जटिल-दर-जटिल बनाये जाती है और कुछ समय बाद हमको अन्दरूनी खोखलेपन का एहसास होता है. 

ऐसी दुनिया हमसे एक और कीमत वसूलती है. तकनीकी वर्चस्व से हमारा प्रकृति से रिश्ता धीरे-धीरे टूट जाता है. गुरूजी का प्रकृति-दर्शन गहन था. "बिना प्रकृति-दृष्टि के मानव समाज अंधा होता जाता है. प्राकृतिक रिश्तों का ज्ञान खो देता है  समाज. भेड़ डाँगर का 'मामा' लगता है. मगर शहर-शिक्षित लोगों को इन रिश्तों की क्या समझ!" आधुनिकता में पर्यावरण का संकट निश्चित है.   

प्रकृति-दृष्टि से ही जुड़ी है गुरूजी की सौंदर्य-दृष्टि. उनका मानना था कि जो चीज़ नैसर्गिक नहीं है वो भला सुन्दर कैसे हो सकती। आधुनिकता की सबसे बड़ी खामी, उनकी नज़र में, उसकी कृत्रिमता है. असली को सुधारते-सुधारते  आधुनिक समाज नक़ली होते चले आएं हैं. और साथ ही बद-सूरत. 

जब हम तीन वर्ष पूर्व माँ को आदिलाबाद ले गए थे कलाश्रम के कार्तिक-महोत्सव में, तो उनहोंने गौर फ़रमाया था कि "थके हालत में भी गुरूजी का अपनी धोती से पसीना पोंछना एक बारीकी अंदाज़ दर्शाता है!" गुरूजी हर मायने में देशज थे. बोल-चाल, चाल-ढाल, खान-पान, सब सरल से सरल. याद नहीं किसी को कि कभी वो सफ़ेद कुर्ता-धोती के इलावा भी किसी और वस्त्र में दिखे हों. 

आज की दूनिया में लोग गुरु के दर्शन के लिए ही उतावले रहते हैं. लेकिन वास्तव में गुरु वो है जो दर्शन कराता है. चाँद की तरफ उंगली के इशारे को ही चाँद समझने में तो कोई बुद्धिमत्ता नहीं है. आज तमाम मानव-जाति वैश्विकरण के तीखे प्रहार के प्रकोप में जी रही है, और प्रकृति पर भी घातक हमला ज़ारी है. गुरूजी के दिए सूत्रों द्वारा इन प्रक्रियाओं को सरलता से समझा जा सकता है. और जैसे-जैसे धुंध छंटती है, पुराने मंज़िलों की तरफ नए रास्ते बनाये जा सकते हैं.  

संगीत सिखाते वख़्त माँ हमसे कहती हैं, "गुरूजी की छवि सामने रख के रियाज़ करो तो शुद्ध स्वर निकलेगा अनंत से!" गुरूजी के सरल जीवन और दर्शन में दिखता है स्मृति और श्रुति का अनोखा संतुलन. उनका जीवन-दर्शन सनातन-सभ्यता की एक अद्भुत मिसाल है, जिस में नज़र आती है न केवल हमारे समय की साफ़ तस्वीर बल्कि शाश्वत की भी एक आनन्दमय झलक. हम इस महा-स्रोत से आगे भी प्रेरणा की श्वास लेते रहें, ऐसी महादेवी से कामना है.  

   

Meher Engineer RIP… “Ami ki korbo?”

In a world whose imagination is choked by chronic notoriety (for just fame is no longer possible in the deafening chorus of today’s cultural barbarism), we may readily fail to perceive that human greatness often comes without a big name to announce it.

It was in one such way that I first met Meher Engineer who died tragically from a stroke last week in a Kolkata hospital. He lived alone (his two children both live abroad) in a small place near Chowrunghee and was found unconscious early one morning some ten days back. He had had a stroke the previous night and was hospitalised only the next day. Alas, too late.

Meher Da was, in 2007 (when we first met), as a decade later, a thin and tall, bespectacled man in an ordinary shirt and trousers. What stood out were his old sandals. In his less than modest appearance, few would have seen the veteran professor for what he was: an accomplished physicist, who had just retired as the Director of the Bose Institute, set up in 1917 by one of India’s greatest pioneer scientists, Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose.

In 2007, we were both in Dehradun for a meeting on Special Economic Zones which the Indian governments of the day were actively promoting, after a Chinese fashion, around the country (they have not stopped this wicked activity yet), seizing forcibly the fertile lands of the peasantry all around the country, in the holy name of ‘development’. It was a policy which had the de facto blessings of most (though not all) economists, including Nobel-winning Amartya Sen.

Meher Da and I were introduced by our common friend, the stalwart Lohiaite activist, Vijay Pratap. Meher Da reported on the ‘Nano’ acquisition for the Tatas in Singur. I was expecting a somewhat ‘technical’ presentation from a physicist. It turned out to be anything but that. His talk was titled the same as his conclusion, the words of a 75-year-old woman, whose little plot had been taken by the CPM government to hand over to the Tatas: Ami ki korbo?    

I still had in my slow mind the dull residues of a little naiveté in those days and remember feeling utterly shocked to realise that a popular communist government could do something so cruel. It was Meher who made me see for the first time exactly how nefarious and dangerous the CPM rule of three decades and more had proved for Bengal, beginning with what is probably the greatest massacre in the history of Independent India: Morijhapi in 1979. He proceeded to enlighten us further on the gallant business ambitions of Buddhadeb, who he described accurately as a ‘Corporate Stalinist’. I began to see the remarkable affinity between communism and capitalism, an insight I owe almost entirely to that first meeting with Meher Da.

In subsequent years we grew closer, the traffic of emails always on the rise, so much so that I did him an honour I do for few friends (and parents): name a whole archive in my Gmail account after my physicist friend. More than any other single individual I can think of, it is Meher who has educated not just me but thousands of others, I am sure, about the great perils of global warming and climate change. 

I am no scientist to be able to comment on Meher Engineer’s professional work in his discipline. But about one thing one could always be very sure. If something was coming via Meher it would be 100% reliable information and analysis. I have seen Meher at work at his table in his cubby-hole of an apartment in Kolkata: he was ruthlessly clinical in his investigative rigour, bringing to bear all his long, arduous years of scientific training on whatever theme he was examining. The first thing he always did before claiming anything was to test, as would befit a scientist like him, the contrary hypothesis. It was a sine qua non for him before opening his mouth in public.

As a result, many of us first learned from Meher Engineer what we reliably know now about flooding seas, melting polar ice caps, retreating Himalayan glaciers, and ocean acidification. The ‘Meher Engineer’ archive in my Gmail box could be the basis of an excellent public primer on the subject of climate change. Always up with the work of IPCC and other authorities, Meher would keep us updated on what is probably the decisive survival issue for humanity in the 21st century, the smug complacency of Ivy League economists notwithstanding.   

For Meher Da, all science should have been citizen science, in the first place. He would often quote lines from Einstein or DD Kosambi to that effect. ‘MacScience’ (often serving military interests too) was to him a personal professional offence. He would have some choice sarcasms to describe the eager intellectual conformity and pusillanimity of those among his colleagues who contributed their brains to such corrupt projects. Meher Engineer could never have been a promoter, a fund-raiser or a salesman!

When it came to one of my disciplines, Economics, Meher Da would call me frequently to check a piece of World Bank data, or some argument made by a government economist in a newspaper column. He would assiduously go through any references I gave him, following them up with further questions. He had a brainy child’s curiosity which could trouble any professional consensus.

Over the years, our friendship grew deeper as we began to stay at each other’s homes on visits to Kolkata and Delhi respectively. Gracious and generous as a host, Meher Da would always find room for me in his tiny place on Lenin Sarani, engaging me in long conversations on his delightful balcony over a cup of tea. Then he would take me out to have jhaal-bhaat or a dosa at a favourite restaurant near Esplanade. Not merely that. He would invariably arrange a discussion or a meeting for me with people who he felt I would benefit from meeting. It was originally through Meher Da that I came to know such invaluable friends and advisors (for my research on Tagore) as Probal Dasgupta, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Samar Bagchi, and Subhas Roy. Each of these astonishing people has opened further doors for me in Bengal, a relatively mysterious place to those of us still halting in the lingua franca of what was the original laboratory for the British Raj in this part of the world.  

Meher Engineer was such a sensitive soul, and approached the sufferings of humanity with so much compassion that he all but withdrew from formal physics in his later years and devoted all his time to social work, public education, and activism. His contributions are large and, true to character, hidden behind many a flourishing bush. They are unlikely to be known to the world through his name even in the future.

A model of professional and personal rectitude, Meher Da maintained high moral standards throughout his life. For this, he had the respect and friendship of many who shall mourn him now and miss him ever after.

Rest in peace, Meher Da. You have played your innings with exemplary integrity and done your daring best to delay the catastrophes that await humanity.

Dhrubajyoti Ghosh: The Intrepid Ecologist and his ‘laboratory of survival’

In the course of his work on the wetlands of East Kolkata Dhrubajyoti Ghosh published many articles in newspapers, magazines and academic journals. But he also published three significant volumes on ecology. The last of his three books, published by Oxford last year, is called The Trash Diggers. It is a pictorialised text on the lives and ecologically cleansing livelihoods of the ragpickers of the wetlands village called Dhapa. The villagers have been practising the environmental gospel of “reduce-reuse-recycle” for aeons without ever knowing the words. Urban recycling of non-biodegradable solid waste has been pioneered in India precisely by such officially illiterate, poor, semi-urban communities.

The Trash Diggers begins with the following Foreword by a villager from the wetlands:

 “Mr. Ghosh has been visiting us for a very long time. I do not remember anyone else who has taken our photographs with such care and shown them when he came back. All his pictures describe our neighbourhood - how we live there, how we make a living, the types of fuel we use, how we eat, why there are holes in pigs’ ears. You do not know these things. If you see the pictures you will know. We are farmers on the Dhapa agricultural fields. But we also collect and separate the trash into different types, and then sell them to the traders for a little money. The plastics, glass, cloth, metals - all these that we collect are used to make many kinds of things. The vegetables we grow go to the markets. You buy them cheap. But no one talks about what will happen to us tomorrow. We live in constant fear about our future. If you look at these pictures, perhaps you too will think about us.”

These are the words of Soshthi Mandal who lives in Dhapa. He is the elder brother of Kalyani Mondal, a waste-picker who was crushed to death under a bulldozer on 20 February 2015, while working atop the Dhapa dump site. (“No one blinked”, writes Ghosh about her in his book). Over 5,000 families are engaged in the sorting and recycling of solid waste in Dhapa. They belong to ten different castes, sub-castes, and tribes and have come there both from other parts of West Bengal as well as from states nearby. They do not have a legal right to live and work there. Yet, their ecological contribution to the sustainability of the metropolis is huge, if invisible.

It was a Bengali entrepreneur, Bhabhanath Sen who first got a land lease from the colonial authorities in 1879 to grow vegetables atop the garbage heaps of Dhapa. Sen introduced the practice of co-recycling of solid waste and wastewater. The first urban garbage farmers in India worked in Dhapa. From the Dhapa experience of over a century, Ghosh concluded, and always insisted on, the twin principles of urban solid waste management: decentralised governance and managing waste as a resource.

“To what extent a community, a race, or a nation is civilised depends upon the waste it has to throw away”, writes Ghosh in The Trash Diggers. “The present dispensation is not just about the behavioural pattern of an excluded community. It is also about the kind of knowledge they have mastery upon and the science underneath.” In the theory of knowledge, Ghosh argued, there is growing respect for ‘tacit knowledge’ which presupposes a rational subject who is often unable to verbalise and narrate what s/he knows (almost like a soccer artist unable to give words to his skill).

However, this scarcely means that the knowledge lacks content. It is real, substantial, and positively consequential. It is derived from long and close experience of living and surviving successfully in a challenging ecological context like the East Kolkata Wetlands. The villagers have learned to be “adaptive and resilient” in tough conditions. In Ghosh’s words, “the Dhapa co-recycling practice sets a comprehensive example of a low-carbon model for city waste management that has not yet received the attention of those who matter.” (Something that should have merited public attention by now is the manner in which the natural wastewater recycling mechanism of the wetlands removes E.coli that cannot be cleaned by conventional sewage treatment plants even in advanced countries. It decomposes fruitfully in the tropical oxidation ponds of the Kolkata wetlands).

Ghosh was sarcastic about the manner in which the waste pickers of Dhapa are seen (more precisely rendered invisible) by municipal authorities and the metropolis at large. He wrote in his book: “A community that has been serving a metropolitan city with its painstaking practice of waste recycling, without recognition, remuneration, or social security, is a group that only merits the suspicion of being thieves and vandals! The beginning of this exclusion starts from the deliberate undercounting.” The waste pickers, mostly women, “remain unreachably beyond the notice of the average Kolkata citizen. That is the signature of our civility.” “We count the number of millionaires, but not the millions of pickers who are active in our nation’s backyards.”

Finally, these wetlands, like others known to ecologists, play a part in carbon recycling and sequestration. This last benefit is not to be taken lightly in a time of rapid deterioration in the world’s climate because of rising carbon emissions. Kolkata is the world’s third most exposed city, when it comes to the risk of climate flooding.

However, because these invaluable benefits of wetlands do not appear as cash in a ledger, they are brushed aside in the planning policies that allow developers to encroach and build there.



Ghosh’s intellectual contribution 

In his book Ecosystem Management (NIMBY Books, 2014), Ghosh provocatively suggested that we scrutinise the ‘cognitive apartheid’ that stops experts, media, and the educated public from recognising the ecological wisdom of poor, illiterate communities who have so much to teach us. In making their livelihoods, these modest communities illustrate the ecological principle of self-organisation in ecosystems, with humans active and conscious agents and participants in their functioning. Only studied ecological ignorance can explain a public that takes no notice of this long-standing virtue, and builds luxury offices on fragile lands.

Ghosh also made a case that such ecologically wise communities actually have a ‘positive ecological footprint’. They take away very little from their environment and give back so much – unlike metropolitan households, offices and establishments that take so much and return only effluents. Globalised, metropolitan India is so accustomed to thinking of footprints as intrinsically negative that we fail to imagine that livelihoods can actually return more to nature than they take. It is possible. It happens. It may also happen to be the only way to live in the future.

Ghosh argued for the replacement of the dysfunctional ‘environmental impact assessment’ (“a bit of a joke”, in the words of a recent Union Minister of Environment, while he was still in office) by an ‘ecological assessment’ which would have as its foundation “a charter of ecological ethics”, with the renewable livelihoods of communities directly dependent on ecosystems as its primary reference point.

Ghosh insisted that human culture does not consist just of literature, cinema, music and dance. Rather, the patrimony of ecological culture, which is not just an artefact of the past, resides in the practical collective memory of communities, showing pathways of “living creatively with nature”. Such rooted wisdom lights up paths to an ecologically viable future for all of India, teeming as it is with communities who ‘know’ how to live in harmony with nature.

This is India’s epistemic gift, a privilege not available any more in the supposedly developed world. The ecological practices of people who live in intimacy with nature may be the key to the future survival of this civilisation.

Ghosh’s work of a lifetime has led to the birth of a new organisation, the Society for Creative Opportunities and Participatory Ecosystems (SCOPE), now managed by several of his students. It works, through research and action, to conserve the East Kolkata Wetlands, protecting them from the gluttonous claws of developers. In the face of stiff odds, Ghosh remains for them a steady light of inspiration.



(I wish to thank Dhruba Das Gupta of SCOPE for her suggestions).

The man who exposed the policy-elite's arrogance from ecological ignorance

"Good morning. Slept well after 15 days. I love you so much."

Those were the last words I received on my mobile phone from Dhruba Da. That was on January 3, 2018. He breathed his last on the morning of February 16, but he was in no position to speak or write messages in the last weeks of his life. He was in hospital. He died of a lung infection which led to further complications. 

There was still so much left for Dhruba Da to say, to write, to do. It is striking for me to recall that I only knew him in the last two years of his life. It was as though we had a connection from a previous birth. He got my number from a common friend in Kolkata and called me. I was in Mumbai for a lecture. Our first call lasted over an hour and he said that I should stay with him next time I visit his city.

I did. And I stayed with him a second and final time last September. His generosity was boundless, his humour ever so wry, his intellect razor-sharp. Our conversations always ran out of time, signed mutually with a 'TBC' (to be continued). On September 11, 2017, he came to my friend Subhas Roy's home for a discussion among many friends on Rabindranath's ecological vision. That was the very last time I saw him.

Dhruba Da's gentle presence and warm smile live in the heart.

I wrote a 2500-word essay on his life and work with the East Kolkata Wetlands last week. Nobody was willing to publish the whole of it.  So I drew two pieces from the original. And two media outlets have agreed to publish one each of them. Here is the shorter one, from today's The Hindu :


http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-ecologically-subsidised-city/article22970933.ece

(Related: A staggering statistic about wetlands in Chennai: "Around Twenty years ago, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras pegged the number of wetlands in and around the city to be at around 650. Less than 5% (27 to be precise) exist today. 

"It is a country-wide problem: one-third of India’s wetlands are already wiped out or severely degraded because of habitat destruction, pollution, and encroachment. In low-lying coastal areas where heavy rains are common and high tides can occur, the consequences are potentially disastrous.")

(http://theglobalcalcuttan.com/?p=4539)

Nature's Grandchildren

Rabindranath believes that the inevitable ecological alienation involved in metropolitan life cripples our cognition profoundly, leaving humanity in a condition of an ultimately destructive spiritual destitution. Intimacy with the natural world from a formative age is the only way to restore humanity to spiritual and ecological health. This, to him, is the core of his practical religion as well as his pedagogy.

http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/natures-grandchildren/

When Nehru's 'development' superseded Gandhi's 'swaraj'

In October 1945, two years before India's independence, Gandhi and Nehru exchanged ideas on the question of swaraj. Nehru dismissed Gandhi's idea of Hind Swaraj as outlandish. The idea of swaraj was sumamarily superseded by the modern notion of 'development', with consequences which made even Nehru himself regret his views towards the end of his life.

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/freedom-issue-2017-essay/who-killed-swaraj 

Independence Day 2017: Educating India for true freedom

For this Independence Day, I have written a long 7000-word essay on Thomas Macaulay as the reigning influence on Indian education 70 years after the British left. 

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/biography-macaulay-unwritten-tell-us

Weapon of Mass Digitization - Part II

As the deflationary spiral deepens rapidly across vast swathes of India's cash-dependent informal economy, ultimately impacting the formal sector too, what was seductively sold to the public as a "surgical strike" on black money may turn out to become the worst-ever carpet-bombing the country's economy has ever experienced at the hands of its own government.

In any case, a militarised imagination is the last thing India needs to face its real problems today.

http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/weapon-of-mass-digitisation-notebandi-a-superseded-rbi-elites-misreading-society-1482328535.html?pg=2

Weapon of Mass Digitization - Part I

The popular appeal of demonetisation - and the reason why Modi Sarkaar still survives despite the criminal disruption of the Indian economy - rests on the government's claim that it will put an end to black money in the country.

If things had been presented to the public the other way around, and the government had been up front about the objective of achieving a cashless India (the removal of black money being but a secondary goal), there is little doubt that the policy would have been immediately unpopular.

As things are laid out, it will take a while for the public to see through the rhetoric of patriotism. This is how stealth reforms are meant to take effect. Meanwhile, just like in 1991, the economy is subject to fait accompli policy-making, digital coercion being a necessary part of the bargain.

http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/weapon-of-mass-digitisation-pm-modi-s-gambit-has-nothing-to-do-with-black-money-1482058424.html

Prithvi Manthan

Ashish and I had submitted the copyedited manuscript of the Hindi version of Churning the Earth to the publisher in July, 2014. It has taken them two years for them to actually publish and release the book!

http://rajkamalprakashan.com/default/prithvi-manthan

A-Meri-India @ 25 : A note from the land of frustrated aspirants

On the silver jubilee of the economic reforms euphemistically described as 'liberalization', India is much more a case of voluntary colonialism than ever before as we stride confidently towards ecocide.

http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2016_51/29/A-Meri-India_1.pdf

A dumb primate ?

In the Cincinnati zoo, an innocent gorilla was murdered from

primordial dread. It is not clear which of us is a dumb 

primate. It is chilling that the four-year-old Isaiah, whose 

mishap last week became world news, carries the name of a 

Hebrew prophet.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-article-by-aseem-shrivastava-on-the-death-of-a-gorilla-in-cincinnati-zoo-a-dumb-primate/article8697397.ece

The air in Delhi

India’s new tax on car sales is a step in the right direction, but can the country address the wealth and power imbalance driving the health disaster? 

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/series/rethinking-prosperity

The Lokvidya Standpoint

Amit Basole has edited a useful new volume on Lokvidya. I reviewed it in EPW recently.

BOOK REVIEW

Lokvidya Perspectives: A Philosophy of Political Imagination for the Knowledge Age

Edited by Amit Basole

Published by Aakar Books, Delhi, 2015

The Lokvidya Standpoint

Aseem Shrivastava

Do the people who grow or cook the food we eat ‘know’ something? If so, did they acquire this knowledge at school or college? If not, what is the status of their knowledge? Is there more to their knowledge than skill, pretending for a moment that knowledge is something more than ‘just’ skill? If yes, how did they acquire the knowledge? Do the conditions that generate such knowledge need to be nurtured? Do these conditions involve the living presence of a human community through which the experience behind the knowledge is imparted through multiple traditions, no less than serving as the receptacle for what is produced?

Such are the fundamental cognitive questions prompted by the volume under review. The book brings together a set of valuable contributions made at a conference of the Lokavidya Jan Andolan at Vidya Ashram in Sarnath in November, 2011. The essays in the collection have been grouped under five themes: transition to knowledge society, epistemics and politics of lokavidya, economics of lokavidya, lokavidya and the university, and Lokavidya Jan Andolan.

In his lifelong search for clarity, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had advocated ordinary language therapy for philosophy (and philosophers of course). The authors in the volume under review advocate everyday life and livelihood therapy for those in search of a new philosophy and politics of knowledge (gyan ki rajneeti), appropriate for the challenges confronting India in the 21st century. The goal of the book is to offer a “comprehensive introduction to lokavidya darshan” (LP p.8).

To start with, what is lokavidya? The “lok” in lokavidya is not the same as “working class” or “the poor”. The reference, the editor of the volume Amit Basole clarifies in one of the later pieces in the book, is to the social majority which repeatedly shows up in government surveys as “uneducated”, or lacking any formal training (LP p.455). The category is bound by the nature of knowledge held by people not generally regarded (often by illiterate, no less than by literate society) as ‘knowledgeable’.

What is ‘lokavidya’?

Lokavidya points to a philosophy of knowledge and knowing which emerges from human communities in the course of their negotiation of the challenges of ordinary, everyday life. It is knowledge that lives in them, passed on by tradition, but often amended to address changing circumstances, helping them negotiate real questions of life and livelihood, ecology and culture. It refers to the myriad living traditions of knowledge among peasants and artisans, fisherfolk and forest-dwellers, home-makers and home-builders across the country (and indeed so much of the world).

Just before he died, the lifelong student of the peasantry Teodor Shanin pointed out the redundancy of labour in an ever more robotised industrial world: “the modern formal economy needs only about a quarter of the global workforce. The other three-quarters are engaged in survival through the informal economy. The core of the informal economy is not peasant farming, but family and neighborhood relationships of mutual support. So while the informal economy is seen – if it is seen at all – as the political economy of the margins, when you put it all together, you can see it is not marginal at all.” 

In India, the proportion of the overall population engaged in the informal economy is well over three-quarters. At least 8 to 9 working people out of 10 belong here. It is inconceivable that any of them (or any of us able to read reviews like this) could survive for too long without the enormous labour performed by such people, not to forget in the present context the practical working knowledge that they must have to do what they do. If all the food critics in the country were to suddenly die off, India will survive. But it cannot if the same happened to all the food producers. And yet, such is the astronomical absurdity of the society we have come to live in that the former get paid amounts which are orders of magnitude greater than those earned with so much blood, sweat and tears by the latter. 

Lokvidya Perspectives (LP) is an urgent plea to acknowledge, nurture and reward the vast and varied range of knowledge embodied by the hundreds of millions of working people who enable India and the world to survive from one day to the next. “The cognitive foundation of a people’s strength in the ultimate analysis lies in the knowledge they possess to organise their lives, to understand the world, to resist” oppression (LP p.2).

“The modern university, instead of recognising lokvidya and seeing that society is knowledge abundant, sees itself as being located amidst knowledge scarcity.” This comes with the “denigration of other ways of seeing, knowing and doing that belong to the ordinary people in the colonised countries”, victims as they are of cultures derailed by imperialism. A gyan andolan based on lokvidya darshan is not only possible, the writers who have contributed to this volume call for it. “Unless the University is challenged alongside the State, restorations will recur” (LP p.2).

In deference to lokavidya Basole writes in the Introduction that “that huge store and variety of knowledge…may far exceed the total knowledge content produced and accumulated by universities so far” (p.4). This obvious fact has gone unnoticed because of the ease with which the complexity of the labor performed by hundreds of millions of people has been overlooked even by radical thought. “Radical social and political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries challenged every oppressive structure of the capitalist social order except one: the hegemony of modern science and modern knowledge over other traditions of knowledge. In particular, knowledge traditions of the “uneducated majority,” those millions of peasants, adivasis, artisans, small retailers, and women all over the world who are outside the modern economy, were considered inferior” (LP p.1).

How might one view the politics and philosophy of knowledge at stake? “In the Gatesian age, knowledge itself is being redefined in terms of organizability by machines”, leading to dangerous conflations of information and knowledge, knowledge and wisdom, and so on (LP, p.379). This “juggernaut of virtualisation” - which can only deal with knowledge that can be put down in text and images - can only be challenged by repeatedly asserting the significance of sites of knowledge that simply cannot be virtualised (LP, p.380). How do you virtualise the complex know-how involved in  Lokavidya - referring not just to knowledge but to the associated and underlying ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, a whole weltanschaaung? Lokavidya It does not allow “epistemic reduction” (LP p.16). 

 It is argued that lokavidya is among the few “genuine hopes for a different future” (p.380). As Sunil Sahasrabudhey, one of the intellectual pioneers behind the volume under review, points out, “lokavidya is what it is because it is not organisable through a paradigm acceptable to organised knowledge systems, both traditional and modern” (p.369). It is knowledge difficult, if not impossible, to abstract, commodify and sell. Besides, it is produced at multiple sites, by nature widely dispersed and decentralised. 

The lead authors in the volume argue further that placing the significance of lokavidya at the centre may just provide the necessary missing link between the many movements for social and economic justice taking place today. “The myriad ongoing struggles against displacement and dispossession, inequality and imperialism will acquire a new civilisational significance as well as a sense of solidarity with each other if they are seen as knowledge struggles, struggles for restoring legitimacy to people’s knowledge or lokvidya” (LP p.1).

The social dimension of lokavidya is critical to this quest. “The crises of Lokavidyadhar Samaj (that vast section of Indian society which bases its life and livelihood on lokvidya) is that traditional livelihoods have all but collapsed and the members of this Samaj (largely small and medium farmers, agricultural workers, artisans, tribals, small shopkeepers and home-maker women) are forced to live a life sans basic human dignity” (LP p.450). Most such people have not even had the misfortune of being exploited directly (in the organised sector) by the mainstream, globalised capitalist economy.

The holders of lokvidya are in the overwhelming majority. This lokvidyadhar samaj (the society of lokvidya-holders) are at once the bahishkrit samaj (boycotted society), the vast informal sector in economic terms. Their everyday struggles and movements for survival would be sharper if they make bold and just claims for their own creative traditions of knowledge through a lokvidya jan andolan, instead of merely attempting a modest defence of meagre livelihoods, risking being seen as “anti-progress”.

Women’s lokavidya and the Karigar Samaj

Two of the most incisive pieces in the book (with as many as 36 contributions!) have been written by Chitra Sahasrabudhey. 

In the first essay (published originally in Hindi in 2001), she proposes a lokavidya approach to the women’s movement. The main thrust of the essay is that the spread of imperialism (in independent India, through the destructive mechanisms of state-led development of markets) and the general dynamic of present-day modern society have continuously stolen from women a growing range of socio-economic activities which traditionally came within their domain of creative work. From domestic industries and textiles to agricultural work, healthcare and feeding the family, crores of women have been sidelined by the ascent of commercial and bureaucratic forces, rendering them “inactive, helpless and weak” (LP p.192). Domestic industry has fallen into disarray, while agriculture has been increasingly mechanised and modernized, turning women unemployed. To the extent that women have found work, they have to work outside familial contexts, in “alien conditions” (LP p.197). “Imperialism has made its roots firmer through democracies and development…the great misfortune is that women blinded by the shine and twinkle of modern development, saw this process as one which will make the poor and illiterate women self-dependent” (LP p.195). 

A whole cosmos of valid women’s knowledge - lokvidya - has been repressed as a consequence of the fact that such knowledge has never found due recognition from the modernizers including very often, metropolitan feminists. She contrasts the experience of independent India with the freedom struggle under Gandhi when women’s knowledge was a “leading value”, resulting in far greater presence of women in public life across the country (LP p.198). 

The Lokvidya Jan Andolan must fight then for beginning the process of retrieval of the traditional areas of women’s activity. Even if just food and clothing were to return to the realm of women’s control, “unlimited possibilities” can be envisaged (LP p.200). Thus, “the movement for reorganisation of the production and market of textiles and food materials on the basis of women’s knowledge can become the mainstay of emancipating women from the vicious web of exploitation and erecting a promising challenge to globalisation" (LP p.201). Advocating economic localisation, Sahasrabudhey argues that production by the family must find a just place in the local economy, reinstating the role of women and artisans as knowledgeable people. A sustained campaign for the dignity of women’s lokavidya can “initiate the reorganisation of society such that it gradually inactivates the greedy and exploitative imperialist system” (LP p.205). 

In a related essay Chitra Sahasrabudhey also proposes that the Karigar Samaj, duly restored, could become “the liberator of enslaved societies” (LP p.317). A resurrection of artisanal human creativity - entailing due recognition for the enormous wealth of lokavidya among the country’s myriad artisans, not to forget local control of resources - is called for in order to promote “a just and fraternal relationship between man and man and between man and nature” (LP p.318). 

Underscoring the significance of karigar lokavidya, Sahasrabudhey writes: “minute details of river and ocean waters, its fauna and flora are known to the fisherman but the university professor of hydrology holds the right to knowledgeability and the right to a fat salary. The knowledge of the potter is no less than that of the ceramic engineer, nor that of the weaver any less than that of the textile engineer. But it is not valued more than his meagre wages. This is the injustice that pervades society. The karigar samaj must break it in order to establish a position of honour for itself” (p.334). It must fight for an “autonomous social life” which can regulate an economy built around household industries and localised markets. “There is no escape from the shackles of globalisation without the liberation of the karigar samaj” (LP p.342). One thinks in this context of the importance Karl Polanyi assigned to “embedded economies”.

Echoing the visions of Gandhi and Tagore, Sunil Sahasrabudhey points out in the Afterword to the book that “there is no civilisation where there is no village…it is impossible to realise the Rights of Nature and Mother Earth in a world built around the city.” (LP p.459) He calls for a gaon-shahar samvaad which would initiate the process of renegotiating the all-important, but terribly strained relationship between metropolitan and urban India on the one hand and the countryside on the other.

In a volume of this size (almost 500 pages in length!) one wishes that the ecological dimensions of such  radical proposals were explored further, since a renegotiated relationship between town and country and an alternative - small and dispersed - industrial system, shunned in India since the days of Nehru, is surely a large part of the answer to the impasse of development in 21st century India. Re-embedding economies in a renewable ecology and culture is the key to any future worth contemplating for a world imperilled and defeated every day by, among other things, climate chaos. One hopes that many of the authors who have contributed to this volume will explore these themes in future work.

A few shortcomings of the book may be pointed out at the end. Reading through it, I missed an index. Secondly, the volume could have been edited down significantly, given the repetition of ideas across essays, often by the same author. Thirdly, verbal references to non-Hindi vernacular equivalents of lokavidya would have been helpful for non-Hindi readers. Finally, given an anglophone readership (but even otherwise), it would have been useful to offer many more examples of lokavidya.

Yet, the book is an invaluable and pioneering effort which should provoke far greater research in directions tragically ignored by Anglophone Indian radical thought, which has unfortunately drawn more from a borrowed imagination than is helpful or merited. 

http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/2/book-reviews/lokavidya-standpoint.html

The Revaluation of Nature: A Conversation

I am in Mumbai for an audio recording. Yesterday I participated in an hour-long four-way conversation at 'SynTalk' on The Revaluation of Nature. The conservationist Dr. Ulhas Karanth, Bangaldeshi environmental economist Dr. Enamul Haq and Rajat, our host and moderator, were the other three participants. The enjoyable conversation ranged over a number of interrelated themes in Economics, Finance, Ecology, Conservation and Philosophy. It would be interesting to anyone interested in issues connected with the ecological crisis:

The Revaluation of Nature: A Conversation

What Bihar means

The Harvest of Hubris: Kachhe din jaane waale hain

“Bahati Hawa sa thha woh, Gujarat se aaya thha woh, kaala dhan laane wala thha wo, kahan gaya use doondho. Humko desh ki fikr sataati hai, woh bus videsh ke daure lagaate hain, humko badhti mahangai satata, wo bas mann ki baat sunata. Har waqt apni selfie khinchta thha woh, Dawood ko laane wala thha woh, kahan gaya use dhoondo…” 

- Nitish Kumar,  parodying in an election speech a song from the film  Three Idiots

It must have been a sullen birthday for Advani Ji on Sunday. And it will be a dull Deepawali for the Sangh Parivaar, their thunder stolen by the unlettered gwaalaas of Bihar, the former’s greedily anxious patronage of the cow notwithstanding. 

I first came to live in Delhi when I was 16. I was born (in Arrah) and raised in Bihar. It is the part of the earth I still feel closest to. From childhood we were raised on the adage Arrah jeela (zila) ghar baa toh kauun baat ke darr baa? (If Arrah is your home, what can you possibly be afraid of?)

After spending some time traveling in Bihar some weeks before the polls, including a 45-minute meeting with a very self-assured, but watchful Nitish Kumar, I became quite sure that Modiji will meet his match soon. Before the last phase of the polls in November I told a number of people that the Mahagathbandhan would win by a two-thirds majority. Only Laloo himself was crazy enough to make such a prediction. Many went sleepless for a few nights, thinking of Chanakya’s prediction of 155 seats for the NDA. And on the morning of the counting the bluff masters and omniscienti in the national media began counting the NDA’s chickens long before they had hatched. In the event, it was Laloo’s 190 seats for the MGB which came closest to the final result, especially if you take into account the 12 seats that went to candidates other than those of the NDA and the MGB, in which case Laloo's prediction was uncannily spot on! Something for our national pundits and know-all metropolitan journalists to ponder. A thoroughly well-deserved drubbing for the NDA.

It is backward Bihar that has saved India again. Consider the opposite verdict as a counterfactual: Had Modi-Shah’s NDA won 178 seats out of 243, we could have reasonably expected the Indian Constitution to be imperilled by the ruthlessly ambitious communal hate-mongers, their eyes set firmly on winning a similar majority in UP in 2017 and seizing control of the Rajya Sabha - all that stands between them and the rape of the Constitution. Instead Modi-Shah and the RSS find their Ratha-Yatra blocked yet again by the nearly forgotten Laloo Prasad Yadav, back from long political wilderness to haunt the Parivaar’s dreams like a bad penny. His RJD finds itself the single biggest party in the assembly with 80 seats. In the last assembly the party had just 23. It explains in some measure why the BJP-led NDA, which had tasted success in 172 of the 243 assembly constituencies in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, was struck down to a paltry 53.

What does this widely unexpected turn of events mean?

The DNA of the NDA

One thing it clearly means is just how much more politically astute is the unlettered, largely rural, Bihari janta than the educated classes of metropolitan India. Love and hate are passions which any honest human heart can divine. It does not take education. On the contrary, as we often find, it may hinder a clear view of the truth. Bihar has demonstrated this abundantly. If political sagacity lies in recognising the perfidy of a power that seeks to divide a people for political gain, Bihar has it in greater measure than any other part of India. (The Bihar polls also featured over 2000 third gender voters. Wonder how that will compare with an election in the US or the UK!)

While it is true that Nitish’s governance and developmental achievements over the last decade weighed significantly in the voters’ minds, caste, community, and the urgent need for communal harmony and decency in public life have played the decisive role in this election. Campaigning for the RJD candidate at an election rally at Keoti earlier this month, Nitish Kumar said: “Prem aur sadbhav banaye rakhiye. Tarah tarah ke log jhagda lagane ki koshish karenge, ek kanphukwa (rumour-monger) ghoom raha hai. Sama mein jahar gholne ki koshish karenge, haddi phek denge, murti tod denge, mara suar phek denge dharmik sthalon ke paas. Inke uksane se sachet rahiyega.” ("Maintain harmony and peace. People will try to create trouble of every kind. A rumour monger has been doing the rounds. Attempts will be made to poison the atmosphere by throwing bones, breaking idols, leaving dead pigs near religious places. Remain alert, do not get provoked.")

Bihar is perhaps unique in that it has hardly had a communal riot during the last 25 years. The RSS plan of “uniting” Hindus (against all others) across the country has bitten the dust in Bihar, perhaps setting the tone for the rest of the country. Their view that reservations ought to be purely along economic lines betrays a typically modern lack of understanding of the socio-economic complexity of jaati-vyavastha. This is not to endorse the idea of caste in the slightest. It is only to remember the occupational historical correlate of jaati for most Indians and to underscore what should be the bleeding obvious: as the Patel agitation in Gujarat showed, the demand for reservations in education and jobs is only going to get more bitter as the crisis of unemployment (which, a vast amount of data suggests, is impossible to address within the economic framework of the reigning development model) gets worse over the next few decades. This will put paid to any attempt at “Hindu” unity. RSS Hindutva idealism has read the ground completely wrong, leading to electorally costly repeated blurts from the pulpits of Nagpur by sarsanchaalak Mohan Bhagwat. To address the jobs question within the Hindutva ideology is likely to prove utterly difficult, if not impossible, especially since folks like those in the Swadeshi Jaagaran Manch have been totally sidelined by the Modi Manch (of three). When you couple this with the unfettered corporate investment agenda of Modi’s, the writing is on the wall for the present rulers of India. India refuses to shine like this, a lesson they should have learned from the 2004 debacle. Given the depth and range of interests at play, they are unlikely to learn it this time either.

Bihar is also, at a deeper level, a vote against hatred in public life. What we have witnessed over the last six weeks was easily the most vicious of all electoral campaigns in the history of Independent India. Desperate to win at all costs, the NDA went hell for broke in its attempt to communalise and polarise the electorate, divide, for instance, Dalits and Yadavs from Muslims, and Yadavs among themselves. Even Modiji outdid himself when it came to lowering the standards of public speech, especially for a serving Prime Minister. Early in the campaign he found “some problem with Nitish Kumar’s DNA”, a remark which alone may have cost him more than a few seats. At a recent rally in Buxar, keen to divide the opposition’s votes, he did not pause to think before accusing the grand coalition of plotting to reduce quotas for SCs, STs and OBCs in order to benefit “a particular community”. Rabble-rousers like Giriraj Kishore went to the extent of saying “Lalu says that (you should) throw meat in a Durga temple”. Lead campaigner and BJP President Amit Shah said that if Nitish’s coalition won, firecrackers would go off in Pakistan. (There were actually many more in India!) And so on. 

The venom and poison that has been unleashed during the last year should make anyone wonder if this is a civilised society any more. The hate brigade reintroduced a vicious form of beef politics in recent months, leading to the lynching of an innocent man last month, the Prime Minister maintaining a typically cowardly silence. It is not for love of the cow, but for love of the power that the pretence of protecting it is seen to give that the beleaguered animal has found such enthusiastic patrons in recent months. Nobody should miss the point that the surge in beef politics during the last couple of months was scarcely coincidental. It was prime-timed for the Bihar elections. (This happened despite Nitish repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that cow slaughter had been banned in Bihar since 1955). You will see the hype come down sharply now. The attempt was to divide the large Yadav vote in the process. In the event, the divisive tactic proved counter-productive, one more instance of the alertness of the ordinary voter in the state. One finds it hard to imagine if a region like Haryana or Western UP would have responded with the same sagacity.  

The MGB’s victory in Bihar restores the idea of India to its pristine dignity, an idea wounded and imperilled seriously over the last 18 months by a hate-inspired leadership hypocritically more keen to see a Mahabharata than an Akhand Bhaarat.

Fortunately, every seductive slogan of Modiji’s - beginning with the ridiculous DNA slur - was turned around by his Bihari opponents into a jumlaawaar which fractured the NDA strategy. He was outwitted fair and square.

Bihar backward?

It is time people stopped considering Bihar “backward”. Without making any apologies for the rampant corruption (as much a feature of other places), it is important to keep in view the fact that Bihar has been systematically denied its due share of Central funds over the past 25 years, affecting its performance more than any other state perhaps (the dues going into hundreds of thousands of crores, Modiji offering a small fraction of it, as if from his own private kitty), because it has always faced a hostile government in Delhi in these recent decades.

There is also something else to consider. During our meeting with him Nitish Kumar expressed the view that provincial elections in no other part of the country inspire as much wide national interest as a Bihar election. Why is this so?

Bihar has always led the curve in Indian politics, all the way since Gandhiji’s Champaran Satyagraha in 1916, through the JP movement and the revolt against the Emergency in the mid-1970s, to the Mandal agitation and Laloo’s stopping of Advani’s Rath-Yatra in the early 1990s. For anyone who knows the socio-political ground in Bihar (and retains a deep distrust of the political intelligence of metropolitan media savants), it would have come as a huge surprise had Modi-Shah pulled off an upset against the Laloo-Nitish combine, especially after Modiji chose to commit (yet another) folly. Kisne hidaayat dee thhi Modiji ko Laloo se moonhh lagne ki, auur wo bhi Bihar mein? The NDA brains trust also preferred to have Amit Shah give more than 60 speeches while blocking local point-men like Shatrughan Sinha, committing the same blunder they did in Delhi, of preventing the state unit of the BJP to take charge. Somehow, Modiji (and Shah himself of course) believes that the people of India also voted for Amit Shah in 2014. Trying to save themselves from the Delhi blunder of announcing pre-emptively a candidate the state unit of the party had not endorsed, they went for the opposite gamble of not announcing a candidate at all this time. (This is typical of a power-drunk leader without any Plan B, presuming that everyone will kow-tow to him anywhere in the country once he is triumphant). I remember Nitish Kumar saying to us in September “Modiji Bihar ka additional charge lenge kya?”

I have lived in four countries on three continents. Within India I have lived in four different states and travelled to virtually all, except a few in the North-East. I have not come across people with a sharper political intelligence anywhere else. This is the reason for the wide national interest that a Bihar election provokes. There are objective reasons why Bihar - apart from its large population (one out of thirteen Indians is a Bihari) - is of enormous political significance for India, a trend likely to grow in the future.

Biharis and Baaharis

Regionalism played a far greater role in this election than communalism. Parties like the Shiv Sena and the MIM came from outside the state to participate. It was widely noticed that top NDA leaders from out of the state had come to campaign. Amit Shah camped all October in Bihar and addressed over 60 rallies. Modiji himself spoke at more than 30, his party losing in most of the places where he spoke. 

The obvious question this campaign strategy provoked was why local leaders were not given the lead roles in the campaign. The opposition made full use of this lapse, especially since the NDA failed to announce a CM candidate, Modiji himself at the forefront of the campaign. It naturally prompted Nitish to ask voters to choose between a Bihari and a Baahari. Wouldn’t Modiji himself have done the same had Sonia Gandhi aggressively fronted a Congress campaign in Gujarat when he was CM?

Moreover, taking its cue from the Lok Sabha polls, Modi’s campaign was mechanically pitched for urban (and urbanising) India. But almost nine out of ten Biharis live in villages. It was natural for the large rural vote to go against Modi, especially as he mocked at the scale of labour migration from Bihar, forgetting what a major contribution is made my millions of migrant Bihari labour both to the country and to their own households. Our elites and middle classes would find it difficult to believe that even Rahul Gandhi's words about "suit-boot ki sarkaar" had greater traction in so many parts, resulting in 27 seats for the Congress, when it had just 4 last time.

What can we expect now?

First of all, we can expect a lot of national entertainment, now that Laloo is back before the media cameras. He has already promised some fun when he said that he will go with a laal-ten (lantern) to Modiji’s constituency Benares to look for his achievements! From there he threatens an agitation to challenge the regime in Delhi. As the Parivaar knows now, if there is one man in India who is serious about destroying communalism, it is Laloo. He is not a man to be trifled with!

The story is told that after blocking Advani’s Rath-Yatra in the 1990s, when he was Chief Minister of Bihar, Laloo Yadav was giving a speech somewhere in UP, in either Kanpur or Lucknow. Heckled by Bajrangis, he turned the mike off and sat down. When things had quietened, he stood up again, turned the mike on and said into it “Ee Ram Chandra Ji kauno BJP ka card-holder hain ka? Humko cheente hain? (Do you recognise me?) Hum bail (bull) ko seengh pakad ke chadhte hain!”

The political lesson of Bihar is that the man who knows his cow wins. The man who pretends to love it loses in the end. 

Will the Mahagathbandhan hang together, or perhaps dissipate into the sort of factional fights which have been the undoing of coalition governments in the past? The risks are not low, given that the coalition here is between two former rivals, even enemies. Yet, both sides know very well what is at stake. They came together in a moment of national peril, to not only defend Bihar against a perceived outsider, but to kill the deadly virus of communalism before it got worse. The virus is far from gone. And the two leaders know that they must hang together for it to remain at bay. 

For his part, Nitish needs to reflect carefully on the future economy of the state. The country is living through an unacknowledged impasse of development. 'Development' can mean many things. It is for him and his supporters to define afresh what it should mean for Bihar, what would bring the greatest benefit to people long deprived and exploited. 

“Bihar mein bahaar ho!” is a much better direction to go in than “Bihar mein bazaar ho!”, for “bazaar” no longer refers to actual bazaars, like our traditional haats and mandis, but to the “share bazaar”. The latter is the sort of development which will keep most Biharis in a state of deprivation, while narrow elite interests in the cities are promoted. In the long run, such a model of development, unleashing enormously destructive ecological forces in the wake of growing inequalities, especially between cities and the countryside, will bring ruin even to the wealthy in the cities. Sabka swaarth, sabka vinaash.

The election results show that people in Bihar know where to place the blame when it comes to fundamental macroeconomic issues like inflation, especially the price of essentials like daal. Instead of following the arhar Modi model of promoting big business, Nitish could pay due attention to basic services, agriculture and small, sustainable industry to generate livelihoods, deepen his already substantial commitment to renewable energy and pioneer for all of India an entirely new form of ecological development, something which could lay the foundations of a future state of what may be called Praakritik Swaraaj. Such attention to rural Bihar would also allay Laloo’s well-known suspicion of development, helping to keep the coalition together.

Bihar is only 12% urbanised. Instead of succumbing to the dominant view that this is a sign of “backwardness”, it may be wise of Nitish to see this as perhaps one of Bihar’s great long-term ecological assets. A whole new style of development can be pioneered in Bihar which may not be so easy to pursue for highly urbanised states like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or Maharashtra. This would also require appropriate infrastructural investments (in basic amenities and training) from the government in small (tier 3 and 4) towns, addressing the need for employment amongst educated, mentally urbanised youth, keeping them from metropolitan frustration, while also easing the pressure in the cities. 

Above all, the big lesson of this election is that leaders must avoid the hubris that strong mandates bring. They must read these mandates well. This is the era of extreme verdicts in Indian electoral politics. Speaking solely from the perspective of the country, it would be a lot better if the verdicts were more slender: it would give stronger incentives to the ruling coalitions to behave themselves and stick closely to the tasks within the mandate. If NDA had 75 fewer seats in Parliament they would not have chanced their arm so freely, spouting, encouraging and permitting the scale of communal rubbish that has been served over the past year to seek to make narrow electoral gains.

On the other hand, a mandate like 178 out of 243 can be turned to great effect under astute leadership. Nitish is known for his sober qualities. He will need every bit of this sobriety to stay humble, grounded, and focused. The people of Bihar have waited long. They are bubbling with enormous potential and hopes; they will require at least this from him.

As for Modiji and his vanquished crew, there is just over a year left for the UP elections. After massive defeats in Delhi and Bihar, the RSS may ask for Amit Shah’s head, as against allowing him to take charge in UP too. (Rajnath may be their preferred choice.) If they do so, it will inaugurate a blood feud within the Parivaar. At any rate, if they continue in the same communal vein, forgetting the substance of their real mandate, they will deservedly lose again, given people’s rising impatience on issues that matter. (Beef-eating is hardly one of them.) 

If that happens, the unlikely may come about and Modi may not last the full term in Parliament. Not so long ago, I was the only crazy forecasting such an outcome. Even now, there would be few takers for this view.

For now, let us savour the fact that you can’t fool many people in this country all the time. Those out to destroy dharma will themselves perish in the dust.

Satyameva Jayate!