Books
RESERVED: How Parliament Debated Reservations 1995-2007
by Rajeev Dhavan. Rupa and Co., Delhi, 2008.FEW issues have dominated public discourse, more so in recent years, as the policy of reservation in public employment and education. And hardly surprising that positions on these policies are sharply divided, not just between those who might benefit from the arrangements and those who fear a ‘loss’, but even more among those who mobilize and comment on the provisions. Unfortunately, years of public wrangling and millions of words later, there is little clarity about the concrete contours of the policy of reservations (quotas), how well and in what context it has worked to subserve the stated objectives, whether what began as a temporary and time-bound measure of ‘affirmative action’ should be extended and for how long, and so on. Equally, there is considerable concern over the tendency to continually extend the regime of quotas – to new groups and to newer arenas.
Alongside the debate on the substantive elements of the reservation provisions are the equally important, though less commented on, issues regarding the specifics of the law, their interpretation by the courts and the amendments/extensions to law introduced by the legislature. We all know that policies are often challenged in courts whose job it is to review, uphold, amend or strike down specific provisions. This could happen because the law is badly drafted or because it violates the Constitution. When the Parliament steps in to amend or re-write the law, sometimes through constitutional amendments, it can well set up a confrontation between the law-makers (Parliament) and the institution mandated to interpret the law (judiciary). This too we have witnessed more frequently than desirable.
Central to the reservation debate, as Fali Nariman writes, is the ‘elusive doctrine of equality’. ‘To what extent should the claims based on merit and on the Fundamental Right to Equality be ignored? How far does the Constitution, truly interpreted, direct us to go? How long are we to atone for the oppression of centuries? Should we go on equalizing downwards? And for how long?’ Unfortunately, as Marc Galanter, well-known scholar of Indian jurisprudence, points out, ‘In an area of law founded on the Constitutional embrace of conflicting principles, it should not be expected that courts would provide an enduring synthesis that transcends and encompasses them and settles issues with finality. Rather, we should expect – if the courts are at all representative of the larger society – some ambiguity and vacillation.’
It is the manner in which Parliament has responded to the courts’ ‘ambiguity and vacillation’, specifically in regard to the courts’ criticism of aspects of our reservation policy that forms the subject matter of this highly topical and contentious book by Rajeev Dhavan. Stated up-front, Dhavan’s charge is that the range of constitutional amendment bills passed by Parliament – 77th amendment (1995), 81st amendment (2000), 82nd amendment (2000), 85th amendment (2005), and the 93rd amendment (2005) – as also the Union legislation to increase reservations in central and technical educational institutions (2006), not only represent ‘a massive upset of judicial decisions by Parliament’, worse, a detailed scrutiny of Parliamentary debate reveals an unacceptable and shocking lack of Parliamentary application of seriousness (reviewer’s words). More soberly stated, Dhavan writes, ‘All we can say is that both the style and substance of civilized discourse on reservations leaves a lot to be desired.’
Few today may remember that Rajeev Dhavan, way back in 1992, argued in the Mandal 1 (Indira Sawhney vs. Union of India) case on behalf of the OBCs. At that stage he had argued that backwardness went beyond disadvantage and discrimination to also include disempowerment. This impelled him argue that Ezhavas, a Kerala group, though not suffering from caste disadvantage nevertheless deserved reservation. Fifteen years later, Dhavan in the Mandal II case, argued on the other side, challenging the Union government proposal to introduce reservations for OBCs in educational institutions, aided and unaided. What changed in this period, according to him, was the effort by Parliament to introduce constitutional amendment bills ‘only’ to overturn the judgment of courts restricting specific provisions in the larger architecture of reservations. These provisions related to issues such as ‘carrying forward unfilled reserved vacancies in public services’, ‘relaxation in qualifying marks for SCs and STs for reservation in promotion’, whether ‘by virtue of being appointed earlier to a reserved post, an employee belonging to the SC or ST category acquires a consequential seniority over merit candidates in the promotional cadre’, and so on. Equally, at stake was the government’s intention to extend the schema of reservation to private unaided institutions, a provision subsequently struck down by the Supreme Court.
It is instructive that very few of these specific provisions ever feature in the public discourse on reservations, which continues to be dominated by a broad ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ position. It is equally disappointing that very little of our debate – public, judicial, parliamentary – is based on empirical data and impact studies, not only because we have so few of them but also because ex-ante positions override all data considerations.
It is not possible for this reviewer to adequately comment on the validity of Dhavan’s legal arguments, or even some of his empirical assertions. For instance, it is not clear on what basis he asserts that the SCs and STs are holding a disproportionate number of posts in technical civil services. Or why he draws a distinction between ‘political and bureaucratic’ empowerment and ‘educational’ empowerment – to distinguish between Mandal I and Mandal II. Nor is it clear why Dhavan extends the ‘creamy layer’ argument, primarily raised in the context of OBCs, to also include SC and ST groups. Nevertheless, he has rendered signal service to all in explicating the details with respect to less debated provisions on the carrying forward of quotas, establishing norms for promotions, whether reservations are applicable only on point of entry or valid throughout the tenure of service and so on.
But Dhavan’s real contribution lies in mining the Parliamentary debate on each of the constitutional amendments, which, one must sadly agree, makes for both a hilarious and disturbing reading. In not even one of the extracts of the Parliamentary debate reproduced in the book, do we come across an instance of a substantive argument, for or against, and a meaningful joining of the debate. The courts may well be biased in their reading of equality provisions. Equally, they may, in an unwarranted manner, be encroaching on the domain of the legislature. This can be debated. What is evident, however, is that our parliamentarians, at least in these cases, take their charge of making laws rather lightly.
Overall then, this provocative book should be read by all interested not just in the specifics of our reservation policies but also for how our major institutions act and behave.
Harsh Sethi
TRAPPED! BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND DEEP WATERS by Dinesh Kumar Mishra. People’s Science Institute and South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People, Dehradun and Delhi, 2008.
Dinesh Mishra’s book on Bihar’s Kosi river comes at a very opportune moment. The floods that ravaged the Kosi flood plain this year are still fresh in memory, with large tracts still under water – and likely to remain so for the next five months. Many of the reasons why the Kosi burst its embankments, and what has happened to the flood plain that makes it so vulnerable, have been explored in the book – incidentally written well before the floods occurred. In fact, the Hindi version was published in 2006. Hence, the warning signals that it contains are all the more important for serious consideration by policy-makers and ordinary citizens alike.
Mishra has been engaged with the issue of floods in internal deltaic regions since 1985, not just in Bihar but also in parts of Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Assam, and Orissa. He is not only a civil engineer in the classical mould from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, but has also been unusually receptive to the concerns of the local people with their traditions and ways of life that were adapted to the vagaries of the flood plain long before contemporary science and technology began intervening to control these natural processes. The fact that he chose to do a doctorate at the Veer Narmad South Gujarat University as he approached his 60s, so that he could pursue his passion more assiduously, speaks volumes about his commitment and competence.
Both these qualities are displayed in ample measure in this book. The first chapter introduces the river, both in its scriptural as well as terrestrial forms. The second is a fascinating historical account of the various attempts to ‘control’ the river and its floods, beginning with the ‘improvements’ in transportation in the 1860s that actually marked the destruction of the natural drainage lines in the flood plain, followed by the floods becoming a ‘devastation’ rather than a natural blessing that enriches the land. This led to the first debates and conferences on floods and flood control by the end of the nineteenth century, wherein views ranged from building high dams and fully embanking the river to allowing it complete freedom. Eventually, it was decided to embank the Kosi; the ultimate irony is that President Rajendra Prasad, who in 1937 had held that all embankments should be done away with, laid the foundation stone in 1955!
Thus, as Mishra illustrates in vivid detail, the final decision to embank the river had little to do with science and much more to do with politics – the politics of selling the emerging construction technologies, the politics of the contractors and builders, and the politics of the political parties trying to enhance their public image. And as this politics unfolded, many of the scientific institutions also meekly followed the dictates of their masters in legitimizing the entire project in the name of ‘nation-building’, thus laying the ground for the first flood control policy of the government focusing almost exclusively on embankments and storage reservoirs. In this manner, almost a century of public debate and opposition was firmly annulled a little after India gained freedom from British rule and its repercussions can be felt to this day.
The following chapters document how the same politics then eventually led to regional and local decisions on what should be the alignment of the embankments – depending upon whether a village wanted to be ‘outside’ or ‘inside’; the series of breaches in the embankments and their restoration or extension – making the flood situation recurrent and, therefore, a source of continuing revenue to the contractors; the beginning of ‘relief’ work – again as a political project for benefiting the more affluent; and the eventual entrapment of villages in flooded situations – whether they were within the embankments, or outside them in the so-called ‘protected’ zone, or encircled by ‘ring’ bunds. It was all a matter of impeding drainage flows and not allowing the water to escape through the natural routes that led to this situation. What marks these chapters (and the critical contribution of Mishra) is the wealth of interviews and the living testimony offered by individuals who saw these processes at closer quarters: many of whom may not survive for very long to pass on their experiences to the next generations.
Some of the adverse impacts of the failure of the flood control strategy based on embankments was sought to be mitigated by holding out promises of irrigation through canals on both sides of the river that would feed a large tract of agricultural land, and the next couple of chapters detail how even these promises turned out to be hollow because the drainage pattern in the plains had changed drastically and irrigation on a once-flooded plain merely worsens the problem because it does not obey the natural cycle that created the plain in the first place. Furthermore, the point is again emphasized that rivers cannot be seen merely as carriers of water but also of silt and that it is this silt that eventually defeats the grandiose plans of flood control, irrigation, and even power generation.
Chapter seven is yet another fascinating account, particularly from the point of view of a trained engineer, of how the whole idea of ‘public cooperation’ was subverted to feed the politics of flood control and enrich the few at the cost of the many. The Bharat Sewak Samaj was originally set up to lead this massive effort at enlisting people to participate in the work of building the embankments under the leadership of Planning Minister Gulzarilal Nanda and it elicited an extremely favourable response in its early days. But contractors and their collaborationist engineers and bureaucrats soon struck back because people’s free shramdaan was eating heavily into their profits. Eventually, the Centre constituted an enquiry commission in 1968 under the chairmanship of a retired judge of the Supreme Court, and the Bihar government also set up its own commission, but neither commission could come up with any relevant conclusions.
Thus by 1957 itself, the issue of a relief and rehabilitation machinery had begun raising its head and Mishra does a magnificent job of describing how, over the years, this transformed into a very profitable business for the administration, the local elites, and sundry non-government organizations whose politics was no less pernicious than of the original schemers who put a completely faulty system flood control in place. Again, there were many protests, many appeals, many committees, but they all culminated in dwindling choices for the flood victims. According to Mishra, this has resulted in a sense of resignation in the local people, such that instead of putting up a fight they now prefer to migrate. In many ways, this chapter contains many valuable lessons for all those attempting to grapple with ‘disaster’ situations, whether currently in the flooded Kosi plains or during events of droughts, earthquakes, tsunami, or fires and evictions.
Mishra then goes on to analyze the impacts on livelihoods, cattle, fish, fuel, sanitation, education, children, health, migration, communication, criminalization, relief, drainage, and erosion in the ravaged Kosi valleys. In the final chapter he touches upon what could be possible solutions to the problems created mainly by a misdirected flood control policy. He writes about the need for a vibrant dialogue with Nepal on the issue, and the proposals to build a high dam at Barahkshetra, inter-linking of rivers, and strengthening the embankments. He also comments on the ‘fourth crop’ of relief and the growing fad of ‘disaster management’. Eventually, he winds up by underlining the need to learn from the coping mechanisms of the people and developing a strategy for living with the floods, which would incorporate flood tolerant housing, sanitation, drinking water supplies, agriculture and animal husbandry, and an early flood warning system.
In some ways, this final chapter is a weak link in an otherwise sound and elegant edifice of combining practical experiences with theoretical analysis. It does not dissect sufficiently the various proposals from a technical and social perspective, whether it be the large dams or a coping strategy. In particular, Mishra does not highlight the core issue of how to improve drainage. This is somewhat unfortunate because that is the heart of the matter, and relates to not only the embankments and dams, but to virtually every construction in the flood plain. Rivers and their tributaries are nothing but nature’s routes for water to flow from the highest mountains to the sea. The flood plain is the ecological niche within which nature performs its task of land building and enrichment. How best human beings can understand this process and both use it to advantage as well as maintain it is the challenge that faces engineers such as Mishra. It is an issue with which he has grappled with in the past, as have the two publishers of this book, and it is indeed a pity that there is little reflection of that discussion in an otherwise absorbing and hugely relevant work.
Dunu Roy
FRONTIER IN FLAMES: North East India in Turmoil edited by Jaideep Saikia. Penguin/Viking, New Delhi, 2007.
THE tactless display of the Incredible India! advertisement on television channels portraying the North East as ‘paradise unexplored’ makes it hard to disregard former security and terrorist analyst Jaideep Saikia’s statement that, ‘Insensitivity also exhibits itself in the perception that that the region [North East] is a mere appendage to a subcontinental gigantism, and consequently neither the political realities not the social undertakings in the constituency affect the rest of India’ (p. xiv). The fact that it is with deep pain and unhappiness that the people of the North East look upon mainland India may not be uncommon knowledge; they represent an unbroken disenchantment with New Delhi’s policies and attitudes, reflecting a more cabalistic malaise that has made the people of North East not feel ‘Indian’. Taking this emotion as the opening premise, it is appropriate to read Saikia’s edited volume as an important petition to the Indian populace to aid in making the North East attain ‘the respect of an able partner in India’s nation-building enterprise’ (p. xiii). Otherwise, it would not be long before the already dismembered and mutilated region becomes permanently overrun by vested interests, political and commercial.
Saikia’s tenure in security advisory capacities in the government has enabled him to identify writers who are sensitive, scholarly and committed to enhancing the North East’s status in India. We have ten essays covering issues ranging from illegal migration from Bangladesh and the problem of militancy in the region, all the way to the play of geopolitics in the North East. Fortunately, despite overlapping themes, the essays do not repeat or restate events and incidents and help provide a fresh perspective. However, the Prolegomena by the editor is somewhat disappointing.
Amidst the plethora of problems facing the North East region of India, two issues stand out for their severity of impact on people and for the unhealthy trend that they establish. One is the question of usurpation of tribal lands by non-tribal, especially the migrants from Bangladesh; the second is the increasing violence by militant groups in the region. Sometimes one wonders how there could be a uniform ideology among the ever-increasing extremist factions and, even more, what actually they are fighting for. For instance, Binalakshmi Nepram-Mentschel laments that in Manipur alone, ‘over twenty-seven armed groups operate’ (p. 34). Primarily a land of the Meities, Manipur according to Binalakshmi, has turned out to be a ‘fragile garrisoned soil’, engaging at first in a war with New Delhi’s arrogation of the land. Things, however, became worse with what the author calls, ‘war within war’. That is, contemporary skirmishes have transmuted into internecine conflicts among the different communities in the state. The Kuki-Naga killing is one such fallout. As such, the objective of the armed rebels has become more parochial in the sense that it has moved away from securing an autonomous status for the state to one of protecting their communities from others.
Taking up a similar issue, Namrata Goswami warns against the ‘balkanization of Manipur’ because of peace talks with the Naga tribes. Since many Naga clans trace their origin to parts of Manipur, there is a high probability of Manipur’s land being apportioned to the Nagas. Arunachal Pradesh too is susceptible to such divvying. This highlights the preposterous act of the Government of India to have arbitrarily demarcated the North East region into different states, when such territorialisation doesn’t respect tribal land ethics.
The mainland’s ennui with respect to the North East is exposed when one confronts the Centre’s indifferent attitude. In particular, the issue of illegal migration from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) has been a bone of contention between the North East and New Delhi since partition. Assam and Tripura have faced the music due to New Delhi’s callousness and negligence, bemoans a concerned Edavelth Rammohan. A concomitant setback due to such (il)legal migration has been the difficulty of combating land alienation, which has taken on a political colour. Rammohan reflects the perception of the people of the North East when he avers that the Bengali Muslims (from Bangladesh) ‘see a lebensraum, a living space on agricultural land, and thereby pose a threat to the demography and electoral space of the Assamese people’ (p. 20). In addition to New Delhi’s uncaring concern over the Bangladesh-Burma borders, the recent emergence of vote bank politics (the illegal migrants form a substantial part of the region) too has accentuated the pressure on tribal lands. Political parties have turned a deaf ear to the appeals of the original inhabitants.
The situation in Tripura is even worse: ‘More than seventy per cent of its population consists of settlers from East Bengal.’ The movement from common land control to individual land ownership has resulted in exacerbating conflicts over land, maintains BBC’s Subir Bhaumik. This, predictably, has acquired an ethnic tinge, what with tribals losing their lands to settlers from East Bengal. With an ineffective state administration and police highhandedness, Bhaumik doesn’t find it surprising that these have led to cropping up of armed resistance. The predilection of political parties for ‘refugee votes’ has only added fuel to the fire.
Economics seems to be a protagonist of the conflict in the North East, though the crisis at a deeper level is a question of rights, dignity and ethics. However, economics seizes centre-stage, as the North East’s illustrious Padmashree awardee, Patricia Mary Murkhim, reveals. Doubtlessly, India’s shining economic performance doesn’t seem to have any kinship with the North East, where ‘in each of the seven states, the economy’s growth does not exceed four per cent’ (p. 1). If such were the case, why shouldn’t such isolationism harbour thoughts of separatism, and engender feeling of neglect among the people of the North East, wonders Murkhim. As an interim measure, she suggests the revival of traditional institutions that can serve to bring together the people and the ‘formal structures of governance and power’ (p. 12). Hopefully these institutions can be more inclusive and less intimidating. Life would be less frightening too for the common man, woman and child, if not caught unassailably ‘between the warring factions and the security forces deployed in the area’, voices Arunachal Pradesh’s celebrated writer, Mamang Dai. Trapped in the middle of belligerent organizations, the villagers have come to accept the rebel groups that operate in their region as a necessity. Not only do the security forces repeatedly employ ‘crude methods of interrogation’, but worse, even after being informed about the activities of the rebels, they remain inert. Unsurprisingly, the villagers consider the government to be against them.
Another issue of alarming concern is the clandestine operations of the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan and the Director General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) of Bangladesh in the porous Indo-Bangladesh border region. This requires immediate attention and action asserts Maloy Krishna Dhar, who was with the Indian Intelligence Bureau for over 30 years. Dhar points to the inertia of Indian politicians in dealing with the destabilization activities of the ISI and DGFI, which are in cahoots with the CIA in ‘systematically encourag[ing] the jihadi tanzeens’ (p. 85) to create havoc in the North East region. It’s high time, Dhar professes, for India to give more importance to the operations of the two external agencies, and secure India from their demonic grip.
The former chief secretary of Assam, Harendra Nath Das, focuses on the economic fallout of militancy in the state. Holding personnel to ransom, extortion, and siphoning funds from government sponsored rural development projects are the chief ways of funding militancy in the region. Consequently, no company wants to invest in the region (in addition to flight of capital of already existing ones). Dilip Gogoi, writing on the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), considers its degeneration into a terrorist organization as unfortunate for, in its initial phase, it was a revolutionary movement with righteous aims. As a way to change the perception of the state, it is crucial for the government to focus ‘on infrastructure development by opening up the economy and laying the ground for investment’ (p. 130). Jabin Thomas Jacob offers a similar sentiment in the last essay of the book. Abysmally low levels of infrastructure development along the borders in the North East have commercially depressed the region. It is important for a nation to develop cross-border linkages with its neighbours and accept such interdependence as an obligation to the frontier states.
Though not offering any novel insight into the North East region, the essays, nevertheless, are to be appreciated for the forceful and truthful approach they have adopted, never falling back on tortuous clichés or unscrupulous rhetoric. Their value lies in a bonding with facts, and minimizing opinionated ideas. This doesn’t mean compromising on originality. Rather, it helps provide an honest approach to the emotions and sentiments of a people in turmoil. The editor, though an expert on the North East region, sadly only contributes a ceremonial introduction. A brief note in the form of a conclusion, highlighting common and unique issue of strife would have increased the book’s usefulness to lay readers. A recent map showing the North East’s contours too would have added to a reader’s understanding of the geography of the region.
As is clear from the essays, state governments exercise only nominal powers. For all that is written on the South Asian region apropos democracy and its growing influence (State of Democracy in South Asia report, 2007), the North East requires urgent intervention to improve the quality of life of the people. This, no doubt, is a larger agenda, and needs careful orchestration by the Centre, state and regional institutions, along with the wholehearted participation of the people. In the meantime, conflicts between militant groups and security forces need to see a decline, reminding one of Brooks Atkinson’s unforgettable proclamation: ‘After each war there is a little less democracy to save.’
G. Narasimha Raghavan
GANDHI’S KHADI: A History of Contention and Conciliation by Rahul Ramagundam. Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2008.
ACCORDING to the author, ‘Khadi… is at the threshold of being restructured and repositioned as a brand’ (p. 17). Against this background he seeks to ‘reinstate core issues of khadi to their rightful legacy’ (p. 11). The core issues discussed in the book are spiritual, economic and political.
Gandhi said, ‘There are many aspects of khadi; amongst them the spiritual one is the one I hold uppermost and the economic one next’ (p. 12). The spiritual aspect was repentance for having willingly surrendered freedom.
The author quotes Gandhi, ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them... (p. 24). …It is we, the English-knowing men that have enslaved India… (p. 25). …Why was India lost?... Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought their goods? History testifies that we did all this… (p. 26). Foreign cloth constitutes our slavery… We are purifying ourselves by discarding foreign cloth which is the badge of our slavery’ (p. 27).
The economic issue revolved around self-restraint, as well as giving priority and privilege to the human element in economic pursuits. Khadi was the means for swadeshi and swaraj. Gandhi said, ‘Swadeshi is that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote…’ (p. 111). This requires ‘an ever-increasing vigilance and searching self- examination…’ (p. 111). Further, he wrote, ‘Political economists assert that social affections are to be looked upon as accidental and disturbing elements in human nature; but avarice and the desire for progress are constant elements… it is this human element on which the entire economics of khadi rests.’ The human element is not accidental, on the contrary it is intrinsic – khadi is a superior cloth because "it has a soul in it". ’(p. 106)
The political project was to somehow bring nationalist politics and political parties closer and more organically linked to the lives of people. Gandhi made relentless efforts to persuade the Congress to adopt the spinning of the khadi fabric as the duty of all members of the party. He saw in khadi a mode of ‘political work that is self-supporting’ (p. 143).
Nevertheless, Ramagundam argues that even his closest friends, such as C.F. Andrews, were sceptical of his argument. According to Andrew, the author points out, Gandhi’s insistence could create a new dogma, ‘a creed with spinning and wearing khadi as its essential elements…’ (p. 149). The Congress saw khadi as an instrument to transform its character from a political to a reform organization’ (p. 150). The author points out that the 1924 Pact between Gandhi and the Swarajist Party represented by Motilal Nehru ‘…declared suspension of the non-cooperation movement and acceptance of the spinning franchises’ and in the process reduced the wearing of khadi to a ritual, a ceremonial dress…’ (p. 151). Gandhi’s proposal for a ‘Khadi clause in the constitution of the (Congress) did not find any takers… According to the clause, if a member was not "a constant wearer of khadi", he was debarred from participating in the work of the Congress, its committee or subcommittee…’ (p. 164).
The author points out that the educated were impatient with Gandhi’s insistence on khadi first. Instead, they advocated the ‘Independence First’ rationale. Once India won her freedom, they argued, her government could bring in legislation to favour khadi. In Gandhi’s conception, however, a ‘decent show’ of khadi was required before India could achieve her swaraj. An ideal government for him was one that governed the least.
Gandhi retreated. Having parted ways with the Congress on this issue he worked to organize the All India Spinners Association (AISA) and alongside continued the debate on khadi.
The author points out that a new species – the mixed khadi – emerged, its warp made of mill yarn (p. 174). AISA refused to participate in swadeshi exhibitions that permitted stalls for mill textiles (p. 176). If this practice caught on, it was argued, it would hamper improvement in the quality of hand-spun yarn (p. 174). Gandhi said khadi and mill textiles were on two different planes. ‘The aims are opposite. It is not intended to supplement, it is intended to supplant mill textile. Khadi gives work to all; mill cloth gives work to some and deprives many of honest labour. Khadi serves the masses; mill cloth is intended to serve the classes. Khadi serves labour and mills exploit it’ (p. 176).
Criticism came not only from Congress but from people like Nirad C. Chaudhuri or Aurobindo Ghosh and from these who worked for the AISA such as S. Ramanathan, Secretary of the Tamil Nadu branch of AISA. Gandhi responded to all criticisms. The author points out that while advocating khadi, Gandhi constantly insisted that his campaign was not against the mills as there was enough space for both (khadi and mill cloth) to grow as long as foreign cloth continued to be dumped. It was his concern about idleness in the village that had him think of khadi (pp. 186-192).
In an article, ‘Hookworm and Charkha’ Gandhi wrote that legislation was important on issues such as eliminating unsanitary conditions in villages, but the same method of legislation did not apply to the charkha (p. 195).
AISA, according to the author, was founded by Gandhi as a substitute for the inability of the ‘Congress to transform itself into a spinning organization or a khadi warehouse’ (p. 197). Is the suggestion that the intention behind AISA was to make a khadi warehouse? Though it reads contrary to the archival material made available in the book, this statement by the author seems to be in agreement with all those Congressmen who thought that Gandhi was trying to make Congress into a spinning warehouse. So did Congressmen miss the point and has the author similarly missed the point?
What is the point? What does the author mean by ‘reinstate core issues of khadi to their rightful legacy’? What legacy is the author talking about? Is the legacy the nationalist movement? According to him, ‘Much of the historiography of the nationalist movement has adamantly skirted the significance of a constructive agenda, of which khadi formed a vital part in the building of the liberation movement (p. 4). Why is this so? Is it because dominant historiography carries forward the legacy of those English knowing men who willingly surrendered their freedom? If this true then the nationalist movement as we know of it through dominant historiography is not the legacy to which khadi belongs.
The author has in a way decontextualised khadi from its historical times – there is no discussion of the character of the historic times when Gandhi was working with khadi. This prevents khadi from transcending the specificity of its historic times so as to become accessible to people of different cultures and from a different historic time.
The core issues of khadi cannot be fully understood without looking at the larger historical context – the times between the First and the Second World War, the Great Depression and the emergence of nation states. What impact did these have on India? Did the social conditions created in India at a time when it was becoming part of the world system have a bearing on the way people responded to khadi? How far did the spirituality of khadi, the act of repentance and self-purification that Gandhi saw, become integral to people’s consciousness?
The core of khadi is the assertion that the nation state does not necessarily lead to freedom, independence and a life of dignity. The nation state does not promise self-esteem, nor does its economy guarantee safeguards against idleness. Khadi was not just about employment, which was only a means for alienating the mind, body and spirit from each other, but about engagement of the mind, body and spirit in the means of livelihood and in thus creating conditions for social life. This was its human element.
Finally, what is the legacy of khadi?
Savyasaachi
POLITICS OF TIME: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society by Prathama Banerjee. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006.
IN recent years, there has come into being a purposeful research into aspects of time and space. Perhaps, future researchers and analysts may find the underlying cultural, social and political reasons for this kind of research becoming very popular. Whatever the reason, writing about time and space traverses many areas. Prathama Banerjee, here, tries to show how the concept of the ‘primitive’ has been used through the reading of literature from colonial Bengal. Through her analysis, we are led to understand that the ‘primitive’ was created much before anthropologists started using the term, a conceptualization that would surprise many anthropologists.
This complex interrelationship of the transformation of the time of the ‘primitive’ to a concept that may be understood through the colonial construct involves ‘the transformation of time into a homogenous, numerical series was a material process which can be described as follows: first, the material constitution and bounding of some peoples as "primitive" and non-contemporary to other peoples; second, the putting of such "primitives" in relations of exchange with the so-called "historical" as if that, in principle, were the only relation possible amongst the non-contemporary; third, the theorization of money as the only mediator/translator possible in such exchanges because number, the signifier of both money and labour, remained unaffected by the practice of different social temporalities; and fourth, the concomitant transformation of temporality into a universal numerical scale (itself translatable as money) into which different times could be converted as relativized stages of the same time, and between which exchange could be instituted and numerically priced’ (p. 19).
The Bengali worldview recreated this junction of time and the ‘primitive’ in the context of ‘first, that of splitting the presence of the nation into the perpetual contra-existence of the "primitive" and the "civilized", so that the flaws of the jati could be blamed upon the disowned and the "primitive" constituents of the nation’s self and then, that of ascribing a spatiality to time itself, so that these contradictory social times could appear as adjacent spaces, capable of being physically gathered within the territorial and conceptual oneness that was the nation’ (p. 51).
Eventually, travelling ‘became a technique of tracing and integrating the nation’s variegated landscape and socialscape, which otherwise resisted being smoothened into a single narrative and a singular historical time. Vivekananda’s long journey to the southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula in order to contemplate, Gandhi’s mass journeys or bharat darshan by the railways, Nehru’s textualization of national history as a "discovery" of India – all these articulated travel as the practice of breaching internal frontiers and temporal differences. Distinct from but simultaneous to this was the material process of forced immigration and transportation of "tribes" like the Santals, a process which had the effect of constituting ‘primitives’ as pure body-commodities, shorn of all social temporalities except the time of circulation. Once "primitives" thus became purely atemporal and asocial bodies, displaced from their country and community, they no longer seemed to represent a potent counter-historical time. Their presence no longer threatened to contaminate, by another time and another practice, the continuous time of historical chronology.’
The account given by the author shows how the Paharias were felt to be uncooperative to the British and did not fit the description of the ‘primitive’ tribe that they had created and hence the Paharias were displaced, to be replaced by the more cooperative Santals in the Damin area. Making such areas non-regulation tribal districts meant that not only were the ‘outside,’ ‘historical’ society excluded from the ‘primitive’, the ‘primitive’ were also excluded from the outside areas. Thus began an exclusivity that was to continue even after Independence. However, the author fails to understand the dual fact that though it itself became an exploitative act, it was initially meant to protect the tribal from exploitation. This simple fact has nowhere been mentioned. However, the interaction with traders meant that the Santals received less than they gave since they did not understand the trading commodities and money well enough.
The author explains how the Santal rebellion or hul was also participated in by other castes. This fact was later glossed over, as was the fact that the rebellion could not have originated from a single central leadership.
In essence, then, the author attempts to show how contemporaneous communities became separated through the concepts of time imposed on one through the other. This not only showed how such a ‘politics’ of time operated, it also created the background for further exploitation and expropriation. Thus, the tribal is shifted to the ‘primitive’, in order that they might be shifted away from the focus of the present. Even as it showed this, it becomes clear that the author attempts to reach a definition or perspective regarding the people from Bengal through inversely defining them, as in a camera negative, through the mirror of their treatment of the tribals.
The work is excellently nuanced, deeply researched and worthy of a more detailed reading. However, there are certain caveats. At no point is one provided any definition of either an adivasi or a Santal. Perhaps, this is intentional since any attempt would have to negotiate many minefields. However, how we can problematize an ‘other’ without first having defined a community is something we are left to wrestle with ourselves. Also, the Bengali bhadralok, even in the present, sees the Santal in all its tribal communities, so much so that it has ceased to see all the other communities which have often all been subsumed within the general title of Santal. Thus, the internal differentiation of the community is an issue ignored, perhaps inevitably so, due to the lack of definition of the Santal community itself.
The ‘who knows why’ response of the Santal that the author refers to in the text could be manufactured due to the ethnographer’s queries itself and may not necessarily be an intrinsic part of the Santal worldview. It could also denote individual Santal responses to what they think or believe others’ might know but which he himself does not. The author is also silent on the differential interpretation of time among Santal men and women.
Finally, the idea of a study of anthropology as conducted by Lowie being one of ‘shreds and patches’ was heavily contested by many and is definitely not the dominant theme of the work which is referred to by the author in the book. The author believes that this kind of anthropological writing, one so ‘thick’ was without theoretical outlook or only about detail, was definitely wrong. Some analysts claim that even S.C. Roy followed a more functional outlook. Even today, undergraduate or postgraduate anthropologists often read Lowie’s work not to find that thing of ‘shreds and patches’ but to learn from its theoretical outlook and theoretical history of anthropology. Thus, the idea that Bengalis learnt to ignore such theories by reading Lowie would be mistaken.
In spite of these problems, the work reviewed here is one of the best to have come from a historian on tribal conceptions of time and has much to teach those keen to work in this arena.
Abhik Ghosh
POLITICS AND ETHICS OF THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION edited by Rajeev Bhargava. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2008.
THE Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD) must make fascinating reading. The time (1946-49), the context (through the riots, Partition, the scooping in of the princely states, redrawing the map of the subcontinent), the people in the Assembly (who they were, how they got there, what they represented, what they wanted, what they got) and the act of creation through contention and compromise must make the CAD of compelling interest. Yet, there has been little more than the occasional scholar dipping into it, and the lawyer and the judge who have made instrumental use of it in advancing an argument. Both have been on the wane with time, and with the acknowledgment of the weakness of the interpretative potential of the CAD.
This excursion into making political science engage with the process of Constitution-making marks a departure from this trail of neglect. The explanation for this scholarly endeavour lies in the anxiety of the times. ‘Suffering from amnesia’ and ‘laps(ing) into a state of inarticulacy’ about the ‘real point underlying "our legal and political practices" may be harmless when the going is good.’ But ‘when these practices are challenged or threatened, a sustained inarticulacy about their underlying purpose and justificatory reasoning can damage these practices even more,’ says Bhargava in his Introduction. This can ‘be prevented only when we undo this forgetting and retrieve the original articulations… Consider the partition of India and the articulation of secularism in its immediate aftermath.’ This volume, then, is an attempt to train the sights of political science on a not so distant past to deal with distress about damage to a constitutional and democratic polity in the immediate moment.
The essays move between what could have been and what was negotiated into being. Bhiku Parekh’s lament about the distortions determining the Indian identity is a cry from the heart. The volume moves on immediately to Thomas Pantham who strains to find ‘overlapping and complementary or compatible’ spaces between Gandhi’s ideas and what was in fact imbedded in the Constitution. The keenness to demonstrate that Gandhi mattered in Constitution-making is touching. Peter de Souza is more matter-of-fact when he investigates the differing visions of Ambedkar and Gandhi on the centrality of the village in Constitution-making. In retrospect, neither Ambedkar’s constitutional order which was ‘one that was limited by rules and accountable to citizens’ nor Gandhi’s village swaraj, seem to have been solutions to the continuing poverty and oppression. The best opportunity, de Souza suggests, is represented in panchayati raj as it reaches the gram panchayat which is ‘the required hybrid: Gandhian in its focus on the village, Ambedkarite in its emphasis on constitutionalism.’ The return to Gandhi in these two essays is redolent with nostalgia for a time when the differences were about principles and normative content.
There is a certain palpable excitement when Aditya Nigam reimagines the Constituent Assembly (CA) as an ‘event’, shifting the focus from what went on in the CA. May be it is stating the obvious when he asserts that ‘reading the CAD in their very literal meaning can… be quite misleading’ and when he contests that there is a ‘unitary logic’ underlying the making of the Constitution, or that the CA was a coming together under the ‘compulsion of the logic of power, to hammer out a negotiated settlement.’ Perhaps, the depiction of the Constitution as a ‘text without (an) author’ is only partial. These are, nevertheless, notions holding interesting possibilities waiting to be explored.
Valerian Rodrigues writes about citizenship, identifying ‘inclusion-exclusion, normative considerations, and differential entitlement’ as three issues on citizenship, but doesn’t succeed in capturing the politics, of power and poverty.
A Constitution constructed in a particular historical-political moment: should it be flexible? Or rigid? Is there an argument for committing future generations to it? In an essay that sets out to demonstrate that ‘constitutionalism can have consequences that are positive for democracy,’ Suhas Palshikar illustrates this proposition with a discussion of what he calls ‘environmental constitutionalism’. There is a discussion of the ‘right to property’, followed by a narration of the ‘public trust doctrine’ through a judgment of the Supreme Court, but the rendition is disjointed. The innocence which is read into the doctrine of eminent domain appears unreal in a time when the power of the state to forcibly take over land, as well as the presumptions about the ‘common good’ is heavily contested. The continuance of laws in their colonial form, such as we see in the Land Acquisition Act 1894, was sanctioned by the Constitution. How did the CA deal with this? Is there a difference between the power to dispossess a zamindar and the power to effect mass displacement? Was the same jurisprudence intended to extend to both? What were the land reforms about if those to whom land was to be redistributed could have it prised back within a couple of generations? Leaving these or like questions unasked, accepting the presumptions about eminent domain and sovereignty, and banking on the public trust doctrine – which, so far, is a one case wonder – does not square the circle.
Affirmative action is subjected to discussion in some detail. Christophe Jaffrelot makes an argument to denude the validity of the proposition that the Constitution ‘was intended to promote social transformation.’ The way it went, and as seen in the context of political representation, both the Scheduled Castes and the OBCs lost. It helps to have scholars who are not auto-censored by visions of the holy cow. Ashok Acharya’s setting down of the development of affirmative action in the US and in India is useful in establishing parameters for legislative and judicial thought on the matter.
Representation of religious minorities in the legislatures engages the attention of Shefali Jha and Rochana Bajpai. Jha digs into the debates in the CA to find an explanation to rights vs. representation in relation to minorities, but only leaves us a string of questions on collective rights, representation, religious freedom, and democracy. Rochana Bajpai’s focus on special representation in the legislatures – the route of separate electorates, proportional representation and reserved seats – is lucid.
Secularism, group rights, and the state’s relationship with religion finds its investigators. Gurpreet Mahajan, writing about individual and group rights, and identities, would have it that although India asserted that the state shall not espouse religion, it did not pursue equality or the path of secularism by endorsing the policy of separation. ‘Even as we analyse the changes introduced by the ideologues of Hindutva, one needs to remember that non-separation was the constitutional mandate.’ Pratap Bhanu Mehta takes a further, strident step to argue that: ‘On the one hand constitutional practice requires that religion be made subordinate to public purpose. On the other hand it wants to claim that these public purposes do not impinge upon religious freedom.’ The only way to achieve this is ‘by interpreting religion in such a way that its requirements and the demands of the state turn out to be congruent.’ Ergo, the ‘regulating and trying to control the meaning of religious doctrine.’ Hobbes assists Mehta in providing the contours of thought. And the judgments of courts in cases where they ‘interpreted’ religious doctrines to derive a compatibility with liberal constitutionalism is grist to his mill.
This meant that ‘the state, rather than positioning itself in hostility to religion, became the vehicle for the democratization of religion.’ Incidental to this exercise, and a perhaps unintended consequence of the Supreme Court’s attempts to bring Hindu religion and practice in conformity with the needs of social justice was the creation of ‘a unitary Hindu identity’. In retrospect, while ‘the consolidation of this identity had various sources …its availability as a legal category has surely helped the process of perverting the discourse’ from one of ‘progressiveness, tolerance and a capacity for reform’ to ‘a discourse of intolerance.’ There is an important argument in this article. The one annoyance, however, is that the cases referred to are undated and not referenced, making periodization difficult except for lawyers who are otherwise in the know.
Among the more stimulating essays is the one by Upendra Baxi. His enduring engagement with the Constitution travels to several territories in constitutionalism, even if he adverts little to the CAD themselves. It is true that his admitted inelegance in creating categories that are named C1, C2, C3 – referring to the text, its interpretation especially through adjudication, and the theory that is derived from the first two – could have been rendered better. Yet, there are thoughts and ideas in the essay that overtake this inelegance. The contrast between swaraj, which was both legitimated and valorized, and the denial of self-determination along with the constitutional effacement of ‘derogation by way of secession’ is one such. The rooting of ‘constitutional patriotism’ and the militarization that it has fostered, lodging all rights ‘within the bounds of sedition/treason, and draconian security legislation routinely and tragically sustained by the Supreme Court of India’ is a statement in constitutional practice and pragmatism. There is the reconstruction of Indian citizens as vermin – where regions are described as Naxalite/terrorist/dacoit infested. The ‘practices of citizen interpretation’ which lie unauthorized and unaccounted in the understanding of legal and constitutional theory springs beyond orthodox constitutional discourse. The opaqueness about judicial activism, where it is represented both as ‘inaugurat(ing) a new constitutional register’ and as facing a ‘legitimation contingency’ – does indicate a glossing over of the structural changes that have occurred to power of the court over a people in the production of rightlessness. Contrast this with the agenda of reaching rights to the dispossessed, which was the justification for PIL when it was juristically first crafted.
Decades after the Constitution had done a settling of rights, wrongs and institutional arrangements, untouchability has not disappeared. Is there an explanation that can be found within the Constitution itself? Gopal Guru’s reading is that the Constitution did indeed make some attempt to blend both legal/procedural and moral rights – in extracting a commitment to moral rights by enforcing legal rights through institutional mechanisms. Much has happened in the years between 1950 and the present day in the realm of social justice; but, ‘it has to be acknowledged that it is not the ethical insight of the state’ but ‘Dalit assertion for self-respect’ that has led to the implementing of ‘constitutional provisions in order to ensure cultural justice to the untouchables.’
Yet, as Gopal Guru explains, while constitutional provisions and the 1989 Atrocities Act recognize the practice of untouchability, it ‘insulates the source of untouchability and captures only the sites of untouchability… it is necessary to treat untouchability as a phenomenon involving both the source of pollution and its object.’ The second problem is that it assumes that truth resides only in the body of the untouchable. ‘The Indian Constitution, even with its punitive provisions… has not succeeded in penetrating the upper caste self which has become morally so hardened… In sum, constitutional provisions are necessary for "positional good", but not sufficient for achieving "cultural goods" like recognition and dignity.’ This is the one essay that puts the Constitution on trial, challenging its tolerance of intolerance, oppression and exclusion.
It is fragments of a few constitutional themes that largely make up this volume. It does not do much to understanding the CAD, or to place the CA within the history of Indian political thought. There are patches of thought and scholarship dispersed in the essays but, and in greater measure, it demonstrates an aridity that is disconcerting.
Usha Ramanathan
