How the leaders delivered

Let this review start with a general advisory: Do not get put off by the title of this book.

Yes, this is an anthology of important speeches made by eminent Indians between 1877 and now. It's also true that speeches being what they are can generally be very boring and soporific.

But the 161 speeches (classified under 17 broad themes) that find place in this volume are neither boring nor soporific. They are selected with great care and thought. Indeed, they capture the evolution of India as a nation over the years. Almost all the speeches articulate the various ways India has evolved as seen by some of its greatest thinkers, social reformers, economists, scientists and politicians""before independence and after.

Thus, Surendranath Banerjea or Dadabhai Naoroji emerge in a new light""not as intellectual or political collaborators of colonialism, but as forces that saw in the British raj the many virtues that could be assimilated and absorbed. As Rakesh Batabyal, the editor of the volume, argues, all these leaders believed in what Karl Marx described as the "regenerative role of colonialism". Arguing in those days that the British education system or the railways network also had some redeeming features required political courage and the vision to look ahead.

Another idea that these leaders of the early nineteenth century grappled with was whether India could emerge as a nation from merely being a geographical entity. Gokhale, Naoroji, Banerjea and Gandhi spoke at length and at different times on how the various states under the British raj could be united as a single political entity. They all seemed to have recognised the daunting task. But not for once did they give up in arguing their case cogently.

Eventually, as the speeches reproduced here show us, it took the grit and determination of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to use persuasion and even threats to get all the 500-odd princely states to agree and submit to the sovereignty of the Indian state. One of Patel's speeches made at Jaipur in the presence of the Kapurthala royalty gives adequate evidence of how the then home minister had alternated gentle persuasion with blatant threat to get the Nizam of Hyderabad and some other recalcitrant kings to sign on the dotted line.

Equally bold is Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, who headed the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) in 1934. In his presidential speech that year, he outlined a detailed agenda for action to usher in planned economic development in India. His speech, delivered at a time when most Indian political leaders were in jail, showed that Indian business leaders and Sarkar in particular were clear in their mind that building a strong industrial base and attaining high economic growth were as important goals as political freedom from the British rule. Not surprisingly, it is Sarkar again who pushed the Indian government to set up the Indian Institutes of Technology so that the country could produce engineers of international class.

The range of the subjects covered by the speeches is indeed vast""from Jagadish Chandra Bose on his belief in the existence of life in plants to Swami Vivekananda on the social purpose of the Hindu religion, CV Raman on the Nobel prize winning Raman Effect, Kanu Sanyal on the formation of the CPI-ML and to Indira Gandhi on why the commercial banks had to be nationalised.

The speeches become more interesting during the post-independence era. It is Brajesh Mishra who in 1974 explains to the world why the Indian government went in for a nuclear test at Pokhran. In 1998, Brajesh Mishra is part of the Vajpayee government at the Centre. And the explanation offered by Vajpayee after the series of nuclear tests in May 1998 is quite different.

What assures for this book a permanent place in one's bookshelf is the highly informative and succinct introduction to each of the speeches. The context and the significance of the speech are outlined with an objectivity that would be the envy of any historian.

Objectivity suffers only in one place""the section which carries speeches on economy and development. The volume editor seems to have been ideologically biased towards the economic views espoused by the Left. How otherwise does one explain the inclusion of a fairly ordinary and long speech of Somenath Chatterjee, at present the Lok Sabha Speaker! The speech is ostensibly a critique of the new economic policies introduced by the PV Narasimha Rao government, but the arguments therein are poorly marshalled and flawed as well.

A notable omission from this volume is the historic speech delivered by Ghanshyam Das Birla at a Ficci luncheon meeting in the late 1970s. In that speech, Birla voiced the collective anguish of Indian business leaders, who were constrained by a plethora of restrictive economic laws. Birla went a step ahead and called upon business leaders to violate the economic laws that barred them from producing more. Among those who listened to Birla at that meeting was George Fernandes, the industry minister at that time. Such a speech should have surely found a place in a volume that is otherwise unmatched in its comprehensiveness.

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MODERN INDIAN SPEECHES

Edited by Rakesh Batabyal
Penguin
Price: Rs 595; Pages: xix+916