His report on Vedanta’s operations in Niyamgiri made waves, but the former bureaucrat takes pride in his role in earlier battles.
“…bribe me?” Saxena, master of plainspeak, completed helpfully, writes Aditi Phadnis. “Actually they have a former Cabinet secretary on their board (Naresh Chandra) who is even distantly related to our family. But not once did I hear from them, not even a phone call, which, in a way, is very good.”
We were at lunch at the India International Centre (IIC) and Saxena, who is 6 feet 3 inches, was trying to make himself comfortable. Being tall means you have to be reconciled to a lifetime’s discomfort: beds that are too short, airline seats that are designed for pygmies, clothes that never fit. In his case, it proved to be an advantage early on: he was admitted to kindergarten when he was six but after asking him a few questions (and on the basis of his height, he said with a laugh) the school judged that he would be better suited to Class 5. He finished his first MSc in Physics when he was 18 (Prof Rajendra Singh or Rajju Bhaiyya of the RSS was one of his teachers) and his second in Mathematics when he was 20. By 21 he was teaching at alma mater Allahabad University and by 22 he was an IAS officer, the youngest, and the topper of the 1964 batch.
The next question was obvious: why didn’t he make it to Cabinet secretary? He thought for a while. I urged him not to choose his words.
“I put it down to an incident when I was advisor in the Planning Commission,” he said slowly. Atal Behari Vajpayee was prime minister. Saxena had been rural development secretary and had become member secretary, Planning Commission. The mid-term appraisal of the ninth Plan was on and Saxena had written six or seven chapters himself. The practice was to read out the appraisal to a full meeting of the Planning Commission with the prime minister in the chair before it was put up to the National Development Council (NDC).
Saxena said many of his findings were “extremely critical” of the government. “The prime minister just closed his eyes and said nothing as I went on reading. After a while, N K Singh (secretary in the Prime Minister’s office) said: ‘This meeting is over’.”
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“It was only in the afternoon when N K rang and said: ‘Yaar NC, the PM is very angry and unhappy about your report. He cannot approve such a report’ that I realised what had happened.” Saxena’s response was, “Okay, say so in the minutes.”
“Singh said: ‘How can we do that?’ So being the quintessential bureaucrat, I gave him the way out. I told him to write in the minutes that the prime minister was present but not to say whether he approved or disapproved.”
“So we didn’t change a word in our report and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government accepted our criticism. It was presented to the NDC, which approved it. No one reads these papers, really. It was only The Economist, which wrote in its issue of October 2000, that ‘the Planning Commission’s description of development schemes in India reads like a criminal chargesheet’!”
Saxena said he was “not very unhappy” with this description. But the government obviously was. “So I went on leave,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. And that’s how the post of Cabinet secretary passed him by — the incumbent, T R Prasad, was given an extension.
This was not an unusual development: Saxena’s bureaucratic career is a series of quiet rebellions. He was issued two warnings, one by the Union home secretary and one by the Union environment secretary. The first one was for writing a paper on Hindu-Muslims relations after the killing of Muslims in Hashimpura, Meerut in 1982 (where the Provincial Armed Constabulary pulled young Muslims out of their homes at random and killed them, holding them responsible for communal riots). Saxena held not just the PAC but the local administration culpable. The other was for writing an article on the government’s forest policies in the Illustrated Weekly of India — which might have gone unnoticed had the Union environment secretary been someone other than T N Seshan.
Somewhere in between, we ordered lunch: tandoori vegetables for me, fish tikka for him. We were not really focused on the food.
Saxena says there is much that is wrong with the government — but there are some things that are right, as well. Twice in his career, he tried to rewrite the laws of inheritance in India that prevented daughters from inheriting a share in their father’s property. He did it finally and that itself is a tribute to the element of democracy in the Indian system. But he had to fight. “On reading laws of inheritance in UP, I found that if there was no male heir, the property could go to an uncle, a brother or a nephew. The daughter’s claim on it came last. On further research, I found this was not just the case in UP: the same law was in place in Delhi, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana…”
He first tried to change this law when he was revenue secretary in UP and a famous Socialist, Ramnath Kureel was the minister. “He told me: ‘Saxenaji, I will back you even if you propose land reform. But not this’.” Then came Kalyan Singh’s tenure. “I still remember, I met him in Aligarh. I was rural development secretary and I told him: this has to be done, otherwise I will sit in dharna here. He called for samosas and jalebis for me and we talked. He said he couldn’t do it but did agree to change the law to include the claim of the wife on her husband’s land. It was only when the National Advisory Council considered the matter that we decided the way out: amending the Hindu Succession Act. It is still being violated, but at least it is a law,” he said.
Saxena’s experience tells him that maximalism doesn’t work. His biggest regret is that although he was rural development secretary and proposed a new resettlement and rehabilitation law, he was too democratic in the manner that he went about it and well-intentioned interventions by the NGO community led to its quiet burial. He managed to convince both government and industry that the biggest cost in rehabilitation and resettlement of people ousted from their land was legal. If industry were to give 20 times the gross produce as a one-time settlement or twice the gross produce on an annual basis, with the land leased from the farmer for 50 or a 100 years, it would work out to an initial five to six per cent of the total cost of the project but would settle the issue forever. Industry was satisfied with this proposition.
Saxena’s formulation was: the government had the right to acquire land but would execute agreements with the landowners and industry for the land. NGOs, chiefly Medha Patkar, did not want government to have the “right” to acquire land in the first place. Predictably, Cabinet said the matter had to be discussed. “From 1998 to 2010, we’re still discussing this,” he said sadly.
As we rose, I tried to imagine what the world must look like to him: full of tiny people. For he’s one of the tallest men I’ve met.