 "Idea of India")
DEMOCRATS AND DISSENTERS
Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Pages: 352
Price: Rs 699
Plato rejected Athenian democracy on the grounds that it encouraged anarchy. Nietzsche disapproved of democracy as "Christianity's heir". But to adapt King Edward VII's famous comment on socialists, we are all democrats nowadays. India's other national myth - of being a secular republic where caste and creed are subsumed in the desi equivalent of Cicero's Civis romanus sum, I am a Roman citizen, - is no longer even whispered. But woe betide anyone who questions the world's largest democracy boast. Even the dissenters (if any) of Ramachandra Guha's title claim they want only another form of democracy.
A conveniently literal interpretation of the creed attaches greater weight to the rites and rituals of representative government than to the sturdy egalitarianism that Americans understand by democracy, as Senator Adlai Stevenson III once pointed out. I remember a senior reporter haranguing the late Chogyal of Sikkim on the one-man-one-vote mantra that is democracy's sine qua non here. "But each Sikkimese has five votes!" the Chogyal protested. His plea of an imaginative system that ensured cross-community voting, avoiding communal electorates and vote banks that fragment society was beyond blind addicts of stereotypical democracy. It's heresy to criticise the concept.
Deep down, this is a profoundly conformist land. That's the tribal tragedy. They, too, yearn for the good things of urban life that would have been theirs if only they could practise the "sycophancy and self-preservation" with which Guha saddles Indira Gandhi's courtiers but which characterise the opportunists and arrivistes who define contemporary society, its media and academe included. Undoubtedly there are exceptions, but I would run out of fingers and toes counting revolutionaries I know who grabbed the chance of success in some conventional or capitalist undertaking and were then treated with even greater deference. A former CPI leader admits in his memoirs to taking lessons in ballroom dancing to improve his prospects in the multinational organisation he joined when his god failed.
The last of Guha's 16 essays inadvertently provides an explanation for fickleness by quoting Ramesh Chandra Majumdar's comment that India lost its independence five centuries before the British conquest "and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century." Majumdar possibly wrote Hindu Colonies in the Far East to demonstrate that today's slaves were yesterday's slave-owners. The prolonged servitude he mentions produced the 19th Century Bengali who wore trousers under his dhoti - or was it the other way round? - to be ready for whichever side emerged victorious in 1857.
There are some fine pen portraits of individuals in this anthology, especially of foreigners - Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson. Guha is less authoritative about the recent past which explains why the delicious irony of Jaipal Singh calling himself "a jungli, an Adibasi" is overlooked. Jaipal was an Oxford Blue. His first wife was W C Bonnerjee's highly anglicised grand daughter. He was a covenanted assistant with Burmah Shell and used to stay in Calcutta with the British Metropolitan (Archbishop) of India.
Guha also says the mythical name of Dandakaranya was lost until the Maoists revived it. Actually, the 1958 Dandakaranya Project revived it. The vast region rich in natural resources was the promised land where dispossessed East Bengalis would let down new roots. When they got there, it was to find only threadbare canvas, without infrastructure and the richest areas lopped off. Dandakaranya became a metaphor for betrayal.
The attempt to force amorphousness into numbered and labelled straitjackets is a more serious drawback. Lahoris face three threats. Violence is divided into five forms. Tribals suffer from nine tragedies. At least, mathematical precision is impersonal. Branding teachers and writers (glorified as "intellectuals") on the basis of the author's perception of their political beliefs could be hazardous since it is subjective.
Is the Marxist who does puja in the privacy of his house radical or conservative? Is the careerist academic a liberal? Prasanta Mahalanobis pioneered state planning despite being close to Tagore. Jagdish Bhagwati, voice of the free market, started life in Mahalanobis's Indian Statistical Institute. Democrats and Dissenters reminded me again of the inappropriateness of forcing Indians into imported categories.
Apparently, Michael Burleigh, the conservative historian, wrote that Hobsbawm "dazzles readers with (his) apparent fluency as he zigzags from First to Third World contexts." Guha also impresses readers. He too zigzags across themes and regions. His essays are a valuable source of information. But they are more readable than relevant. The lasting impression that emerges from these 317 pages is of a rose-tinged elysium called India. Although Guha admits that "sometimes the suppression of truth is caused by plain corruption, by writers or editors seeking plots of land, or Rajya Sabha seats, or preferential government accommodation, or ambassadorships" uncomfortable frailties are not allowed to mar the beatitude of his Panglossian vision.
His apologia for a former Congressman, now a prominent BJP publicist, who once wrote "a largely sympathetic biography of Jawaharlal Nehru" but now bitterly attacks Sonia and Rahul Gandhi is revealing. Ordinary folk would recognise there is no longer any dividend in praising Nehru. The dividend lies in castigating Nehru's heirs, especially if they have been mingy with rewards. Guha's starry-eyed assessment is that the "historian" and "democrat" in the turncoat - not that such an uncomplimentary term is used about someone of consequence - is "anguished" at the thought of the party of independence facing ruin.
One can only repeat George Orwell: "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them."
