The Gentle Revolutionary-L. C. Jain (Sample)

The Gentle Revolutionary The collected essays of L. C. Jain Edited by

Tridip Suhrud

The Gentle Revolutionary The collected essays of L. C. Jain

Edited by

Tridip Suhrud

NAVAJIVAN

૱ 650 © Devaki Jain, 2020 First Edition : February 2020 ISBN 978-81-7229-930-9

Printed and Published by Vivek Jitendra Desai Navajivan Publishing House Ahmedabad-380 014, INDIA Phone : 079-27540635, 27542634 E-mail : sales@navajivantrust.org Website : www.navajivantrust.org

CONTENTS

FOREWORD V

INTRODUCTION

VII

1 WHY GANDHI?

1

2 FATE OF GANDHI’S ECONOMIC THINKING 3 GANDHIAN INITIATIVES

15 117

4 CIVIL SOCIETY: THE FOUNDATIONS FOR DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION 135 5 POLITICAL PARTIES AS CORNERSTONES OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE

153

6 INDIAN POLITICAL SCENE: A SKY WITHOUT STARS

195

7 POVERTY OF ATTACKS ON POVERTY

207

8 MEMORANDUM TO THE PARLIAMENTARY STANDING COMMITTEE 221 9 OUR CONSTITUTION, SOCIAL ORDER AND ENVIRONMENT

245

10 TURNAROUND IN INDUSTRIAL GROWTH: HASTY CLAIMS FOR LIBERALISATION

285

11 WHY AN ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIC SURVEY?

315

12 SOUTH ASIA: OPENING THE DOORS OF HOPE— SOME THOUGHTS

345

13 SUMMONS FROM MOTHER INDIA

361

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

383 iii

FOREWORD

I knew Lakshmi C. Jain—or Lakshmi, as I used to call him—since my student days. A revolutionary spirit was his birthmark. He was a student leader and was able to mobilize fellow students especially for the cause of freedom. I vividly recall his leading a procession on 9th August 1942 soon after Gandhiji’s ‘Do or Die’ call, urging colleges to shut down. He was arrested.

The era of 1940’s—the time we were in college together—was the most luminous and turbulent years in India. It was all about freedom and, whatever may be the current ways of looking back at those decades, it was Gandhiji who was the predominant inspiration, leader, magnet. Along with his calls for Quit India and peaceful methods of enabling India’s freedom from the British empire, there were also his moral principles that pervaded the air. Simplicity, khadi, identification with the other—this was also part of the environment.

It was not as if we were Gandhians. But Gandhi’s call penetrated the minds and hearts of almost every Indian, especially students. Students wanted to volunteer, make sacrifices forfeiting achievement, job security, in order to belong.

The volume brought back to me many memories of Lakshmi’s close association with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, which was the beginning of a life-long journey. Along with her, he got into the area of rehabilitation of the refugees. (In a tribute to Kamaladevi published in the EPW dated 26–11–1988, he recalls with appreciation Kamaladevi’s philosophy—‘to help the refugees to help themselves in building a new life’). Post-Partition, under her guidance, Lakshmi got into the setting up of the cooperative movement, and, later in the revival of handlooms and handicrafts.

Here I would like to recall his strong support to the demand which Shri Ashoke Chatterjee and I had made to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for giving special ministerial attention to the handloom and handicrafts sectors.

In a letter to the Prime Minister in May 2009 he wrote: ‘The time has come for Handlooms and Handicrafts to be given an appropriate ministerial support. v

Presently they are tagged with the Ministry of Textiles. The contribution being made by Handlooms and Handicrafts both to employment and export, which is known to you, is very substantial and, more importantly, in the present context they have a potential of contributing even more while consuming very little capital and energy in the process of production’.

The journey never ended. And in some ways the journey did end with Lakshmi. His concerns for the institutional structures of people-led cooperative movements, the place of labour—labour that gives dignified livelihood and creates things of lasting beauty—in our lives has become almost a thing of the past. So has deep aesthetic unease with declining forms of civility in our public discourse.

This volume of his writings selected for their resonance of Gandhi’s ideas—diverse in its content and objective—provides a glimpse to those to whom the freedom struggle can only be the history books—of how participating in that struggle influenced our entire life. That passion never stops. It is now, more than ever before that we need to hear Lakshmi’s voice, gentle and deeply transformative.

Kapila Vatsyayan 3 – l – 2017

vi

INTRODUCTION

I M. K. Gandhi had a remarkable ability to attract women and men of sterling virtue and profound intellect and organisational ability to his cause. This capacity survived, as a residue, for several decades even after his death. And yet, there was equally a lack that was evident in his times and has only become more pronounced in ours. This lack is the absence of serious thinkers about the realm of economy or political economy around Gandhi.

There were two remarkable exceptions to this. One was Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa, whose Survey of Matar Taluka gave us the first major findings of the penury of India’s peasantry and who thought deeply about the permanence of economic forms much before we became concerned about the sustainability of our economic actions and increasingly of the earth’s capacity to sustain and nurture life itself. The other was Richard Gregg, American, trained in law, committed pacifist and capable of leading a sparse life. Gregg wrote the first major exposition on the economics of Khadi in his Economics of Khaddar.

This despite the fact that Gandhi was both a formidable economic thinker as also creator of institutional structures that sought to address the fundamental concerns of economics: the allocation of resources, creation of livelihood, production and distribution of goods and services, nature of ownership of means of production and their just distribution. Underlying his economic thought was a deep and abiding concern with de-humanising poverty, structural violence and injustice. His actions in this domain were profound. His commitment to bringing poverty at the centre of our national imagination remains significant. While Gandhi had many co-workers, including Kumarappa, who gave their lives to action against poverty, for generating livelihoods, ensuring re-distributive justice and a life of dignity, the paucity of thought remains. vii

It is possible to argue that action must take precedence over thought, at least in the domain of eradication of poverty and the violence that life bereft of opportunities, perennial hunger, helplessness and injustice begets. And yet, this need not necessarily be so. The life of Kumarappa is a testimony to this.

This is also evident in other domains of thought and action in the Gandhian imagination. Vinoba Bhave’s transformative call for ‘voluntary’ disowning of land was imbued by his deep, scholastic study of religion akin to a theologian.

And, therefore, this lack needs to be understood. Gandhi’s own economic thinking—often through a misreading of Hind Swaraj—is regularly characterised as obscurantist. Gopal Krishna Gokhale thought the pamphlet was ‘crude’ and ‘hastily conceived’ and hoped that Gandhi himself would destroy it after spending a year in India. Jawaharlal Nehru, of course, ‘chose’ to forget it. He found it a ‘romantic mythology of backwardness’ and admitted to Gandhi that he had but a dim recollection of the book. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar invoked the imagery of cotton wicks and earthen lamps and castigated Gandhi as a hopeless obscurantist. Even those in sympathy with Gandhi and his concern for Sarvodaya, found a country bereft of machines, railways, doctors and lawyers unsuitable for civilised life, even if it were to hamper, as Gandhi seemed to argue, a search for Swaraj and a glimpse of true civilisation. The liminal position occupied by the Hind Swaraj is evident from the fact that when the editors of Aryan Path in 1938 decided to devote a special number on it, not one Indian was invited to contribute. Even in Gujarati, the language in which the text was first written, the first significant exposition on the text was published almost a century after its first publication in 1909.

Those who saw beyond the perplexing nature of Hind Swaraj often came up with two ideas that could be attributed to Gandhi’s economic thought, and both these remained primarily in the realm of ideas. The first is Trusteeship.

This, despite several examples of ‘best practices’ remains only an idea, not yet even an aspiration; the foreignness of the idea is such that even Gandhi despite his remarkable capacity to impart new meanings to words had to use the English phrase while writing or speaking in Gujarati and Hindi.

The other idea is about the relationship between ethics and economics and the primacy of the former. Both these, though seen as distinct, stem from similar ground—the realm of ethical conduct. The argument for cultivating a disposition of a trustee towards personal wealth is ethical/philosophical and remains in the realm of virtue.

These notions have allowed for extrapolation. This is most evident in the realm of ecology. The idea that we have to cultivate both the attitude and modes of conduct appropriate to a trustee towards the earth, her resources and the future, has found considerable resonance in deep ecology. While Gandhi, with his trusteeship and his plea for primacy of the ethical over the economic continually finds new interlocutors, state policy in India finds him viii

useful only to the extent of naming various schemes—usually well-meaning and sincere—for action against poverty after him.

There is little recognition that Gandhi’s economic insight was prescient.

In 1928, as the modern industrial economy was about to experience its first deep shock, he said in a conversation, ‘God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.’ In this Gandhi goes to the very heart of the organisation of modern world economy. The modern industrial economy was a product of not only the steam engine and the harnessing of fossil fuels for energy needs; it required control and regulation over production and consumption patterns of large part of the world in Asia, Africa and Latin America through imperial modes. But Gandhi was not unduly perturbed by the late advent of capital-intensive production in India or Asia; if at all he seems almost grateful for this delay. What he wished was to take advantage of this historic fact to propose and work towards an alternative.

Gandhi’s emphasis about the moral having precedence over the economic challenged the very foundation of positive economics, which is based on an irresistibly simple assumption that citizens as consumers try and maximise their net material gain subject to relevant constraints. What Gandhi sought was an ideal economic order. It is possible to propose models of ‘an ideal economy’ which seek to realise primary economic values such as high rate of growth, full employment, economic efficiency, stability and even equality which do not interfere with the basic assumption of general acquisitive behaviour. Gandhi’s normativity, his emphasis on ethical conduct, aprigraha (non-acquisition) and asteya (non-stealing, not from the earth, not from the generations to come), his urging us to cultivate the attitude of a trustee is not about the realisation of economic values. Rather, he seems concerned primarily with non-economic values and wishes to order economic behaviour in accordance with the demands of a normative order that lies outside positive economics.

Speaking at a symposium organised to mark the centenary of Gandhi’s birth, Raj Krishna characterised Gandhi’s economic thought as essentially normative and one that disregarded normal economic values. He cautioned that there are few takers for economic models that seek to ‘interfere with their normal economic acquisitiveness’ and that such models have not ‘materialised anywhere on a large scale’ be they Communist, Cooperative or Gandhian.

Moreover, one cannot disregard either the near irresistible demand for the goods produced by a modern economy nor the fact that the technology required—usually highly capital intensive and labour displacing—is the same the world over. The control of the large-scale enterprises—state or private corporations—would be governed by similar forces of demand and supply ix

and so ‘the institutions of production, finance and marketing assume a more or less similar form everywhere’. These autonomous and universal processes have little patience and even less space for normative considerations, at least during ‘normal’ times.

In Raj Krishna’s dire warning lies one possible answer to the problem that we began with—a paucity of serious, sustained economic thinkers within the Gandhian imagination. Even as the need for normativity, ethics, virtue in all domains is recognised, economic thinking has remained suspicious, if not entirely dismissive, of these concerns.

II We need to ask a few questions: Does any normative economic thought have a future? Does it survive even as a residue? These questions have acquired a salience and urgency that they perhaps lacked in 1969, in large measure possibly due to our search for what we call ‘Sustainable Development’. The search for normative behaviour has become ever more urgent. But, even within this discourse, the primary emphasis so far has been on finding a technological solution to a technological problem. In our search the ethical dimension has not been primary, since sustainability is seen as an economic value and not a normative one. But as more and more communities rise in protest, often violently, the questions of community ownership and rights over natural resources have come to predominate the debates on ecology, industrialisation and survival of both tangible and intangible heritage that communities embody. In this search, the ethical dimension has re-emerged.

We are being urged to be non-acquisitive; we are being told, almost in the voice of Gandhi, that acquisition beyond our wants is a form of stealing. In this search for Gandhi’s ideas about limitation of wants, decentralised local production using locally available resources and skills—what Ela Bhatt has evocatively called Anubandh—concern for the well-being of the human person, the meek, the exploited and the underprivileged will find a locus. Thus, it is likely that even as Gandhian proposals for economic organisation may not have much of a future, as both history and future may militate against them, but the search for ethical economy of permanence will continue to find a resonance especially in those communities which are disadvantaged by modernity and force us to look at the ethical and the normative in the economic realm.

It is in this context that the publication of 13 essays by Laxmi Chand Jain (1925–2010) becomes significant. L. C. Jain bridged many worlds and many concerns, intellectual and political. For many, he was a Gandhian economist, at a time when the space for both Gandhi and his economics had shrunk. x

He came to Gandhi not only through Congress politics, but also essentially through his pioneering work on the rehabilitation of Partition refugees, the setting up of the Indian Cooperative Union and the work with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya on the Indian handicrafts. It was the early years spent as a volunteer in the refugee camps, in establishing Chhattarpur village and the colony at Faridabad, that L. C. Jain acquired an intimate understanding of the innovation and resilience of the poor and the deprived. He carried these concerns and faith with him into all his other public engagements—the Handloom and Handicraft Board, the Super Bazars, the idea of the rural credit, the Planning Commission and even, the Office of the High Commissioner of India to South Africa. It was this faith in the democratic instinct of the Indian people that enabled him to be both a resilient dissenter against the Emergency as also a critic of the Janata Party.

The 13 essays collected here were written in the last decade of the previous century and the first decade of the present one—the earliest one from 1990 and the latest being from 2007. This collection opens with L. C. Jain’s Gandhi Memorial Lecture at the Gandhian Institute of Studies, Varanasi.

L. C. Jain’s proximity to Gandhi and his understanding of India’s relationship with Gandhi—while he was alive and even after he is gone—is reflected in his diagnosis, akin to a cultural psychologist, that we go to Gandhi seeking answers to our pains. The role of Gandhi as an alleviator of our pain—possibly the reason why he is no companion in joyous celebrations—marks almost all the essays in this collection. But, the first essay is not about us; it is about him, his agonies, his suffering and his profound loneliness that was redeemed through his bearing witness to Truth at the moment of his assassination.

In a magisterial survey, Jain asks a basic question: Why did India, led as it was by Gandhi’s followers, not take his economic prescriptions seriously in the task of consolidating freedom. L. C. Jain’s answer is characteristically prescient, and yet sparse in its expression: Ideology. He shows that no major leader or economist saw Gandhi’s emphasis on austerity or consumption ethics, and discerning and deliberate choice of technology as desirable. They also did not share Gandhi’s faith in village as a basic unit for economic and political re-construction. Nehru’s poser: why should the village necessarily embody truth and non-violence had a wider resonance, including Dr Ambedkar and leaders of socialist persuasion, within and outside the Congress. L. C. Jain shows that the decision to abandon Gandhi’s ideas was neither sudden nor pragmatic as opposition to them had been articulated since the thirties and since they had never been seriously implemented, what was presented as pragmatic arguments was, in essence, ideological.

If the State failed Gandhi, did his followers in the Sarvodaya movement fare any better? ‘Gandhian Initiative’ interrogates post-independence Gandhian initiatives. Bhoodan was and remains one of the most significant xi

interventions by Sarvodya workers under Vinoba Bhave’s leadership. Despite its ability to garner over four million acres of land for redistribution, the subsequent ‘flattening out’ of Bhoodan has been a puzzle. Most commonly, it has been attributed either to the poor quality of land that was received or to the inadequate attention paid to the problem of re-distribution. L. C. Jain’s critique is more fundamental. He argues that despite—and not because of—Vinoba’s leadership, the Bhoodan movement strayed away from Gandhian method. For Jain, the passive roles of both donors and recipients, and the centralisation and concentration of function in the Sarvodya workers robbed the movement of its potential vigour as also its Gandhian character.

This tendency for centralisation and seeking bureaucratic solutions to political problems has led to the erosion of our polity. In 1991, L. C. Jain called it a ‘sky without stars’. The freedom struggle was waged on a promise: a promise of social transformation that was to come as a result of political freedom. This promise was anchored in the ground of equality of opportunity through universalisation of education and mass participation in governance through de-centralisation. The failure to provide equal opportunity and the overbearing centralisation coupled with the belief that bureaucracy and not political party is the appropriate agency of lasting social change has disabled India. ‘What we have created instead’, he writes, ‘is over-bearing centralisation, which has shifted, if not almost snuffed out, the very breath of freedom’.

And with the breath also went out the fragrance of freedom. This failure has implications for what we have come to celebrate as ‘civil society.’ In 1994, Jain reminded us that civil society, that domain of hope, of voluntary and autonomous action requires nurturance. Liberation in itself is no guarantee for either democracy or the creation of a non-violent public sphere. Jain sees civil society itself as fundamentally lacking in equality, pointing out that in the absence of such equality between women and men, any conception of civil society is certain to be deeply flawed and could support violence.

There was a time, not too long ago, when South Asia was seen as ‘opening doors of hope’. South Asia, diverse in its faiths, languages, exquisite crafts, cultures and politics, was for Jain a site for both despair and hope.

The despair came from its hunger, its poverty and fundamental inequalities; the hope from its peoples and their capacity for forbearance and innovativeness. But he cautioned that for the hope to turn into possibility, required a deepening of democracy, land reforms, food security, innovations in health care and education and constructive regionalisms. A decade and a half later the hope lies shattered—as L. C. Jain had feared—with increasing authoritarian tendencies, land-pooling schemes that belie any hope of re-distribution, fragile food distribution systems, increasing legitimacy of violence, a further closing of borders and a heightened suspicion that regionalism would lead to secession. xii

Jain’s was quite often a lone voice especially after India began to advocate ‘less government and more market’, continually reminding us of our poverty, hunger, dispossession, and increasing fragmentation and stagnation of agriculture. He was deeply perturbed by not only the increasing disparities, inequalities and poverty but our increasing unwillingness in the last several decades to even speak of poverty and accompanying violence in policy and public forums. This amnesia about poverty gives us a false sense of comfort, a comfort in our State’s ability to ‘eradicate’ poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.

He reminded us in the poignant words of a South African woman that poverty is ‘not knowing from where the next meal is coming’. His panacea is simple and, in its simplicity, radical and far-reaching. Instead of speaking of either the State or the Market vs the poor, what we need is State and Market for the poor. Any strategy that views people’s organisations and their efforts with suspicion or indifference is certain to fail, as has been evident from India’s attempts to ameliorate and later eradicate poverty from the lives of people.

When we could do neither, we simply chose to forget them.

In September 1946, when the Provisional Government with Pandit Nehru as Vice President assumed office, Gandhi gave the new Government ‘instruments of instruction’ which, among other injunctions, foregrounded: ‘Remove Untouchability.’ As we celebrate seven decades of India’s Independence, we need to ask as to what happened to that promise, pledge and duty. Jain asks a question, one that has never before been posed to our Constitution and through it not only to our rulers but also to all of us. ‘What is the night soil carrying capacity of our Constitution?’ Our failure is evident, the reasons for it not so clear. For Jain, the answer is apparent. The Constitution, he reminds us, is not a self-enforcing entity. It needs instruments of interventions. One such is the enactment of specific laws, while the other is a comprehensive social change with scavengers, women and men, at the heart of it. We have, he shows, relied exclusively on the first and disregarded the other, often wondering if carrying night soil gives spiritual experience. Our Constitution, as a result, has no capacity for carrying night soil.

These essays are in no way a modern re-telling of Gandhi’s ideas. They seek to investigate the reason for the receding presence of Gandhi in the political-economic discourse and policy structures of modern India through a detailed analysis of political debates and policy documents. And yet, they do not remain at the level of historical analysis. L. C. Jain’s abiding concern is not Gandhi. He is imbued with and moved by a deep pathos about the fate of the poor, the dispossessed and the destitute. It is these that led him to Gandhi. Like Kumarappa before him, L. C. Jain sits on Gandhi’s shoulders and sees far. What he sees fills him with hope but he also sees the structure of political economy change fundamentally around him. This struggle between hope and realisation of structural impossibilities give these essays a life beyond xiii

their context. Their publication will give all of us yet another opportunity to assess the paths not taken and reawaken the debates on poverty that have become increasingly rare.

At a time when Gandhi’s economic thinking has become part of our collective amnesia, L. C. Jain may well be a lonely voice, but by no means given to soliloquy or lament. His voice is a voice of hope, of possibilities, patiently waiting for the country and the world to recognise deeper structures of Gandhi’s thought and in the meanwhile keeping the possibility alive.

And it is for this reason that he could speak of Gandhi—for himself and for Devaki—as one ‘who sits lightly on our shoulders, a guide both playful and wise.’

Tridip Suhrud

xiv

The Gentle Revolutionary The collected essays of L. C. Jain

1 WHY GANDHI?

Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Lecture, Gandhian Institute of Studies, Varanasi, 24 April 1995.

One may waive a right, one cannot waive a duty.

Gandhi

We usually remember Gandhi for seeking an answer to our pains. Let us spend a little time today recalling some of his agonies.

But before that we must exult in what would have been the ecstasy of his life: A free South Africa The end of apartheid Nelson Mandela walking out of imprisonment of long 28 years—holding firmly to his purpose, but soft in his touch of the adversaries, the Inkatha party and some of the whites.

Millions singing, crying with joy, dancing in the streets everywhere, breathing freedom and able to hold their heads high.

Imagine Gandhi being alive or perhaps at Rajghat, he did come alive on the historic day in 1994. Who could not?

Gandhi was South Africa’s gift to India. So, for ever we must remain grateful to the people of South Africa.

Note also that South Africa and Mandela succeeded in foiling the divisive designs of the rulers and some of his own people, and keeping their country intact. Alas, that was not to be our fate—and that was Gandhi’s agony. And that agony was worse than assassination that ended his presence amongst us.

But as history reveals to our everlasting sorrow, Gandhi was abandoned by most around him, long before he was killed.

Dropping the Pilot New Delhi, 25th June, 1946 At 8 a.m. Bapu went to attend the Working Committee meeting. He asked me to read out the note which he had written to Cripps last night. He then addressed them very briefly: ‘I admit defeat. You are not bound to act upon my unsupported suspicion. You should follow my intuition only if it appeals to your reason. Otherwise you should take an independent course. I shall now leave with your permission.

You should follow the dictates of your reason’.

A hush fell over the gathering. Nobody spoke for some time.

The Maulana Saheb with his unfailing alertness at once took in the situation. ‘What do you desire? Is there any need to detain Bapu Why Gandhi? 3

any further?’ he asked. Everybody was silent. Everybody understood.

In that hour of decision they had no use for Bapu. They decided to drop the pilot. Bapu returned to his residence.

The Working Committee again met at noon and addressed a letter to the Cabinet Mission, rejecting the proposal for the formation of the Interim Government at the Centre and accepting the long-term plan with its own interpretation of the disputed clauses. In spite of it they made Bapu to attend the afternoon session of the Working Committee. At noon the Cabinet Mission invited the members of the Working Committee to meet them. Bapu not being a member was not sent for and did not go. On their return nobody told Bapu a word about what had happened at the meeting!1

Monkey Justice The Viceroy [Lord Wavell on 1 December 1945,] categorically denied that the British had broken any pledges. They were prepared to hand over power straightaway if the Indian parties could agree among themselves. Gandhiji told him that in that case the settlement of the Indian question would have to wait till the Greek Kalends. ‘If you say that so long as there is no unanimity among the Indians you will stay on, there can be no basis for a settlement, for you won’t allow it.’2 On 7 March 1947, A. V. Alexander the Defence Minister in the Labour Government, stated in the House of Commons: ‘History may record that Mr Churchill’s speech this afternoon has been the principal factor in preventing the sides (Congress and Muslim League) from coming together’.

Deepen the Divide It was again a British Commandant, Col. John Coke, who at about the time of the Indian rising of 1857, wrote: ‘Our endeavour should be to uphold in full force the (for us fortunate) separation which exists between the different religions and races, not to endeavour to amalgamate them’.3 In January, 1925, Lord Birkenhead, the then Secretary of State for India, wrote to Lord Reading, the Viceroy: ‘The more it is made obvious that these antagonisms (supported by the infinite variation of nationality, sect and religion) are profound and affects immense and irreconcilable sections of the population, the more conspicuously is the fact illustrated that we, and we alone, can play the part of composers.’4 The speech of Mr. Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister, in a debate in the House of Commons, on the 15th March, 1946, contained the following significant remarks: 4

The Gentle Revolutionary

India must choose what will be her future constitution. I hope that the Indian people may elect to remain within the British Commonwealth. … But if she does so elect, it must be by her own free will. … If, on the other hand, she elects for independence, in our view she has a right to do so. … I am well aware, when I speak of India, that I speak of a country containing a congeries of races, religions and languages. … We are very mindful of the rights of minorities, and minorities should be able to live free from fear. On the other hand, we cannot allow a minority to place a veto on the advance of the majority.5 [But there] remained the difficulty about parity. The Muslims constituted a little over one-fourth of the entire population of India.

According to the democratic principle, they could claim less than one-third of the total representation. But the Muslim League argued that the Muslims were not a minority but a ‘nation’ and as such must have a parity of representation with the majority community, irrespective of their numerical strength in any Government that might be formed.6 Muslims were a separate nation by virtue of their ‘distinctive culture and civilisation, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of value and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and tradition’, and, therefore, they were entitled to a separate, sovereign existence in a homeland of their own.7 Jinnah: ‘The right of self determination, which we claim, postulates that we are a nation and as such it would be the self-determination of the Muslims, and they alone are entitled to exercise that right.’8 [Gandhi wrote to Jinnah:] ‘As I… imagine the working of the (Lahore) resolution in practice, I see nothing but ruin for the whole of India’.9 But Jinnah did not want separation on the basis of a plebiscite in which all the inhabitants affected by it could participate; he wanted the issue to be decided on the basis of ‘self determination’ confined to the Muslims alone. ‘We claim the right of self-determination as a nation. … You are labouring under the wrong idea that ‘self determination’ means only that of ‘a territorial unit’.… Ours is a case of division and carving out two independent sovereign States by way of settlement between two major nations, Hindus and Muslims, and not of severance or secession from any existing union, which is non est in India.10

Why Gandhi? 5

Moral versus Political He had hoped, commented Gandhiji in his prayer discourse of the 16th October, ‘that the coming of the Muslim League in to the Interim Government would prove to be good augury’. A man like himself, he observed, they might say, ought to be glad that another seat had been given to a Harijan. But he would be deceiving himself and Jinnah Saheb if he said so. The latter had said that the Muslims and Hindus were two nations; the League was a purely Muslim communal organisation. ‘How then could they nominate a Harijan to represent them?’ He feared that their whole mode of entering into the Cabinet had not been straight.

By bartering the moral basis for the political, the Congress leaders lost the one vantage ground which they held, viz., the moral. It led to a whole series of surrenders on their part and finally to surrender on the issue of undivided India itself. The League continued to use Jogendranath Mandal against the Congress and later against Gandhiji’s peace mission in Noakhali, till four years afterwards, humiliated and disillusioned by the treatment accorded by his new masters to the minorities, including his own community in Pakistan, he himself had to flee and take shelter as a refugee with thousands of others, in the Indian Union.11 Referring to an incident in the Working Committee on the last day at Delhi and a conversation he had with him in that behalf later Gandhiji wrote to Sardar Patel from Poona on 1st July 1946: ‘I did not like our conversation today. It is nobody’s fault. The fault, if at all, is of the circumstances. What can you or I do for it? You go by your experience, I by mine. You know I have been at a loss to understand a number of things which you have done. … You speak in the Committee with much heat. I do not like it. On top of it today came the question of the Constituent Assembly. … All this is not by way of complaint. But I see, we are drifting in different directions.’12 Nehru: ‘He (Gandhi) was a very difficult person to understand, sometimes his language was almost incomprehensible to an average modern. But we felt that we knew him well enough to realise he was a great and unique man and a glorious leader, and having put our faith in him we gave him an almost blank cheque, for the time being at least. Often, we discussed his fads and peculiarities among ourselves and said half-humorously, that when Swaraj came these fads must not be encouraged.’

6

The Gentle Revolutionary

And What were those Fads?

To ensure that the goal of self-sufficiency at the village level was made an integral part of the planning process and the economic system, he repeatedly stressed that ‘the first concern of every village would be to grow its own food crops and cloth’. Gandhi envisaged food-cloth led industrialisation as the economic base.

[Gandhi:] ‘Industrialisation on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive or active exploitation of the villagers, as the problems of competition and marketing come in. Therefore, we have to concentrate on the village being self-contained, manufacturing mainly for use. The mere socialisation of industries would not alter this process in any way at all.13 Pandit Nehru wants industrialisation, because he thinks it is socialised, it would be free from the evils of capitalism. My own view is that evils are inherent in industrialism, and no amount of socialisation can eradicate them.’14 [Nehru: Then again,] we have to put down certain objectives like a sufficiency of food, clothing, housing, education, sanitation, etc. which should be the minimum requirements for the country and for everyone. It is with these objectives in view that we must find out specifically how to attain them speedily. Again it seems to me inevitable that modern means of transport as well as many other modern developments must continue and be developed. …If this is so, inevitably a measure of heavy industry exists. How far that will fit in with a purely village society? Personally I hope that heavy or light industries should all be decentralised as far as possible and this is feasible now because of the development of electric power. If two types of economy exist in the country there would be either conflict between the two or one will overwhelm the other.15

Personal Touch The party arrived at about midnight. Gandhiji had then been already asleep for two hours. By the time some of the guests were ready to go to bed, he got out of his, to face the day at half-past two. With his characteristic delicacy in regard to the little graces of life, which never deserted him even in the most trying circumstances, he had given minute instructions about the arrangements to be made for the accommodation and convenience of the guests. He used to carry with him wherever he went a few essential articles of personal daily use like a hand-basin, a commode etc., so as to not inconvenience his hosts. He had them all sent to Pandit Nehru’s hut to make things a bit easier for him. But Pandit Nehru, when he came to know of Why Gandhi? 7

it, would not hear of it and hauled poor Manu over live coals for allowing Gandhiji to put himself to inconvenience.

‘Bapu gave orders, what could I do?’ Manu protested.

‘Then you should have disobeyed,’ replied Pandit Nehru with affected sternness. As she still hesitated, he added: ‘You could have told him Jawaharlal forbade you. Such orders are not to be obeyed even though he slaughter you’.

‘But do not be scared, he won’t’ he continued with a merry twinkle and a kindly affectionate laugh to set the frightened girl as her ease.

‘That is Jawaharlal; so let it be’, remarked Gandhiji when the incident was reported to him next morning. And so, the hand-basin, the commode and the other little things came back unused and were reinstalled as before in Gandhiji’s improvised little bathroom.

Eager crowds of both Hindus and Muslims from the surrounding villages besieged the place during the stay of the visitors from Delhi.

They broke through the cordon and swarmed into Gandhiji’s prayer pandal.

‘So, this is your lone sojourn!’, Pandit Nehru twitted Gandhiji.

‘You forget I am a Mahatma too!’, replied Gandhi with a hearty laugh.16

Instrument of Instructions On the 2nd September [1946], the Congress Ministers took office after receiving Gandhiji’s blessing at an impressive little ceremony at his residence in Bhangi Colony. For Gandhiji it was a day of deep heart-searching. In the early hours of the morning, whilst most slept, he scribbled a short message for the members of the new Government, to remind them that they must not in the hour of fulfilment forget to redeem the pledges which they had made when the Congress was in the wilderness.

At the appointed time in the morning, the Ministers arrived.

They were received by the lady members of Gandhiji’s entourage with garlands of handspun yarn. The message which Gandhiji had written out for them in the morning, it being Monday his day of weekly silence, was read out to them. It was his ‘instrument of instructions’.

Brief to the point of baldness, it ran: ‘You have been in my thoughts since the prayer. Abolish the Salt Tax. Remember the Dandi March.

Unite Hindus and Muslims. Remove untouchability. Take to Khadi.’17 Following upon the Cabinet Mission’s refusal to invite the Muslim League alone to form the Interim Government, communal rioting in an ugly form had again broken out in Ahmedabad. Gandhiji’s advice to Morarji Desai, the Bombay Home Minister, who came to consult 8

The Gentle Revolutionary

him before proceeding to the site of the trouble, was that he ‘must go to meet the flames under the sole protection of God, not that of the police or the military’. If need be, he must ‘perish in the flames’ in the attempt to quell them as had been done by the late Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, the young editor of the Kanpur nationalist daily Pratap, who was killed during the Kanpur Hindu-Muslim riots of 1931 while engaged in his mission of peace.

Finally, when the Congress Ministries took office in the Interim Government at the Centre in September, 1946, Gandhiji again insisted that ‘the new Ministries must resolve never to use British troops, no matter what their hue is, not even the police trained by them. They are not our enemies. But they have hitherto been used not to help the people but to keep them under the foreign yoke. They should now, as they can, be used for constructive purposes.18 [Gandhi:] There may be work, there may be men to do the work and tools with which to do it, yet in my view a system that admits of poverty and unemployment is not fit to survive even for a day.19 He (who has made the ideal of equal distribution a part of his being) would reduce his wants to a minimum, bearing in mind the poverty of India.20

Election Expenses Then there was the question of the election expenses. Gandhiji said that real victory of the Congress would be only if they won without spending a pie.21

Corrupt System: Not to be Tolerated for a Single Day The death of millions as a result of starvation during the Bengal famine was not due so much to the scarcity of food as to the unbelievable corruption and callousness in the administration as well as outside. Middlemen, petty traders, and big merchants had not hesitated to make money at the cost of human lives. Unofficial and official exploitation proceeded side by side. Indeed, without the latter the former would not have been possible. ‘From top to bottom, the whole system is corrupt’, remarked Gandhiji in deep anguish. ‘The government connives at unofficial corruption. If the nation had control of the Government, this brutal bribery and corruption would not be tolerated for a single day’.22

Why Gandhi? 9

Equity As a non-violent man, Gandhiji replied, he could not countenance the usurpation of anybody’s just rights. But some of the extraordinary privileges under British rule were themselves of the nature of a usurpation. They could not be maintained.23

Basic Education: Arsenal of Non-violence Last but not least in Gandhiji’s arsenal of non-violence was Basic Education or the new system of education. It was as revolutionary in its conception as it was ambitious in its scope. It was based on the theory that it is the activity of what an eminent educationist has called ‘the thinking hand’ which has, more than any thing else, guided the evolution of man and society and, therefore, the whole education of man can be imparted through the medium of a basic handicraft.

Its goal was to build up a ‘non-violent, non-exploiting social order’ in which alone the ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood can be fully and universally realised. At the core of it was the principle of non-violence. Gandhiji described it as an ‘all-in complex’ of all activities included in his constructive programme.24

Women: Self-governed Passionate suffragist that he was, he insisted on the executive of the organisation being composed exclusively of women. They should have the right, he explained, to ill-manage and mis-manage an organisation which would be their own. It did not matter if women were ill-governed so long as they were self-governed. They must be taken out of the leading strings of men. The women workers trained by the Trust, Gandhiji further insisted, must be imbued with the spirit of non-violence which animated Kasturba and in other respects represents her outlook on life.25

Scavenging Speaking at Panchgani on 21 July 1946 Gandhi hoped that, ‘something would be done immediately about the disposal of the night soil. The present practice was a sign against man and God and its continuation even for a single day should be a matter of utter shame to them’26.

Mark his repeated accent on ‘even for a single day’.

Fourteen years or 5110 days later, the Government appointed a Scavenging Conditions Enquiry Committee in 1960, stating: The problem of carrying night soil as head load [has] persistently been engaging the attention of the Home Minister, G. B. Pant, who has 10

The Gentle Revolutionary

been very anxious to see the inhuman practice abolished completely and immediately.

11, 315 days later in 1987, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi declared that he would bring an amendment to the constitution to ban the carrying of night soil on the head by scavengers.

That was eight years ago. A press report on 23 April 1995 says that Government proposes to wipe out scavenging by 1997.

Social ideas require appropriate institutions to translate them on the ground. This was Gandhi’s forte. He proposed the institution of ‘village republics’ in the political realm, and the pursuit of ‘village self-sufficiency’ as the basis of economic development. By the latter he meant that production and consumption should be as proximate as possible.

Globalisation means that they must be as apart as possible.

Gandhi’s dream was not a mere political personality for panchayats (or village republics). They were to be invested simultaneously with decentralised economic content: local production and consumption of food and cloth, in the minimum. Such local economic content was to foster social content through more assured food security, employment and income; and consequently, little dependency and deprivation of the poor. Localisation of the economy was an integral part of Gandhi’s concept of panchayats.

True, panchayats, even if not of the ilk Gandhi envisioned, are an important step forward for restraining, unhealthy trends towards over centralisation. They would help to improve the overall health of India’s system of governance. But their effectiveness which is also dependent on ‘localisation’ of the economy is likely to be undermined by the simultaneous plunge India has taken for the ‘globalisation’ of its economy and its corollary of ‘leave it all to the market’—to Indian and foreign investors; and the State going to the other extreme of near total withdrawal from one of total control over all investment decisions in the past four decades.

As in the past, in the so called new economic policy, the reliance is to remain on ‘rapid economic growth’. How is that different from Nehru’s production, production and production paradigm—except the change in the factors—i.e., the market replacing the state. It is the changes in the pattern of growth and its composition, that could make a difference to poverty—to the improved consumption of the poor and their participation in production and its rewards. By definition, globalisation led growth cannot be expected to pivot itself in the constituency of the poor; especially when top ten per cent of India’s 90 million offer an immediate and lucrative market.

A more serious implication of globalisation of the Indian economy would be to reduce, if not abort, the scope for ‘location’ of the economy (i.e., local production being proximate to local consumption needs, and local production drawing largely on local manpower and other resources).

Why Gandhi? 11

Gandhi — a Little in, but Essentially Out While the working experience of the past 47 years has led India back to Gandhi’s door—and his prescriptions seem considerably relevant to the objective situation and objectives of equitable and sustainable development, India is likely to be pulled away from Gandhi by the forces of globalisation.

Globalisation may or may not leave Gandhi in the cold but that cannot be said with any certainty about the people of India and even their minimum expectations of liberation from poverty, unemployment and disparities in the foreseeable future.

To conclude, the equation between ‘State’ and ‘Society’ has undergone a sea change in the past four decades since Gandhi’s death and India’s Independence. The society has lost its primacy vis-à-vis the State. In the pre-independence period the defiance of the imperial power generated extra energy and extra self reliance in the body politic of society. But in the post independence period, this energy has sapped both absolutely and relatively.

Moreover, in this period, the State has expanded beyond recognition, be it in respect of its authority, functions, financial and other resources or its administrative, police and armed might.

What has compounded the increasingly supplicatory role of society vis-à-vis the State, is the near total obsession of India’s political parties with power politics and its centralisation. Political power is not being treated by them strictly as an instrument for promoting a new social order envisioned by the struggle for freedom. The political parties do have manifestos outlining their ideology and approach. But manifestos are a mere ritual. Few political parties have informed, awakened and committed membership. Fewer still observe democratic methods for the governance of their respective party, leaving a limited scope for openness, debate, discussion, self criticism, which are an essential armoury for a force devoted to social change.

In the objective situation where the power of the State is rising and the self assertion of society is diminishing, the scope for action by groups not seeking political power such as the Gandhian, is prima facie limited. But by the same virtue, their role has assumed greater social and strategic significance.

There is a large and enlarging constituency of demand. However, the supply of political action (outside of power politics) by Gandhians and other socially aware groups, is still far too short of demand. A positive feature is that there are many non charismatic leaders who are continuing to translate Gandhian philosophy into action or organising social protest movements.

The Emergency introduced in 1975 and its continuance for over one and half years, revealed the serious failure of the Gandhian movement to build up adequate assertive and alert people’s power as Gandhi had envisaged ‘Go to the root’.

12

The Gentle Revolutionary

There is still hope The hope is that in the coming decade, the new emerging panchayats as an institution, and their new leadership of over three million may throw their weight towards a new ‘structural adjustment’ which allows for assimilation of political and economic interests of the masses of people on terms more equitable.

To Conclude with Gandhi’s Words or Dreams Freedom we shall have. I sense it coming. But political freedom alone must not satisfy us. The world will not be satisfied either, for the world looks for great things from India. The freedom of my dreams means the Kingdom of God within us and its establishment through us on earth. And for this end I would prefer to die working even if I may never see its fulfilment.27

Why Gandhi? 13

Notes 1 Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi – The Last Phase, Part 1, Book 1, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1956, pp. 227-228 2 Ibid., p. 148 3 Ibid., p. 70 4 Ibid., p. 73 5 Ibid., p. 163 6 Ibid., p. 217 7 Ibid., p. 88 8 Ibid., p. 89 9 Ibid., p. 89 10 Ibid., p. 91 11 Ibid., p. 273 12 Ibid., p. 229 13 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (henceforth CWMG), Vol. 63, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, New Delhi, 1964, p. 241 14 Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi – The Last Phase, Part 2, p. 589 15 Ibid., p. 545 16 Ibid., Part 1, Book 2, pp. 118-119 17 Ibid., Book 1, p. 5.

18 Ibid., p. 314.

19 CWMG, Vol. 90, p. 325.

20 CWMG, Vol. 72, p. 399.

21 Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi – The Last Phase, Part 1, Book 1, pp. 149-150.

22 Ibid., p. 97.

23 Ibid., p. 180.

24 Ibid., p. 29.

25 Ibid., p. 61.

26 CWMG, Vol. 85, p. 39.

27 Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi – The Last Phase, Part 1, Book 1, p. 54.

14

The Gentle Revolutionary

For many, Laxmi Chand Jain (1925–2010) was a Gandhian economist, at a time when the space for both Gandhi and his economics had shrunk. He came to Gandhi essentially through his pioneering work on the rehabilitation of Partition refugees… It was the early years spent as a volunteer in the refugee camps, that L. C. Jain acquired an intimate understanding of the innovation and resilience of the poor and the deprived. He carried these concerns and faith with him into all his other public engagements—the Handloom and Handicraft Board, the Super Bazars, the idea of the rural credit, the Planning Commission and even, the Office of the High Commissioner of India to South Africa.

The 13 essays collected here (1990–2007) seek to investigate the reason for the receding presence of Gandhi in the political-economic discourse and policy structures of modern India through a detailed analysis of political debates and policy documents.

L. C. Jain is imbued with and moved by a deep pathos about the fate of the poor, the dispossessed and the destitute. It is these that led him to Gandhi. Like Kumarappa before him, L. C. Jain sits on Gandhi’s shoulders and sees far. What he sees fills him with hope but he also sees the structure of political economy change fundamentally around him. This struggle between hope and realisation of structural impossibilities give these essays a life beyond their context. Their publication will give all of us yet another opportunity to assess the paths not taken and reawaken the debates on poverty that have become increasingly rare. ... Jain’s voice is a voice of hope, of possibilities, patiently waiting for the country and the world to recognise deeper structures of Gandhi’s thought and in the meanwhile keeping the possibility alive.

[From ‘Introduction’]

ISBN 978-81-7229-930-9

9 788172

299309

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