Hollow history

Matters of Discretion — An Autobiography by I.K. Gujral; Hay House India; Price: Rs.795; 519 pp

The two-year interregnum following the general election of the summer of 1996 in which the strength of the Congress party in the Lok Sabha led by prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was reduced from 244 to 140, and the Janata Dal which had a tally of only 79 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament formed the government at the Centre with “outside support” of the Congress, is one of the most confusing eras of modern Indian history. During this period of intense political activity, several players strutted the stage of national politics, only to disappear swiftly into oblivion. Among them: H.D. Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral, both of whom rose to the position of prime minister.

The son of a prominent Lahore-based lawyer who was a member of Pakistan’s constituent assembly, Gujral began life as a leftist student leader in Lahore University and did time in jail as a firebrand Marxist agitator. But after the Hindu-Muslim riots which followed the partition of India, the family which included his brother, the famous artist and sculptor Satish Gujral, moved to Delhi where they settled in without much inconvenience. Because two years later, Inder was able to afford a trip to London “to explore business prospects for importing bicycles into India”.

In the flush of the dawn of independence and commencement of the Nehruvian Age, New Delhi was a hub of patronage and the great man himself was not above casual nepotism, uninhibitedly dispensing the loaves and fishes of office to kith and kin and court favourites. In the hothouse environment of the Delhi durbar where connections with the high and mighty among the new rulers of independent India were of utmost advantage — Matters of Discretion discreetly glosses over the young Gujral’s profession or occupation in the early 1950s — Gujral candidly attributes his entry into the ruling Congress and politics to his membership of the “inner circle” of Sucheta Kriplani, the “young and fiery freedom fighter” of whom he became an “avid follower”. In 1963 when Sucheta was transferred to Lucknow as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the “vacuum was filled” by Indira Gandhi who, entranced by the talent of his brother Satish, commissioned him to paint the portraits of Panditji and herself. In 1964 “thanks to Mrs. Indira Gandhi”, Gujral was elected to the Rajya Sabha for the first time.

From then onwards for almost a decade, the author served in the Delhi durbar presided over by the “split and very complex personality” of Mrs. Gandhi, in various capacities as minister of information and broadcasting (I&B), works and housing etc, until 1975 when the country’s first internal Emergency was declared by her on June 25. On that fateful day when elaborate and unprecedented press censorship was imposed, Gujral was the Union I&B minister, and as such was directly responsible for imposing savage press censorship and imprisonment of several journalists. But apart from stating that “the prevalent state of affairs was disappointing, to put it mildly,” in this memoir, Gujral has little to say about the Emergency and press censorship which he seems to have feebly protested, and for which he was transferred to the ministry of planning, a position he meekly accepted.

Quite obviously by then Gujral had become too accustomed to the pomp and perquisites of government office to vigorously protest any action of Mrs. Gandhi. Again when she neglected to re-nominate Gujral to the Rajya Sabha when his second term ended in 1976, he fell in line when she whimsically appointed him India’s ambassador to Moscow. It’s an indicator of his inoffensive and malleable personality that in the following year after the Congress party and Mrs. Gandhi were ignominiously routed in the post-Emergency general election of 1977, the Janata Party leadership easily persuaded Gujral to continue as ambassador in Moscow. And when Mrs. Gandhi was re-elected in January 1980, Gujral  continued to serve as ambassador in Moscow for a full year, clear testimony to his diplomacy skills and acceptability to all shades of political opinion.

Back in India after his Moscow sojourn and “out of sync” with his patron Mrs. Gandhi, Gujral responded to the “call of duty” emanating from the Punjab where “the traditional Hindu-Sikh relationships had virtually collapsed” following the Congress party having first encouraged the militant Sikh guru Sant Bhindranwale to split the ruling Akali Dal, and later turned against him when he occupied the Golden Temple. Operation Blue Star, under which the Indian Army stormed the Golden Temple cost the nation and Mrs. Gandhi dearly when she was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

Under the successor Rajiv Gandhi administration, Gujral found himself completely in the political wilderness and became involved with efforts of the opposition parties to form an alternative to the ruling Congress. In 1988, when Ramakrishna Hegde and V.P. Singh promoted the Janata Dal party and “without asking”, included him as a promoter-leader of the new party, Gujral promptly fell in line. “Once again destiny was taking its own course and a new chapter began in my public life,” writes Gujral in this memoir.

The tide into which he was unwittingly plunged proved fortuitous for this quintessentially mild-mannered diplomat. A year later when riding the Bofors anti-corruption wave, V.P. Singh ousted Rajiv Gandhi from office and formed a coalition Janata Dal government at the Centre, Gujral was appointed Union minister for external affairs. Almost a decade later, the country’s highest office — prime minister — was thrust upon him which he served with no particular distinction from April 21, 1997 to March 19, 1998.

In the preface of this detailed autobiography written from the author’s singular perspective, Gujral admits the main sources of this memoir have been the diaries he maintained from an early age.

Unfortunately Matters of Discretion has been presented in essentially diary format. It’s a cursory recitation of entries and exits on the national stage for over four decades bereft of satisfactory explanations, interpretation or analyses of the momentous history of the times. The very least one expects from a former prime minister is a summary of his achievements and/or excuses for failure to fulfill the aspirations of an entire generation which the author served in various capacities without any evident success. But even self-justification and blame-gaming is muted in this inoffensive autobiography which alas, is doomed to become a footnote document of Indian history.

Dilip Thakore

Conventional analysis

People Without History:India’s Muslim Ghettos by Jeremy Seabrook & Imran Ahmed Siddiqui; Navayana Publishing; Price: Rs.295; 257 pp

The Rajinder Sachar Committee Report (2006) among numerous studies, confirms that Muslims — the country’s largest religious minority — are the most economically deprived and educationally backward community in contemporary India. This is particularly true of northern and eastern India, where they are concentrated.

While much has been written on the factors behind the socio-economic malaise of India’s 150 million Muslim citizens, most treatises on the subject are based on quantitative research employing statistical methodology. Although useful, such studies suffer in comparison with micro-level studies which highlight qualitative factors such as the daily lives and experiences of this once creative minority, currently wallowing in shallows and misery.

This book, a joint venture by well-reputed social critic Jeremy Seabrook and Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, who reports for the Kolkata-based daily The Telegraph, is a laudable initiative which reveals lesser known dimensions of Muslim deprivation and anti-Muslim discrimination using an ethnographic approach. Rich in field-based insights, it is based on dozens of in-depth interviews with Muslim citizens living in some of the most deprived slums, or what its title terms ‘Muslim ghettos’, of Kolkata. Although People Without History focuses its attention on Kolkata’s Muslim community, the insights it offers are of pan-India relevance.

Though Muslims, note the authors, constitute only 25 percent of Kolkata’s population, they are heavily over-represented among the city’s poor. Together with Dalits, they constitute the overwhelming majority of the city’s infamous slums. Mainly migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh or descendants thereof, they were drawn to the city in search of employment, mainly as manual labour. The Muslim-dominant slums of Kolkata surveyed in the book — Topsia, Beniapukur, Tangra and Tijala — are uniformly characterised by endemic poverty, and soaring rates of under-employment and unemployment.

The vast majority who reside within them are manual labourers, many of them former artisans now unemployed because global — particularly Chinese — industry has wiped out the crafts they were engaged in for centuries. As Muslims, it is hard for these people to find ‘respectable’ employment outside the small community-based economy. Pathetic levels of education, added to widespread and deep-rooted anti-Muslim prejudice make it difficult for slum-dwellers to get jobs other than as manual labour, vegetable-vendors, porters, rickshaw-pullers, scavengers, and even petty thieves and smugglers.

In contrast with caste Hindu localities, Muslim slums are severely under-served by way of schools, drains, electricity, drinking water, and healthcare centres. This indicates, write the authors, that for all its rhetoric the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front coalition, which ruled Bengal for 34 years until it was routed in the state Assembly elections last month (May), cared little for Muslim or Dalit empowerment, and was as indifferent to the pitiable poverty and marginalisation of these minorities as other mainstream political parties.

Interviews with Muslim men and women lend weight to the authors’ argument, that although West Bengal had been spared anti-Muslim violence for decades, the self-styled ‘Communist’ government simply used Muslims as a vote-bank, doing little for their development. (This certainly has something to do with the recent dismal failure of the Left Front at the polls). Yet perceptive as they are in their analysis, the authors fail to highlight the failure of the community’s leadership, viewing the poverty, ignorance and deprivation through the prism of discrimination by state agencies and wider (Hindu) society. Regrettably, the authors echo Muslim ideologues who never tire of spinning conspiracy theories and blaming others for all the ills of Muslims.

Neither does People without History examine the issue of Muslim ‘self-exclusion’ from wider Indian society. The plain truth is that with Muslim leaders continuously harping on the historical supremacism, cultural separatism, and distinctiveness of Muslims, the community is hindered from making common cause with the majority for socio-economic reform.

Nevertheless despite these lapses, this book is a must-read, because it brutally shatters the myth of the Indian economic miracle by providing a view from below.

Yoginder Sikand