Classy lady’s lament

India’s Broken Tryst by Tavleen Singh harper collins; Price: Rs.699; Pages: 414

Well-known political columnist and author Tavleen Singh’s fourth book begins with the author relaxing in the garden of her luxury home in Alibaug, the retreat of Mumbai’s rich and famous — a mere three miles across the sea from dirty, teeming Mumbai in which all except the super-rich (including Tavleen and her partner construction tycoon Ajit Gulabchand who reside in the most expensive apartment block in India) live miserable lives.

In this salubrious setting while perhaps counting her blessings, one of which was the crushing defeat of the Congress in General Election 2014 a few months earlier, Tavleen receives a long-distance call from a former minister of the Congress-led UPA I/II government who requests — and is endowed — anonymity. The former minister confirms Tavleen’s suspicion that she was high on Sonia Gandhi’s hit list which explained why “ bad things had happened in my life and to people in my life under Sonia Gandhi’s reign” (2004-14) in which prime minster Dr. Manmohan Singh was a mere puppet.

One of these “bad things” was a tax raid when some very unbeautiful and undeferential tax collectors disturbed her peace and rudely searched her/Ajit’s seaside home to find “nothing more than Rs.40,000 and some jewellery worth barely anything”. Meanwhile she managed to sneak a phone call to a neighbour who turned up and imperiously announced she was the Princess of Morvi. Then, while the tax raiders ate their modest meal out of “plastic boxes”, she ordered the butler to serve her and the princess red wine and grilled fish, in full view of the low-paid bureaucrats to “really annoy the raiders”.

Such disdain for all who aren’t as classy and connected as herself (btw it’s not so classy to have red wine with fish) including Sonia Gandhi who the Welham-educated Tavleen often reminds the reader, has very modest origins, pervades this book.

Nevertheless there’s no doubting that the author has a deep sympathy, empathy and even love for the wretched of the mean streets of Mumbai, poor children in particular. Several chapters of India’s Broken Tryst examine why India’s “tryst with destiny” proclaimed by Jawaharlal Nehru, free India’s first prime minister on August 15, 1947, has ended in a shambles.

Quite rightly, Tavleen blames inorganic, Soviet-inspired socialism which Nehru — a natural sciences graduate of Cambridge University — imposed upon newly-independent India after he was ill-advisedly appointed independent India’s first prime minister, for the huge mess the country has become. The mess was made messier by his daughter Indira Gandhi who nationalised the country’s major banks, multiplied capital-intensive and hugely loss-making public sector enterprises, and severely debilitated institutions of governance such as Parliament and the judiciary. Moreover in 1975 she imposed a 19-month internal Emergency upon the nation after the Allahabad high court found her guilty of electoral malpractice.

Tavleen’s ideological epiphany began after the late eighties, before which she was a regular Rajiv-Sonia courtier, as reportedly recounted in her earlier book Durbar (2012). In 1988 she was appointed the Delhi correspondent of the men’s magazine Debonair, then edited by your reviewer. As Delhi correspondent Tavleen’s brief was to inter alia contribute bits and pieces on business and economic issues. It’s probable that’s when her romance with Nehru-Gandhi socialism ended (though she’s unlikely to acknowledge it) and she became its trenchant critic.

Unfortunately the author’s unrelenting criticism of neta-babu socialism which has transformed a once-proud people into a nation of genuflecting supplicants, is ill-informed and surprisingly amateurish for so seasoned a journalist. Her blanket condemnations of government schools, India’s crumbling cities, living conditions of street people, callous government departments and policies are based almost entirely on personal and anecdotal observation, insufficient evidence for a nation of 1.2 billion people. Curiously, Tavleen makes no effort to adduce secondary evidence from easily accessible, professionally researched papers and surveys to buttress her case.

Thus the Mumbai-based NGO Pratham’s disturbing ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) which indicates that educational outcomes in rural primaries countrywide are consistently declining, or UNDP’s annual Human Development Report which reveals that a mind-numbing 48 percent of India’s children under age five are severely malnourished and likely to suffer brain damage, find no mention in this free-ranging travelogue-cum-memoir. Given the huge scale of devastation wrought by self-serving dynastic Nehru-Gandhi socialism, the author’s solo and ad hoc poverty alleviation forays which are recounted in detail, are pathetically inadequate and reek of cathartic poverty tourism.

Surely it would make more sense for Tavleen to throw her resources, including excellent communication skills and high-level contacts, behind one of several NGOs wrestling with the country’s massive 20 million change-resistant neta-babu nexus and public apathy to extract a better deal for the country’s 480 million children. But with her contempt for all development efforts except her own, this option hasn’t dawned upon her.

Another irritating feature of this book is Tavleen’s tendency to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. While scathing criticism of the priviligentsia of Lutyen’s Delhi enamoured with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is a leitmotif of Broken Tryst, the author evidently treasures the company of the selfish and uncaring society ladies she claims to despise.

During the height of the infamous pogrom against Sikh citizens of Delhi in the aftermath of Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, she recounts accepting a dinner invitation from a socialite at which the latter declares that the Sikhs “deserved what they got”. Shockingly, instead of outing her, and despite being a Sikh herself, Tavleen confers the cloak of anonymity upon this stupid woman.

Unfortunately this forthright and passionately written compendium is replete with anonymous quotes and unidentified villains, which reduces its credibility. Moreover, Tavleen’s habit of constantly reminding readers of how well off she is — seaside bungalows, NCPA apartments, innumerable visits to Davos, easy access to the prime and other ministers, and intolerance of less than 5-star hotels etc — leaves one wondering as to the purpose of this book. It reads more like a lengthy lament of a rich, first-class lady forced to tolerate an obstinately third world country.

Dilip Thakore

Endangered riverine systems

Living Rivers: Dying Rivers by Ramaswamy R. Iyer Oxford University Press; Price: Rs.995; Pages: 500

Prof. Ramaswamy R. Iyer unfortunately passed away on the eve of the release of this book, late last year. His writings have helped reshape and deepen our understanding of rivers as well as of water. In this final offering of his long list of journal articles and books on the issue, he presents a wide ranging, voluminous volume, which brings together, for the first time, some of India’s best water experts, academics and activists to methodically trace the condition of the most important river systems across India.

The book details what ails our rivers and river systems today. It also suggests remedies, a reminder that the ex-bureaucrat author continued to be highly respected in policy and activist circles. Not only are most of our life-supporting rivers polluted, not many are “living”, and as the author concedes, the few that are, “might not remain living” much longer.

The problems include rampant industrialisation and urbanisation of flood plains, unsustainable water extraction and use, failure of pollution abatement plans, misplaced flood control measures like embankments, privatisation, large dams and irrigation schemes, and deforestation, among others. At the very root of this kind of ill-treatment lies a basic lack of understanding of the complex ecology of river systems, and their being regarded as mere fragmented water channels.

Spanning a national river geography, this book is refreshingly not a top-down view. It is a ground-up reflection through the eyes of locally engaged people. Each chapter offers a detailed account of the reasons a particular river system is in decline.

Two very important discussions are about the Ganga and the Indus. Restoring the Ganga is a priority of the current government (with even a new ministry dealing with it), besides the sacred site of Varanasi (one of the polluted hotspots) being the constituency of prime minister Modi. The river is discussed in detail over three separate chapters. Rama Rauta in ‘The Ganga: A lament and a plea,’ Vinod Tare and Gautam Roy in ‘The Ganga: A trickle of hope’ and N.C. Narayanan in ‘The Ganga: Pollution abetment strategies: A review of GAP and emerging institutional models’, write about the need to make an aviral (flowing) and nirmal (pure) Ganga, especially in the light of a failed Ganga Action Plan (GAP). They lay out an institutional critique, and even outline a step by step short and long term plan for its restoration. In effect they make a case for a more locally rooted and less ecologically damaging developmental model to restore the river.

The Indus, one of the largest river basins in the world, on the other hand, flows between India and Pakistan in a contested geopolitical terrain. Shakil A. Romshoo offers a rare and detailed analysis of the Jhelum basin in ‘The Indus System: Changing environment in the Jhelum basin’.

The third major river system in North India is the Brahmaputra and its basin. Flowing through China into India and Bangladesh, in recent years there have been concerns about damming of the river upstream in China as well as in India, and its downstream impacts.

The basin is fed by a complex network of rivers, which span the seven sister states of North-East India, besides Bangladesh. Chandan Mahanta and Lalit Saika (in ‘The Brahmaputra and other rivers of north-east’) document in detail this relatively unknown ecology with its contributions to livelihood, culture and biodiversity which is changing rapidly owing to urbanisation, population growth and erosion.

The final section of the book offers a framework to help understand the reasons for such a state of affairs. Rivers are not merely uniform physical systems which are in a state of constant equilibrium, but, as the author argues, meandering and ever changing.

A contribution by Manoj Mishra suggests an outline for a new proposed law currently under discussion (though painfully slowly) — the River Zone Regulation (RZR) — by the government.

The book is appended by the Delhi Declaration on Rivers, which was adopted by the first ever India River’s Week, an extraordinary event held in Delhi (October 2014) by a group of environmental organisations under Ramaswamy Iyer’s guidance, and attended by over 100 water activists from across the country.

The trajectory of a techno-economic modernity has erroneously assumed nature to be a “free gift”. It is imperative that for a sustainable future, nature needs to be included in our social contract. Unshackling rivers is not only about letting them flow freely; it’s also about unshackling ourselves from our narrow understandings of ecology and nature. The book is a final appeal by an extraordinary man who understood water extraordinarily.

Ravi Agarwal (The Book Review, March 2016)