Day 354: In Spite Of The Gods

Understanding the difference between organized and unorganized India is the key to understanding why India’s economy is so peculiar: at once confident and booming yet unable to provide secure employment to the majority of its people. Contrary to much of conventional wisdom in the West, which often, quite wrongly, sees Indian employees of foreign multinationals as exploited sweatshop labor, the 14 million who work either for Indian or foreign private companies are the privileged few—India’s aristocracy of labor. In 1983, as India was entering the twilight of its swadeshi phase, the average labor productivity of the worker in the private organized sector was six times that of his counterpart in the unorganized sector. By 2000 that gap had risen to nine times.10 The gap in earnings was similar. This is a world of difference. Crossing from one world to the other takes good education and skills, or a huge dose of luck. It does not happen often enough.

India’s ability to provide a better bridge between the old world and the new depends a great deal on the extent to which it can provide jobs for low and semiskilled employees in its manufacturing sector. In terms of scale, India can only be measured against China. In 2005 India employed just 7 million people in the formal manufacturing sector, compared to more than 100 million in China. Given the large investment flows and the priority that Nehru gave to industrialization, many people find it puzzling that sixty years after independence India’s manufacturing sector remains so small in terms of the number of people it employs. That is because Nehru’s strategy was essentially capital-intensive—its priority was to develop India’s technological capacity, rather than to employ the maximum number of people. But it does not follow that Indian manufacturing is correspondingly weak or uncompetitive. Measured by quality, if not quantity, many of India’s homegrown private sector manufacturers are considerably more impressive than their counterparts in China. Again, India finds itself higher up on the ladder than one would expect it to be. It is just that most of its people are still sitting at the bottom.

This very Indian paradox is everywhere visible. But one of the best places to see it is in the impeccably maintained and clean-swept company town of Jamshedpur in the eastern state of Jharkhand, close to the isolated Himalayan kingdom of Nepal. Jamshedpur is almost a museum of India’s industrial history from its nationalist beginnings in the late nineteenth century long before the British departed, to the India of the early twenty-first century that exports galvanized steel to China and auto components to America and Japan.

The town was established in 1902 by Sir Jamshed Tata, founder of the Tata Group, India’s largest private sector company. At the beautifully kept park in the center of the town, fourth- and fifth-generation menial employees of the company can be seen leaving rice or flowers or offering puja (small prayers) beneath the imposing bearded statue of Jamshedji,* as he is still known. The sight reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s description of lower-caste Hindus and Muslims worshiping at “each other’s wayside shrines with beautiful impartiality.” But the prayers are well deserved. For the poor, a job with Tata is a job worth having. With it comes access to high-quality company medical care, pukka (quality) housing with clean and drinkable tap water, and good schools in which to educate your children. But there are fewer and fewer jobs.

Like many large Indian manufacturing companies, Tata’s balance sheet has gone from respectable in 1991, when a new world was opened up by Manmohan Singh’s abolition of the industrial licensing system, to world-class today. Yet the company’s payroll count has gone in the opposite direction. In 1991 the imposing steel mill in Jamshedpur turned out just 1 million tons of steel a year and employed 85,000 people. Now, in 2005, it is making 5 million tons a year and employs 44,000 people. Tata Steel’s turnover has risen from $800 million to $4 billion over the same period. “We could probably get the labor force down to 20,000 and move up to a production of 10 million tons,” said one of the Tata executives assigned to show me around.

Tata Steel’s story, in which it transformed itself from a laborintensive company that supplied low-cost steel to the domestic market in 1991 to a capital-intensive company that supplies world-beating automobile steel to Japan’s shiniest car companies today, parallels that of other successful Indian manufacturers. Up until 1991, Tata Steel made everything it possibly could in its own backyard, since it was always too much of a struggle to import spare parts or new machinery under India’s “import substitution” regime. Naturally this need for bureaucratic approval was a distraction from what the company was supposed to be doing and added greatly to its labor force. The company also employed large numbers of lobbyists and “gofers” who spent their time hanging around ministries and petitioning bureaucrats.

It was yet another questionable legacy of the well-meaning society Nehru wanted to build. Nehru gave India some of the strictest labor laws in the world, making it virtually impossible to sack an employee, even if the person you wanted to fire was a chronic absentee. Nehru gave India an industrial licensing system in which companies such as Tata needed the permission of bureaucrats for even the smallest investment decisions on what they could produce, when they should produce it, and where they should produce it.

Some parts of Nehru’s model, such as the Orwellian “License Raj,” have been dismantled. But some, such as the absurdly strict labor laws (which were made even stricter by Indira Gandhi in 1976), remain. This means that companies are reluctant to hire large numbers of people even when they are expanding since they fear being stuck with boom-era payrolls during the next recession, which would push them into bankruptcy and endanger everyone’s job. But it also means companies prefer to outsource as much as possible of their work to small, unaudited outfits in the “unorganized sector,” so they can escape the labor laws, which are unenforceable in India’s labyrinthine informal economy. There are other legacies that have yet to be abolished, including the “Inspector Raj” of constant inspections that plagues much of Indian business. As Gurcharan Das, former head of Procter & Gamble’s India operations, wrote, “In my thirty years in active business in India, I did not meet a single bureaucrat who really understood my business, yet he had the power to ruin it.”

~~In Spite Of The Gods: The Rise of Modern India -by- Edward Luce

Day 128: Book Excerpt: India's Biggest Cover Up

Sugata Bose also joins the league of some extraordinary men—Jawaharlal Nehru, his minister Shah Nawaz, his friend GD Khosla and his ardent follower Shivraj Patil—in branding his own granduncle Suresh Bose a liar. All on the basis of a note created fraudulently by the government nominee on the committee. Blood is usually thicker than water, but political inclinations often dilute family ties. Sugata Bose should have known better that Suresh Bose had no need to change his mind about Subhas Bose’s assumed death after June 1956, as this “injustice league” propagated throughout the years. From the day one to his last, Suresh shared his elder brother’s, Sugata’s grandfather’s, views about their younger brother’s disappearance.

A few years ago Chandrachur and I met a former Gaimusho official in New Delhi. Tomoji Mutoh had in May 1956 liaised with the Shah Nawaz Committee and especially Suresh Bose. He told us that he accompanied Suresh Bose to the residence of Katanko Tojo, the widow of war-time Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. “He cried there. He said ‘my brother did not die’,” the retired official told us. Mutoh asked us to visit the Renkoji temple and see for ourselves how respectful the Japanese are towards “Chandra Bose’s ashes”. “Your respect for Netaji is not in doubt, and we are grateful for that,” we told him.

If he were alive today, Suresh Bose would have been greatly pained to see his own grandnephew terming his view as “rambling dissent”, borrowing the word “rambling” from GD Khosla. Suresh Bose was not an accomplished writer and at that he was not given enough documents or facilities to produce a slick report. But he did make some valid points and he did set a standard in probity and openness as he called upon the people to not to believe his dissent or the majority report until the Government had made public all relevant records.
There is no chance of misconstruing that the Harvard professor is so impartial and objective that he has not even spared his granduncle. Because in his zeal to back the government version, he has lauded someone who came closer to getting jailed for trying to vilify Subhas Chandra Bose and a friendly foreign nation which sacrificed thousands of its men in helping India attain freedom. This was GD Khosla, whom Sugata Bose describes as “eminent jurist”. Worse, Sugata makes libelous statements against Justice Mukherjee.

It is horrendous that a Bose family member should use a glowing term for a man who portrayed Subhas as an impractical hothead and a puppet of the Japanese in his report. This abhorring idea was not an aside but part and parcel of Khosla’s report. The Bose family dragged him to court and he could wriggle out only after rendering a written apology.

According to Prof Bose, Khosla’s report “fell victim to political partisan” whereas the Congress-led government “quite sensibly, rejected outright” the Mukherjee Commission's report. He is disheartened, as a Congressman at heart should be, that Indira Gandhi’s government which had been compelled to institute Khosla’s inquiry lost elections in 1977 and the Janata government set aside Khosla’s findings. Such unabashed whitewash makes me feel worried about the professor’s American students. Between September 1974, when Khosla Commission’s report was tabled in Parliament and 1977, when Moraraji Desai became Prime Minister, India had for most part been under an authoritarian rule. It was the biggest blot on Indian democracy, the best legacy of the British Raj. It was during this dark age, when prostitutes were paraded to create fervour in favour of the government and innumerable people were forcefully sterilised to stem India’s population boom, that Khosla’s report was finally approved in Parliament sans Opposition.

The people who fought against the Emergency were the people forming the “political partisan” against Khosla’s report.  They included politician Samar Guha, lawyer Gobinda Mukhoty—who went on to fight for justice for the victims of 1984 genocide—and journalist Barun Sengupta.

Disregarding the actual turn of events, Sugata Bose further writes that more than twenty years after Khosla’s report was rejected, “yet another” commission was appointed by the Government. There is no light what had led to all this momentous decision. The setting up of new commission was not a government decision per se; it just had to obey the order of the Calcutta High Court. Sugata Bose is giving his readers an impression as if the formation of the new commission was result of some governmental whim at a time when his favourite dispensation was out of power.

The facts of Khosla’s closeness to Nehru, his self-proclaimed disagreement with Bose during their student days in London, his writing the biography of Indira Gandhi during the period he was heading the Netaji Inquiry Commission and his churning out a book from his inquiry, the apology he rendered to the Bose family have not shaken Sugata’s faith in him. But His Majesty’s opponent describes Justice MK Mukherjee as “retired Bengali judge” to impute impartiality to him. Added to it is the disparaging remark that he “held court” and provided “a venue for increasingly fanciful stories”.

Sugata Bose goes on to allege that Mukherjee “himself harboured a preconceived notion”. He thinks it is proven by two factors: In October 2002, the commission had asked some Bose family members to provide blood samples for a DNA match with Bhagwanji of Faizabad. Then in 2010 Mukherjee was seen on TV, making an off-the-record remark filmed without his knowledge that he was sure that Bhagwanji was Netaji. The history professor adds that there is no evidence to back this theory and Mukherjee’s entertaining a “most preposterous” claim about Bhagwanji caused confusion among the public. His stray comments about the Mukherjee Commission occupy no more than two paras and just with these he has trashed an inquiry which lasted for six years and indicted the Government of India on several points.

As a non-Bengali who followed commission’s work closely, I am in a position to assert some facts. The Calcutta High Court judgment which directed the central government to form a commission was issued by then Chief Justice Prabha Shankar Mishra. It is the norm in India nowadays for the chief justices of the state high courts not to be hailing from those states. Things seem to have changed from the days when Lahore-born GD Khosla could have become Chief Justice of the Punjab High Court.

I had the opportunity to speak with retired Justice Mishra in New Delhi a few years ago. He told me that the main reason for his reaching that decision was the disclosure made by the Government that it itself was not sure of Bose’s death.

Justice Mukherjee’s name as the chairman of the new commission was recommended by the Chief Justice of India. Incidentally, I don't find Sugata Bose mentioning, much less underlining, in his book that Mukherjee is a former Supreme Court judge. He just sees a “Bengali” in him. It is as if Sugata Bose is taking a leaf out of GD Khosla’s book. The judge's personal papers, now kept at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, also reflect a similar parochial point of view. Even after a case was filed by the Bose family against him in Kolkata for trying to defame Subhas “to please patrons for largesse and assignments”, Khosla was unrepentant. He filed—and apparently later withdrew—a transfer petition in the Supreme Court in which he painted the entire matter as a Bengali issue. He described Prof Samar Guha “a prominent Bengali member of the Lok Sabha” and claimed that he did not expect to “receive a fair and impartial trial” in Kolkata, home to his sister, and had “every reason to apprehend physical danger and injury to himself in the event of the trial being held in West Bengal”.

Sugata Bose's description of Jutice Mukherjee a “Bengali judge” is a low blow. This is not how we look at our judges. Justice SH Kapadia is not a “Parsi judge”; he is the Chief Justice of India. We associate people who occupy or have occupied high offices with a particular region or religion only in the complimentary sense.

Sugata Bose was nowhere in sight when Justice Mukherjee examined the witnesses. Mukherjee put pointed, pertinent questions to probe whether or not the person standing in the witness corner possessed any evidence to back his statements. The former Supreme Court judge did not “held court”; he conducted proceedings according to the Commission of Inquiry Act.

Two of Sugata’s uncles that I have known, know it well because they didn’t have to let their imagination wander to visualize what had actually happened. Late Pradip Bose was there on some occasions, and Subrata Bose attended most of the commission’s public hearings. Later 43 members of the family, including these two cousins, issued a statement which expressed deep appreciation for “the arduous efforts” of “Mr Justice MK Mukherjee and his team in the commission”.

~~India's Biggest Cover Up -by- Anuj Dhar

Day 118: Book Excerpt: The Longest August

The performance of the Congress ministries provided examples of insensitivity toward Muslims’ beliefs and feelings. Congregational singing of “Vande Mataram” (Sanskrit: I bow to Mother) as part of the official protocol in schools, colleges, and elsewhere was one. According to Rabindranath Tagore, a nationalist poet and philosopher, the core of “Vande Mataram” was a hymn to the goddess Durga. In Islam, deifying or worshiping anyone or anything other than the One and Only (unseen) God constitutes idolatry and is forbidden.

The two-year-plus rule of the Congress gave Muslims a foretaste of what to expect in an independent India. Support for the Muslim League grew rapidly. In the 1945–1946 elections, it garnered all 30 Muslim places in the Central Legislative Assembly, securing 87 percent of the Muslim vote. In the provincial legislatures its size quadrupled to 425 out of 485 Muslim seats.

By then the League’s resolution asserting that Muslims were “a nation by any definition,” and that the Muslim-majority areas in the northwestern and eastern zones of India, “should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units will be autonomous and sovereign,” was six years old.

More significantly, the term “Pakistan” had become irresistibly attractive to Muslims of all classes and persuasions. Orthodox Muslims envisaged a Muslim state run according to the Sharia. Muslim landlords felt assured of the continuation of the zamindari (landlord) system, which the Congress had vowed to abolish. Muslim businessmen savored the prospect of fresh markets in Pakistan free from Hindu competition. Civil servants foresaw rapid promotion in the fledgling state. These perceptions among Muslims grew in an environment in which Hindus were much better off economically than Muslims.

Astonishingly, there was a singular lack of perception among Congress leaders of the economic factors bolstering the League’s appeal. Jawaharlal Nehru made passing remarks about peasants, whether Muslim or Hindu, suffering at the hands of landlords. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi failed to grasp that it was that section of the Muslim population that felt it could not compete with Hindus in getting government jobs and in commerce and industry that backed the League.

On the political front, what made partition inevitable was Nehru’s boastful declaration on July 8, 1947, about Britain’s Constitutional Award of May 16. It envisaged united India with a constituent assembly, elected by existing provincial legislatures, convening briefly in Delhi, and then dividing into Sections A (Hindu majority), B (Muslim-majority, northwestern region), and C (Muslim-majority, Bengal-Assam) to frame a constitution for three subfederations into which federal, independent India was to be divided. Nehru announced that the Congress had agreed to participate in the Constituent Assembly and, once convened, the Assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s provisions, if it so wished, and that the grouping scheme would most likely not survive. This led Jinnah to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the Constitutional Award.

The savage butchery that Muslims and non-Muslims—Hindus and Sikhs—perpetrated on one another in Punjab left five hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand people dead and caused the largest mass exodus in history. When communal frenzy gripped Delhi, with Muslims bearing the brunt, Nehru stuck firmly to his secular beliefs, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad disapproved of the Indian army protecting Muslim citizens.

Moreover Patel and his cohorts in Nehru’s government were hell-bent on strangling Pakistan at birth. Jinnah complained about this to British prime minister Clement Attlee and vowed that the Dominion of Pakistan would “never surrender.” Despite his failing health, he helped the incipient Pakistan, composed of two wings separated by a thousand miles, to find its infant feet.

JINNAH FAILS TO WOO THE MAHARAJA

While acting as the chief executive of Pakistan, Jinnah dealt directly with the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan and the princely states. He realized that failure to persuade the Hindu Maharaja Sir Hari Singh of the predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir to accede to Pakistan would be a severe blow to his two-nation theory. An opponent of Jinnah’s thesis, the maharaja rebuffed his friendly approaches.

Jinnah then assigned the Kashmir portfolio to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. He complemented his strategy of taking charge of the Azad Army formed independently by Kashmiri Muslims with a plan to secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas. He informed Jinnah of the first track but not the second.

When the invasion of the tribal irregulars led to the airlifting of Indian troops to Srinagar in October 1947, following the maharaja’s accession to India, Jinnah was distraught. His unease increased when Pakistan’s commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy refused to obey his order to deploy Pakistani troops. Sir Frank argued that implementing Governor-General Jinnah’s order would result in British officers commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents in a fight against each other.

Jinnah’s dream of incorporating all of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan withered, accelerating his physical decline. He died in harness only a year after the birth of Pakistan.

The outbreak of war with India in Kashmir within months of Pakistan’s inception gave its military a primacy it has maintained since then, monopolizing the drafting and implementation of national security policies after the assassination of Ali Khan in October 1951. With his death the nation lost the remaining cofounder of Pakistan. The Muslim League started to unravel, while differences between the eastern and western wings sharpened on the status of Bengali, the mother tongue of the majority of Pakistani citizens. Urdu remained the sole official language. The ongoing squabbling between politicians led to the seizure of power by General Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1958.

~~The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan -by- Dilip Hiro

Day 79 : Book Excerpt : Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry

Prasad found Gandhi’s appearance and behavior bizarre in the extreme. “In those days he was living practically on groundnuts and dates,” Prasad remembered later. “Milk of the cow or buffalo was tabooed [sic] and even goat’s milk,” while Gandhi had also vowed not to eat more than five types of food in a single day and to eat no meal after sunset. Although he dressed in homespun peasant clothes, Gandhi spoke not a word of Bihari. He barely understood Hindi. Yet there was something compelling about the strange little man, with his odd habits, his persuasive but pointed banter, and his rapid scuttling walk that made it hard for men two decades his junior to keep up with him.

That compulsion would make Rajendra Prasad go with Gandhi to the poorest and most remote villages in Champaran. He became Gandhi’s first intimate disciple outside his home turf. Three decades later Prasad would become India’s first president.

Meanwhile local British authorities knew about Gandhi’s arrival almost the moment he got off the train. They were deeply alarmed. “His mere presence in Champaran is most undesirable,” the district inspector general’s special assistant wrote to the provincial police superintendent. Even in remotest Bihar, Raj officials knew of Gandhi’s reputation as an agitator, especially on the issue of Indian indentured labor. District Commissioner Morshead had a short interview with Gandhi and concluded that he was keener on stirring up trouble rather than on a serious inquiry. Morshead decided he had to forestall any violence.

On Sunday, April 15, Gandhi and another lawyer named Prasad (not Rajendra but the man he had met at the Lucknow Congress) set off by elephant for the first village in the district, called Chandrahia. Just as they arrived in the dusty, deserted street, a police officer rode up on a bicycle. It was a scene worthy of E. M. Forster, or Paul Scott, with the turbaned khaki-clad officer on his flimsy bicycle standing in the path of the great creaking animal, with its weary and bemused passengers.

They were to stop at once, the policeman said. The district magistrate, W. B. Haycock, had an expulsion order waiting for Gandhi, under the Defense of India Rules. Gandhi returned to Motihari and quietly read the letter. He then informed Haycock that he would disobey the expulsion order and sent a similar letter to the viceroy’s private secretary.

Gandhi waited all day Monday to be arrested, even as the news of what was happening spread with torrential speed through neighboring villages. Finally Haycock ordered him to appear on Tuesday at the district court to explain why he should not be put in jail. Gandhi’s whole plan, of course, was to be put in jail, and he had prepared a statement to that effect.

On Tuesday morning more than two thousand peasants pressed to get into the courtroom. The glass panels of the door broke under the strain, and Haycock had to ask Gandhi to control his followers, which Gandhi gladly did. Gandhi then read his statement, concluding, “I have disregarded the order served upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”

Haycock was in a quandary. As Gandhi said later, “He seemed to be a good man, anxious to do justice.” Like any British judge in India, he saw his job as defending law and order in his district. Willful disobedience of the law (specifically Section 144 of the Crown Penal Code) called for punishment. But the unexpected and unprecedented outpouring of peasant support for the strange little man standing before his bench unnerved him. Haycock convinced himself more violence would result if he arrested Gandhi than if he left him at liberty. Therefore he announced he would suspend any judgment and adjourned the court. He privately asked Gandhi to put off his village visits (surprisingly, Gandhi agreed), and that night Haycock sent a long telegram to the lieutenant-governor asking, in effect, what he should do.

It was a watershed moment in Gandhi’s dealings with British officialdom. In fact, it set the classic pattern of the Raj’s response to Gandhi’s satyagraha tactics, then and later: first the insistence that the law be obeyed; then surprise at the Mahatma’s calm defiance; then confusion at the show of sympathy and support from ordinary Indians; and finally hesitation and inaction and a sheepish letter to superiors asking for further instructions.

So Haycock became the first, but by no means the last, British official in India to be reduced to bumbling helplessness by Gandhi’s unorthodox approach. The response to his letter revealed the pressures from the other side. The lieutenant-governor sharply disapproved of the commissioner’s action and ordered Haycock to withdraw the expulsion order. Gandhi would be allowed to continue his inquiry, making visits to villages in Champaran. “Mr. Gandhi is doubtless eager to adopt the role of martyr which as you know he has already played in South Africa,” the official wrote, and nothing “would suit him better than to undergo a term of imprisonment.” The Indian media were already noticing the events in Champaran and were hailing Gandhi as a hero. Better to back down, the lieutenant-governor suggested, than to give Gandhi the publicity he wanted—and possibly set off an even more widespread reaction. Relieved at not having to enforce the law, Haycock dropped the case.

Gandhi had won. Even more important, Champaran’s peasantry felt they had won, too. As Gandhi resumed his village visits and continued them for the rest of April and May, men, women, and children poured out of their homes. They followed him everywhere, chanting his name, throwing flowers in his path, and—the most striking part of darshan, or sighting of a holy man—gathering the dust from his feet on their fingers. When he finally reached Bettiah and Raj Shukla’s home village, the people unhitched the horses from Gandhi’s carriage and pulled it through the streets. A local British official watched. The English might think Gandhi a fanatic or even a revolutionary, he noted, but to the peasants “he is their liberator, and they credit him with extraordinary powers.”

~~Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age -by- Arthur Herman