OPEN Magazine 25 August 2014

T H E

F R E E D O M

I S S U E FOOTPRINTS OF STRUGGLE THEN AND NOW TO WRITE OR NOT TO WRITE LIVES HYPHENATED TO HISTORY

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The Indian Ideal

Waiting for a nation of equal liberty

By Martha C Nussbaum

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Footprints of Struggle

Tracing the freedom movement | Ullekh NP

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A lament from the Deep South

“It’s all about Individual choices” | Brinda Karat

Of Colonial Minds and Other Demons India is still subservient to borrowed ideas

| Murali Balaji

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India according to a Freedom child

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48

| Martha C Nussbaum

Time to strike a balance between justice and prosperity

| Madhavankutty Pillai

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For An India of Equal Liberty

Crisis in Vedaranyam, the other Dandi

EDITOR’S NOTE

Where Gandhi Became the Mahatma Champaran, until recently a crime haven, shows recovery

| PR Ramesh

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Let there be diversity in political expression India according to an Emergency child

| Topsy Mathew

She Is On a High New horizons await Indian women. Are they up to it?

| Vivek Wadhwa and Shwanika Narayan

Not Worth Your Salt Anymore The villagers of Dandi want to march out

| Lhendup G Bhutia

“The World is at my feet” India according to a Liberalisation child | Isha Trakru

An Equal faith Gandhi and the Vaikom temple satyagraha

| MG Radhakrishnan

To Write or Not to Write Isn’t the freedom not to write also an enshrined liberty?

| Tishani Doshi

A Fire in Memory Chauri Chaura: scars of the non-cooperation movement

| Divya Guha

67 years in 67 numbers NOT PEOPLE LIKE US Personal grudges and public grouses

| Rajeev Masand

Open Space At the stroke of the midnight hour

EDITOR’S NOTE

C

Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor PR Ramesh Deputy Editors Aresh Shirali, Ullekh NP art director Madhu Bhaskar Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai Associate Editor (Web) Vijay K Soni assistant editors

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Volume 6 Issue 33 For the week 19—25 August 2014 Total No. of pages 80 + Covers

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S PRASANNARAJAN

ommemorations are, invariably, history relived in kitsch. The celebrations, the rituals, the vows and what not—that is how the living pay homage to the past.

The month of August is about journeys—in memory as well as in history. An assassination in Sarajevo one hundred years ago culminated in what we call the Great War. No war, even if matured in the national conscience, can be great.

Europe is today in the throes of remembrance; and in India, our own contribution to the British Empire during the war is getting its commemorative due. The colony too sacrificed its men for the ‘Great’ cause. Europe had to wait for more than three decades to add further greatness to war. It will never end, and don’t we know? After the Second World War, freedom was painted in black and white; the bipolarity of the Cold War world made it easier for democrats and socialists to define the future of man in the straitjackets of good and evil.

Another four decades, and another rite of freedom in the wake of the collapsed Soviet empire and the breached Berlin Wall, and as the British historian Timothy Garton Ash in the thrill of the Second Prague Spring and other eruptions of freedom across Eastern Europe called it in a euphoric neologism, ’89 was the ‘Refolution’ (revolution plus reform). To some extent, yes, it was. The nationalist in the Balkans would spoil the party; a scholar would rewrite his argument about ‘the end of history and the last man’; but still, it was a better time, till that plane flew over Manhattan one September morning in 2001. Wars of various sizes, but without the adjectives of historic ambitions, have been raging ever since. Freedom is a permanent argument.

On the 67th anniversary of India’s independence, such a backdrop provides a cautionary context to our celebrations. For whose freedom, we may ask, has America come back to drop bombs on Mesopotamia? For whose freedom did Putin’s Russia cross the border and annex a part of Ukraine? And it is freedom—or the conflicting definitions of it—that aggravates the bloodlust in the Middle East. Your freedom is someone else’s prison. Your struggle is someone else’s terror. What matters is the ideal. And what mattered, sixtyseven years ago, too, was the ideal. “At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes, and her failures.

Through good and ill fortune alike she has never

illustration by anirban ghosh

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The Nehruvian New Man was, in retrospect, a more lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune affordable version of the Socialist New Man. Both were fantasies; in the case of the latter, it was a fantasy and India discovers herself again. The achievement sustained by the jackboot. For Nehru, an idyllic India we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of of secularism and scientific temperament was an opportunity, to the greater triumphs achievements imagined rejoinder to an India of religious divisions that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough and superstitions. The nation that Nehru wanted to to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of build had a socialist core, and for the liberated Third the future?” That was Nehru with the grand sweep of poetic flourish, addressing the Constituent Assembly World, it was after all the age of Soviet chic. The funny thing was that empires built on the lies of ideology at the midnight of freedom. If it was not the ideal, would fall, new struggles of freedom—scriptural, what was it? And the pledge the members took is still economic—would erupt across the world, but India worth quoting: “At this solemn moment, when the would remain immune to history. Today, India is people of India, through suffering and sacrifice, have where it is as one of the world’s enduring examples of secured freedom, I, a member of the Constituent democracy and a marketplace of untapped freedom Assembly of India, do dedicate myself in all humility not because of its politicians, but in spite of them. It is to the service of India and her people to the end that a tribute to the spirit of the Indian who dared to this ancient land attain her rightful place in the dream—and realised the uses of adversity. world and make her full and willing contribution What was needed was not a repudiation of politics to the promotion of world peace and the welfare but politics-not-as-usual. The old ideological of mankind.”

Those words were not repeated as India evolved as a straitjackets are inadequate to deal with a world where the possibilities of freedom are immense even democracy. Those were not words of patriotic pulp. in closed societies—blame it on technology. It is the Can you imagine an Indian MP or a minister taking age of digital samizdat. In India, oath today invoking “world there are still instances of peace and the welfare of extra-constitutional temptations mankind”? Considering the big The old ideological of elected politicians—and bad world we are in, such illiberal instincts of the state. The invocations are all the more straitjackets are onus, in the end, is on the state. relevant now. And such words inadequate to As John Micklethwait, editor-inare absent because the deal with a chief of The Economist, and Adrian politician we are familiar with Wooldridge, the magazine’s is a man of shrunken mind— world where the management editor, argue in someone whose idea of India is possibilities of their new book, The Fourth as small as his constituency. It freedom are Revolution, it is ideas of goverwas once said that the grandeur nance that determine the success of leadership ended with the immense even in of governments today. The Second World War, though the closed societies fourth revolution (after the trio of Reagan, Thatcher and nation state, the liberal state and Gorbachev was there to star in the welfare state) is about the action thriller of history. ‘reviving the spirit of liberty by Today, in places such as putting more emphasis on Washington, London and Paris, the leader in power would say that he can no longer af- individual rights and less on social rights. And it is about reviving the spirit of democracy by lightening ford the luxury of big ideas, that statecraft is all about pragmatism, not idealism. But there were leaders who the burden of the state. If the state promises too much, it creates distemper and dependency among its struck a balance between idealism and action. In citizens; it is only by reducing what it promises that 1947, Nehru was all about the ideal of freedom—and democracy will be able to express its best instincts, of the India on his mind was very much an integral part flexibility, innovation and problem solving. This is a of the post-War world. Peace was not a rhetorical fight that matters enormously. Democracy is the best cliché then. That said, the Nehruvian India, as it safeguard for basic rights and basic liberties. It is also began to unfold, was a project in misplaced idealism.

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Middle Mind Set, DESERT by riyas komu

the best guarantee of innovation and problem solving. But fighting against its worst instincts will be tough.’

Their argument is set in a Western context, but in the world’s most volatile democracy—and till recently one of the most misgoverned states—it is very relevant. Three months ago, India gave its unconditional mandate to a politician who promised 6 open 25 august 2014

good governance—and pledged to redeem the state.

By the time you read this, you will have heard his first speech as Prime Minister from the Red Fort. It is his moment as one of democracy’s most popular leaders to play out the script of the India Ideal: the liberal state rising from the last wreckage of the socialist mind. Freedom is about daring—and he should know. n

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ESSAY

FOR AN INDIA OF EQUAL LIBERTY Time to strike a balance between justice and prosperity

BY MARTHA C NUSSBAUM

Martha C Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago

A

s we celebrate India’s independence this week, it is easy to focus on

economic growth and the competition between nations for advantage in the global market. These issues are certainly important. But we should remember, too, the crucial role of political liberty in creating a nation that remains a model of democratic achievement for the developing world. As an academic whose university has recently launched a major research center in Delhi, I love to work in India, in a way that I would not like to work in China, or even the somewhat more open Singapore. Since its founding, India has cherished not only liberty of access to the political process—and its voter turnout is well above that in my own country—but also a group of other liberties: freedom of speech, freedom of religious belief and worship, the freedom of association, and the free choice of occupation. (Most political theorists hold that the last of these liberties requires a market economy, so one could argue that that liberty is in a better state today than at the founding.)

These freedoms are not set in stone, and they are periodically threatened. Freedom of speech is threatened when books are banned and pulped. Freedom of religion is threatened when religious minorities face mob violence. Freedom of association is threatened when individuals are harassed for their group membership, whether left or right, and when sodomy laws make people risk prison for their intimate relationships.

All these problems, and still others, make the liberties insecure in today’s India. But their defense is vital to a strong nation, for two reasons.

illustration by anirban ghosh

First, liberty is important to human It’s all very welfare. Philosopher John Rawls imagined well to give all rational individuals designing a society without knowing in advance what group, citizens equal rights majority or minority, each would belong to on paper, but if the in it. He argued that the very first thing they would secure was this set of liberties. People, procedures involved he argued, care deeply about the value of disadvantage certain self-expression and life according to their groups, liberty convictions, and they wouldn’t want to risk that they would turn out to be in a weak is not equal group to whom a more powerful group would refuse these opportunities. So, he argued, the choosers in his ‘Original Position’ would opt for ‘the maximum liberty that is compatible with a like liberty for all.’ In other words, liberty must be ample, but it must also be equal. I’ll return to that crucial issue.

A second reason for the importance of liberty is given by John Stuart Mill in his great work On Liberty, prompted by the numerous violations of liberty characteristic of Britain in his time—where all women and many men could not vote, where university jobs required membership in the Anglican church, and where a host of restrictions on personal and sexual freedom made many a person’s life a prison. (Mill himself literally went to prison simply for distributing information about contraception to the poor in London.) Mill’s immediate focus in On Liberty was the freedom of speech, but he also was a lifelong defender of women’s freedoms of association and political participation; he introduced the first bill in the British Parliament for women’s suffrage. Mill’s argument for liberty is that a strong society needs unfettered expression. Dogma is the death of progress. It’s worst when false views rule the roost, but even true views need the stimulus of challenge and dissent.

So nations need ample liberty, both for their individual citizens’ welfare and for the health of a democratic public culture. But now: what about equal liberty?

What does that mean, and what measures are needed to make liberty truly equal?

The United States has really only begun to face this question, since it has largely assumed that all is well with liberty when the state doesn’t restrict anyone. Thus the US has confronted only fitfully and unevenly the threats to equal liberty supplied by the power of private actors, of the market, or even of democratic majorities. Take voting rights. It’s all very well to give all citizens rights on paper, but if procedures for voter registration disadvantage certain groups, for example by requiring driver’s licenses or other documentation that many poor people do not have, a common problem in my own nation (caused, alas, by democratic majorities), liberty is not equal. Or take religious liberties. Democratic majorities may be perfectly well-intentioned, and yet impose great obstacles to minority religious equality—for example, by making Sunday, the Christian holy day, a day of rest, thus penalising workers who for religious reasons need to refuse work on a Friday, or a Saturday. If some workers risk being fired from their jobs for observing their religion and others do not, liberty is not equal.

Again, take the freedom of speech. It’s all very well to say that people can express their political convictions freely. But if large groups in the population do not have access to decent education, what are the chances that they will ever be able to address their fellow citizens in a way that matters? If freedom of speech exists on paper but many people do not have the education that would actually enable them to speak effectively, liberty is not equal. The first African-American Justice of the US Supreme Court, the great Thurgood Marshall, argued that equal access to education is required by the freedom of speech. (He was outvoted, and his position remains a minority position, but it was correct.)

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An art installation in steel

by Riyas Komu that uses likenesses of Gandhi and Jinnah, titled Two Fathers

On the all-important question of equal liberty, India has long been ahead of the US in its constitutional thinking.

Dr Ambedkar remains one of legal history’s most distinguished and insightful thinkers about this question.

And of course his insight derived not just from his first-rate legal mind but also from his appalling early life, when, as he tells us, he was even unable to take water in school on a hot day because the

teacher and the other children would not permit him to ‘contaminate’ the classroom water supply; when he was unable to travel and associate freely, because hotels and restaurants would not admit him. Ambedkar believed, correctly, that there can be no real liberty so long as ‘society itself is a tyrant… enslaving the soul itself.’

For Ambedkar, then, constitutional liberties would be mere words on paper, unless government at the same time were to take steps to make the liberties truly equal and available. Liberties are human opportunities, and people have

them only when they can actually choose actions that express them. ‘It is no use for the Depressed Classes to have a declaration of equal rights,’ he wrote. ‘There can be no doubt that the Depressed Classes will have to face the whole force of orthodox society if they try to exercise the equal rights of citizenship... Rights are nothing unless remedies are provided whereby people can seek to obtain redress when rights are invaded.’ Or, as I would put it, liberties are not just formal guarantees, they are human capabilities, and they exist for real only when people can really avail themselves of them.

In drafting the new Constitution, therefore, Ambedkar took steps to make liberties (amply protected by articles 19, 21, and others) more than words on paper. First, of course, the Constitution declares untouchability illegal in all forms (Article 17). That is a major step, and of course it was hugely controversial at the time. Second, there is a strong article prohibiting discrimination (Article 15), and it states explicitly that nothing in the article prevents the State from taking measures for the advancement of ‘socially and educationally backward classes 11 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

keystone/getty images

A demonstration in Madras in 1929 against the Simon Commission

of citizens’—thus deliberately averting the sort of endless squabbling about the constitutionality of affirmative action that has long vexed the US judiciary. The same proviso is attached to Article 16, on equality of opportunity in matters of public employment. Other articles bearing on the equality of liberty include the prohibition of trafficking and forced labor and the prohibition of child labor in factories and mines.

Ambedkar favoured both strong non-discrimination laws and some forms of affirmative action. We should agree, although we should also observe that mere quotas do little good without early affirmative measures to make sure that the people who eventually take the reserved spaces in education are equipped to succeed when they get there. Above all, Ambedkar favoured then, it is to primary education that we must turn for help, if liberty, whether in both strong nonIndia or the US, is to be truly equal. We may discrimination laws go even further than Justice Marshall: inherent in all the liberties is access to an and some forms of early education that truly develops human affirmative action. talents and capacities—as much early education in India lamentably fails to do.

We should also People are not truly free to participate in observe that mere politics, to practice their religion, to speak quotas do little good in public, or to associate, unless they have 12 open 25 august 2014

the chance to choose a wide range of functions for which education is an indispensable prerequisite. If liberties are not just an empty space, but actual human capabilities, then a nation must produce human capabilities, not just refrain from interfering.

Economist James Heckman, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2000, has shown that early intervention in primary education is a win-win for society: if the programs are well designed, including nutrition and work with families, the payoff we observe years later is great.

Crime is reduced, the recipients are more productive actors in the economy, and their personal welfare is also greatly improved. So it is not necessary to choose between justice for deprived groups and economic efficiency. A successful economy needs and profits from an educated and healthy work force. Such workers are also enjoying the promises of truly equal political and associational liberty offered in India’s very distinguished Constitution. n

CHAURI CHAURA CHAMPARAN DANDI

VEDARANYAM VAIKOM

footprints

BY ULLEKH np

M

ohandas karamchand Gandhi, the architect of the final phase

of India’s freedom movement, often rejected the label of ‘passive resistance’ for the agitations he spearheaded. Satyagraha, he argued, was active though it was non-violent. He was right. When we look back, the militant nature of his protests proves that ‘non-violence’ wasn’t any weak form of protest by the meek, but required great strength of conviction and moral courage. From the time he became active in the Congress after his return in 1914 from South Africa, where he first experimented with the idea of satyagraha with moderate success, he was able to tip the balance against the powerful grip of the British in India through movements conceived and implemented with much rigour and planning. Much to the anguish of his rivals within the national movement who were immediately sidelined, he often coerced people to what he believed was the truth.

A consummate politician, an ultimate tactician and a highly charismatic leader, Gandhi used moral philosophy and his own way of life as political tools to mobilise millions for anti-British protests. In what he often called “the fight of right against might”, he was able to attract world attention and sympathy through agitations that were imbued with symbolism. The secret of his success was as simple as it was tough, as Gandhi scholar Dennis Dalton suggested: ‘He had an uncanny ability to put theory into practice.’

While defying the mighty British in championing the cause of Champaran’s peasants in Bihar in 1917 and inviting national attention to their plight, and later using a commodity as common as salt to bring the country’s colonial rulers

to their knees in 1930, Gandhi, according to scholars, also meticulously chose geographical locations to tap people’s imagination and inspire them to join the freedom struggle.

His intervention in Champaran may have looked accidental, but he was well aware of the socio-political impact of picking a forlorn village populated by farmers who suffered the torture and tyranny of indigo planters. Just as he thought it wise to support the Khilafat movement to rally Muslims under the Congress, his mid-1920s journey to Vaikom in southern Kerala to join an otherwise ‘lower-caste’ campaign for permission to use roads around the famous Shiva temple there was meant to galvanise support for the freedom movement. His presence even inspired ‘upper-caste’ participation in the Vaikom struggle. He also opposed the great reformer Sri Narayana Guru’s

The freedom

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of struggle suggestion that volunteers break barricades erected by the police and enter the temple, saying theirs was a non-violent protest.

In short, he chose locales to strategically spread the influence of the Congress and the freedom movement across the country. Which was evident in his choice of places where he set his up ashrams and camped for long. His entry to Indian politics and adoption of satyagraha was a dramatic period that soon saw the passage of the Rowlatt Act—under which people who were accused of violating the Defence of India Act rules were not allowed the right to appeal—and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. Public unrest was rising against these ‘rewards’ for fighting for Britain in World War I. He tapped the prevailing sentiment and remote-controlled the Congress, of which he was president just once.

Historians identify Gandhi as the leader who miraculously transformed a feeble, elitist Congress founded by an Englishman as a ‘safety valve’ to ‘manage’ the frustrations of rich and powerful Indians into one of the largest mass organisations in modern history. While he was at it, he placed emphasis on launching anti-British campaigns from far-flung parts of the country, and not from metropolitan cities. Interestingly, when the British finally left India, he was not in Delhi where other leaders had gathered; he was in Bengal fasting and fighting the spread of communal hatred and mindless violence. His fast in Calcutta in 1947 temporarily brought communal riots there to a halt following the proclamation of Independence. He achieved what battalions of forces in Punjab could not, prompting the last British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten to call him a “one-man army”. Thanks to Gandhi, the Indian freedom struggle is littered with myriad

historical and political flashpoints.

Certainly, to pick out a few from them is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

For this issue, Open has selected the ones that highlight the freedom movement after the advent of Gandhi.

With the aim of narrating history through the present, we sent reporters to Champaran in Bihar, where Gandhi first experimented with satyagraha in the country; Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh, which he thought failed him; Dandi in Gujarat, where he was at his defiant best; Vaikom in Kerala, where he proved to be a skillful negotiator and also a unifier of communities; and Vedaranyam in Tamil Nadu, which makes it to this list for complementing the Dandi March, sparking an unprecedented nationwide loathing of British rule and resulting in the mainstreaming of the south.

Read on. n

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footprints of struggle Vedaranyam

A Lament from the Deep South

It was the other Dandi, led by C Rajagopalachari. Salt manufacturing in this coastal town of Tamil Nadu is in a crisis

BY Madhavankutty Pillai photographs by NATHAN G It was somewhere in the centre of town, before the small temple of Ganapati in which the idol has a finger pointing towards Sri Lanka to show Rama where his wife had been taken, that I met AS Ramamridham quite by chance. I was being shown around Vedaranyam and we had just stepped vedaranyam out of the temple (I couldn’t see the pointing finger because the sanctum was too dark) when he walked up to exchange courtesies with my host, A Vedaratnam.

Only towards the end of the conversation did I realise that Ramamridham, a retired school headmaster, was 91 years old. He looked old but not that old. He lived in a village about 10 km away and had come to the town that day for a bank errand. When the Vedaranyam march to flout the British salt law took place, he was seven years old. The year 1930 is a long way back, and any living witness would have to be a child then. That is also why there are probably only a few left who actually saw it. Today, Ramamridham is dressed all in white—dhoti, shirt, an angavastram over one shoulder, and a Gandhi topi complemented by a moustache also as white as snow.

Workers at the pans of Vedaranyam pile up raw salt before it is collected and stored

A

postage stamp released by the

Indian Government to commemorate Sardar Vedaratnam’s hundredth birth anniversary shows him clean shaven, with a strong-boned face, a thick greying shock of hair, and looking very much like the patriarch of a south Indian Tamil family. His family was and remains among the leading salt merchants of Vedaranyam.

In the 1920s, however, Vedaratnam was drawn more towards the freedom struggle than trade. His grandson says that when Vedaranyam was hosting a provincial Congress conference in 1929, Vedaratnam, as chairman of the reception committee, was keen on Mahatma Gandhi attending it.

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william vandivert/the life picture collection/getty images

Ramamridham remembers the little part that he had played in the march.

People from his village had arranged food for the satyagrahis. A metaphor employed by a close relative indicates the mood of the time—Ramamridham was told that if food is offered to a god, it is prasadam and no one can prevent its serving. But the police tried, attacking those who were going to offer it. The adults ran away from there and instead asked a group of small kids to give it, assuming that they wouldn’t be assaulted. This was where Ramamridham came in, but when he went ahead, he was spotted. “A policeman told me, ‘you are just sprouting, only three leaves have come. Why do you involve yourself? You be a good son to your father and mother’.” He didn’t listen and smuggled the food in. “I was also hungry and ate some of it myself,” he says.

Vedaranyam abounds with such stories. In the town, there is a small lake, and abutting it is a pillar with neat lines of the Indian flag’s tricolour running from top to bottom. This is a memorial to a barber named Vairappan, who, it is said, took a vow that he wouldn’t serve anyone from the government because of the action it was taking against satyagrahis. A policeman came to get a shave, but because he was in plainclothes, the barber didn’t recognise him. Halfway through, the policeman revealed his identity and mocked him, asking what had happened to his vow (another version of the story says a passerby revealed the identity to the barber). Vairappan immediately left the job half done and a half-shaven policeman hauled him to court. The magistrate gave an ultimatum, and Vairappan gave him his shaving kit and said he could do it himself. He was sentenced to six months.

It is an interesting if somewhat apocryphal story, but in Vedaranyam, it is the stuff of local legend. There are more such memorials and mini museums and it is striking how this little dot at the edge of India underwent a cultural metamorphosis because of its role in the freedom movement.

The man responsible for putting Vedaranyan on the map of Indian history was Sardar Vedaratnam Pillai, grandfather of A Vedaratnam.

“When Gandhi refused, he threatened to do a satyagraha against him on the spot. Gandhi explained to him his busy schedule and instead deputed his secretary Mahadev Desai and Sardar Patel to be present,” he says.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi decided on the salt march to Dandi.

C Rajagopalachari, one of Gandhi’s closest associates at the time, wanted to replicate the movement in the south.

His initial desire was to undertake a march against liquor manufacturing instead of salt, but it was later decided that sticking to a salt protest would have a greater impact. The Dandi March ended on 5 April 1930; the Vedaranyam march began on 13 April. Rajmohan Gandhi, in his biography of C Rajagopalachari, Rajaji: A Life, has a chapter on Vedaranyam. He writes:

The last Governor General of India C Rajagopalachari

‘C.R. had decided that his marchers would Rajagopalachari and walk about 150 miles from Trichy to a town on 16 other satyagrahis the Tanjore seaboard, Vedaranyam, which possessed convenient salt swamps and had a walked to a spot merchant called Vedaratnam Pillai who was near the coast called willing to host a battle.’

On 13 April, 97 marchers started off at 5 am.

Edanthevar and The Collector JA Thorne had sweeping authorpicked up salt. ity to arrest those who assisted in it, including They were arrested suppliers of food and accommodation. He used it full measure, employing both threats and and a trial was held violence. The march turned out to be a battle at a nearby shed of wills between the administration and the freedom fighters. Large numbers attended the meetings that were held along the way. Men and women, despite the danger they faced, defied government orders in unusual ways. Rajmohan Gandhi writes, ‘…at one halt bundles of food were hung on trees the marchers could not miss. Eventually, C.R. had to appeal against pampering the satyagrahis. Walking five miles in the morning and five in the evening—past rice-fields or groves of banana or coconut, with the Cauvery, flowing seaward, often by their side—they carried with them their larger message. At stops they fraternised with ‘untouchables’ and refrained from entering temples from which the latter were barred, swept village streets, and spoke up for Hindu-Muslim unity and against drink. And at two crowded meetings a day they preached the gospel of nonviolent revolt.’ On 28 April, the marchers reached Vedaranyam to be greeted by a vast assembly of people. The date earmarked to break the salt law was 30 April. Vedaratnam Pillai had arranged for their accommodation in a camp. (At present it is called Rajaji Park, a tiled enclosure with a pandal that is rented out by the municipality for functions.)

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Early in the morning on 30 April, Rajagopalachari and 16 of the satyagrahis walked to a spot near the coast called Edanthevar and picked up salt. They were immediately arrested and a trial was held in a nearby shed.

Rajagopalachari was sentenced to six months imprisonment and sent to jail in Trichy. Inside the compartment, he had an unexpected visitor. Gandhi writes, ‘Some minutes after C.R. was put on a train for Trichy, a small white man entered his compartment and extended his hand to the prisoner. It was Thorne.’

‘To him C.R. said: ‘Your plan was bold, but you forgot that we are in our own country.’ Thorne smiled and replied, ‘Yes, we have each tried to do our best and our worst.’ Then he ordered coffee and refreshments for C.R.’ The salt shed where Rajagopalachari was tried and jailed before being sent to Trichy exists today as an office of the Salt Department. Inside, in the room where the court was set up is a

The grandson of Sardar Vedaratnam Pillai, A Vedaratnam, a leading salt manufacturer in Vedaranyam

line of chairs; nearby is the prison, a small room with iron bars on the door and a window that looks out to the railway line.

In the Salt Department office, I met Vijaychandran Nair and Benny George, deputy superintendents posted there.

Salt is a Central subject that comes under the Commerce and Industry Ministry. At the time of independence, India was deficientin salt production; now, it exports the commodity. “The Department monitors all aspects of the lands connected with salt. Production, price monitoring [and] distribution, so that salt which is produced only in a few states is available everywhere, [apart from] export monitoring, labour welfare, etcetera,” says George.

In Vedaranyam, land is leased out for 20-year periods to salt manufacturers by the Salt Department. George says there are about 750 salt manufacturers in all, of which over 600 have small holdings of a few acres or less. In the case of such holdings, those who work the land are both owners and labourers; husband-and-wife duos who are seen working early in the morning on their

land often work for the big manufacturers later Since Independence, in the day. When George joined the Department the Salt Department in the late 80s, he had been posted here. He says it was then a place of mostly thatched huts and has been the temple’s narrow roads. But then the 2004 Tsunami ravperpetual lessee. aged Vedaranyam, and in its place came a better developed coastal town of concrete houses.

It pays Rs 4,200 The Tsunami affected the salt pans along the annually to the coast, but it took its biggest toll on the fishing temple and collects villages nearby. In the village of Arukattuthurai, I met Natarajan on the beach cleaning the engine Rs 5.5 lakh by of his boat. On the morning of 26 December subleasing the plots 2004, he had been checking his nets there when he saw a large wave. It was only when it got closer that he sensed danger, and, taking the boat’s engine, started running. When he looked back, he saw a huge wall of water. He decided the engine was not worth dying for and dropped it to run faster. But by then, the water had overtaken him. “I managed to hang on to some shrubs, and when the force decreased, climbed a coconut tree and waited it out,” he said. Twenty-eight others, mostly children, were not so lucky and died. Most of them had come to do their morning ablutions on the beach because the village had no toilets in the houses. But the village too got better houses after the relief money poured in. The fishermen got new boats.

Ahead of the Salt Department office is a memorial pillar marking the spot where Rajagopalachari collected salt and broke the law. There is no one there in

The Sri Vedaranyeswarar Swami temple, which holds the original titles to Vedaranyam’s salt pans

21 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

A girl at the Kasturba Gandhi Kanya Gurukulam, an ashram set up by Sardar Vedaratnam Pillai

the afternoon. The salt that he picked up was something called spontaneous salt.

It is created naturally—the high tide on full and new moon days brings the sea in; and after it retreats, the water collected in pockets takes a week or so to evaporate, leaving deposits of salt behind. “When the British ruled, it was illegal to even take this salt, something which is made by no one and given by nature,” says Vedaratnam.

The population of Vedaranyam is about 70,000 and at least three-fourths of all people are directly or indirectly dependent on salt. There are 2425.95 acres of salt lands whose titles rests with the Sri Vedaranyeswarar Swami temple, around which the town came up. In the 18th century, the East India Company forced the temple to lease these patches of land to them. Since Independence, the Salt Department has been their perpetual lessees. It pays Rs 4,200 annually to the temple, and, according to the salt manufacturers, collects Rs 5.5 lakh from them by subleasing the plots.

This, says M Meenakshisundaram, an ex-MLA who had represented the place thrice and is also president of the Vedaraniam Small Scale Salt Producers’ Federation, is unfair; and what is more, the Department Mahatma Gandhi recently raised the rent and assignment fee on the leased land by a huge proportion. But had decided on a salt the biggest problem the salt producers face is march to Dandi. of transport. In 2002, the Railways had C Rajagopalachari, stopped services to the place in order to convert the track from metre to broad gauge. one of Gandhi’s Back then, 7,000 wagons of salt used to be closest associates, loaded in Vedaranyam every year. That stopped abruptly and the salt manufacturers wanted to replicate had to depend on road transport by trucks. the movement The gauge conversion, still to be completed after 14 years, moves along at a snail’s pace in the south 22 open 25 august 2014

with no end in sight. There is no sea port, and transport by road is both expensive and unreliable. “We need a bulk transportation system like Railways so that [salt manufacturers] can send large quantities. They are now dependent on lorries. Once the railway line comes, they can easily load some 2,200 tonnes at one go,” says Vijaychandran Nair.

Meenakshisundaram took the delay to court, which ordered the Railways to present a report every three months on the status of the work. But it has not led to any improvement. Yet, even as profits decline and disappear, the people of Vedaranyam have few other livelihood options. “The families here only depend on salt production and sale,” says Meenakshisundaram.

A few years ago, they also became odd collateral victims of the 2G and Coal Scam when India’s Supreme Court ruled that State-owned natural resources must be auctioned. Till then, the locals who leased the salt pans took it for granted that the deal would get renewed automatically after 20 years.

But the change in policy means that this is no longer true. There will be an auction and whoever bids the highest tender rate will be given the salt land.

The salt producers say that they have in-

vested a lot in the land already—in the form of digging wells, making channels to get sea water in, making reservoirs to hold the water, and putting up facilities for storage, roads, electricity, pumping, transport, handling and so on. “These are all done by producers with no help from the Department,” says Vedaratnam, who is also president of the Vedaraniam Salt Manufacturers and Merchants Association.

In an open tender, there would be the danger of big corporations coming and outbidding them, says V Senthil, proprietor of Sri Magaalakhsmi Salt, whose family has 40 acres there. “All our investments will be lost,” he fears.

This year, the price manufacturers are getting for salt is very low, and this means that people in Vedaranyam are in for a difficult time. As soon as you exit the town on the road towards the coast, the salt pans unfurl. On the side of the road, you see salt pyramids. Some are covered with dried Palmyra leaves to be stored to be sold later, after the Northeast monsoon arrives in November and pushes the price up as supply falls in the absence of sunny days to dry the sea water.

The landscape is breathtaking. Salt production, it is said, is not mining but agriculture, and it is easy to see why. As far as the eye can go, there are waterlogged fields where instead of green swaying stalks, little white mounds gleam in the sun. It is afternoon and there are only some stray workers with their wooden rakes piling up the salt.

Most of the toil will happen in the early morning, when it is cool and these fields come alive with men and women.

Salt is corrosive and sticks to the body and it is not pleasant to be there for too long. But this is what life is like in Vedaranyam.

W

e go ahead on the road and en-

ter the Kodaikarai Reserve Forest.

There are an extraordinary number of monkeys on the road and it takes us past a checkpoint into the Point Calimere Wildlife and Bird Sanctuary.

Suddenly, there is a rolling meadow on which black buck and spotted deer are

Vedaratnam made a casual remark. “Our salt is dying,” he said. It was a note of sadness in a place that salt had made one of the freedom movement’s most important landmarks languidly gathered in little herds.

Further on, at the end of the road is the lighthouse of Point Calimere, and then the beach from which 30 km across the sea is Sri Lanka.

The beach also has the remains of what is thought to be an ancient lighthouse of the Chola period, but it is just a clump of bricks about a metre high that leans backwards.

You imagine the lighthouse as a leaning tower, but who knows?

And then back again to the meadow and the deer, and then, before us, Rajaji Park, where the salt satyagrahis rested, as it walking with unhurried grace and currently stands crossing the road with nonchalance, a line of wild horses. We are soon back at the salt pans.

When the Tsunami hit, the road and the railway track had protected one side of the salt pans. Vedaratnam’s land was on the other side and he suffered a huge loss. He points to some plots abutting the roadside and says that they are prime locations where salt can easily be stored and sold. But they are empty and brown.

“Those who have the lease just don’t find it viable enough to make salt,” he says.

Many salt producers don’t have the capacity to stock salt and sell it later for a higher price in winter. Many are forced to go for distress sales.

For the salt producers of Vedaranyam to survive, the Railways need to start operating the line again. They need an industry here of products like soda ash and caustic soda that use salt as a rawmaterial. They need their leases to continue.

And also infrastructure and tax concessions from the government. None of these looks forthcoming.

My first conversation with Vedaratnam was in the office of Kasturba Gandhi Kanya Gurukulam, the school and ashram for underprivileged girls that his grandfather had set up. Over 600 girls live there, and the school educates 1,100 more as well. It was a place that had a history to it and had witnessed the association of many great personalities like Vinoba Bhave, C Rajagopalachari and K Kamaraj. As we sat talking of the crisis that the traditional salt manufacturers are going through, Vedaratnam made a casual remark. “Our salt is dying,” he said.

It was a note of sadness in a place that salt had made one of the freedom movement’s most important landmarks. n 23 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

The freedom

I S S U E

HYPHENATED TO HISTORY Brinda Karat born in 1947

It’s all about individual choices” India according to a freedom child

As told to Kumar Anshuman

T

he concept of freedom has several components. First, certain-

ly, when we commemorate 1947, it is the sovereignty of India and freedom from any kind of imperial or colonial rule. When we think of freedom, we think of India free from the control of these countries that utilise India for their own interests. The second aspect of freedom is certainly freedom of the people, that is, freedom from wants, poverty, oppression and inequality. The third and most important is the freedom of individuals to live their lives within social contexts which do not impinge on freedom in the name of tradition or religion or any other fundamentalism.

Therefore, you have national freedom, socio-economic freedom and the individual freedom of choice. This is what should represent a free country.

I was born in 1947, and in the past 67 years if we look at how close or how far we are from the goal of a free country, it raises several questions. There have been many areas where we have advanced and have been able to encourage independence of thought. There are many areas where we have How can an registered remarkable growth, be it industry or scientific development, and have asserted international an independent position, particularly in the institution such as earlier years of independence. But when we look at today, there is a great decline in the very the World Trade concept of sovereignty, and that is also linked Organization, World to the changing correlation of forces at the international level. A group of developed Bank or International countries led by the US thinks that it can deter- Monetary Fund decide mine what freedom means for the world. the blueprint for our Today there is a concept of freedom which has to be linked with the concept of benefits for development?

the so-called ‘developed world’ because they have the power. This is colonialism in a new form and method.

Unfortunately, the classes who rule India today, the governments which have represented India over the past so many years, have compromised on basic issues. This is totally against what we meant by freedom in 1947.

How can an international institution such as the WTO, World Bank or IMF decide the blueprint for our development? We know what is best for us and therefore why should we accept, in the name of free trade or opening up the market, any regime that doesn’t suit our people? The concept of a global world is a concept with a deeply negative impact on the sovereignty of nations. I am not saying India has to isolate itself to defend its freedom. But freedom cannot be linked to the inequalities which are there in most international institutions today. I am concerned that the concept of sovereignty is being restricted and subverted in the interests of other countries. India has its own parliament, and the Parliament has to decide what is

ashish sharma

ho/indian defence ministry/ap

People gather for India’s first Independence Day celebrations at Raisina Hill in August 1947

good or bad for the country. We have always said that all international agreements must get the approval of the Parliament. No government, however big its majority is, should have the right to sign an agreement that has an important impact on Indian sovereignty.

When the world is talking today about the Thomas Piketty book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, on how capitalism has an intrinsic aspect [that fosters] inequality, India is a country which has one of the highest gross inequalities in the entire world today. There are inequalities which have been driven by certain economic policies. India is in the midst of the worst kind of unfreedom. India, in spite of its claims to be on a trajectory of growth, gets rated poorly in all human development or economic inequality reports.

The inequality is also linked to the question of caste in India and the use of so-called ‘social engineering’ for narrow political purposes by important groups and political parties. They maintain the status quo with the assumption that different caste combinations lead to power. Sadly, politics today is all about power, be it electoral or parliamentary, and they try to combine caste groups without addressing the inequalities within a caste or between castes. They have given up India is in the universalisation for caste-based social engineering and private policies. With the midst of the worst BJP in power, we have all the toxic elements kind of unfreedom. that lead to a greater divide in society.

Communalism, Communalism, casteism and corporatism are the three Cs which define India today. casteism and Last but not least, freedom is about indicorporatism are vidual choices. Today we have a situation where there are social sanctions for the the three Cs which most heinous crimes, such as honour define the country killings and rape based on caste and religion. You have organisations that have today 26 open 25 august 2014

coined regressive [terms] such as ‘love jihad’ [an alleged effort of young Muslim men to convert young women of other communities to Islam by feigning love]. How does [such terminology] fit within the framework of the Indian Constitution? How can you have the subversion of festivals to make it Hindu versus Muslim? It is astonishing to see political leaders associating themselves with such an anti-society approach.

The fruit of freedom has been destroyed by toxic beings in our polity.

Women in India have asserted themselves to break barriers. That is why there is a backlash from conservative forces in our country, which is supported in many cases by some political parties. When orthodoxy gets space through political representation, it is a very serious development.

I think the youth of this country have a great responsibility to carry forward the strengths of freedom. I would like to end with a message to them: when you dream, always remember it cannot be based on deprivations that lead to nightmares for others. n Brinda Karat is a member of the CPM’s Politburo

Av e n u e s

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The definition of luxury is evolving with time and what was considered luxury in the past is now hygiene. Today, nothing less than personalized services will work.

There is a certain segment of population in the metros in the age group of 32 to 38, working in corporates who are looking for homes which match their aspirations, are eco-friendly and safe and secure.

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giving unprecedented value in the form of competitively priced and well designed products.

To that end, GPL works with the best designers, architects and contractors within India and around the globe to deliver imaginative and sustainable spaces. By bringing together the best talent, Godrej Properties works to create developments that will last into the future, and foresee the needs of each and every resident. They are currently developing residential, commercial and township projects spread across 9.5 million square meters (102 million square feet) in 12 cities.

Their customers are the key pillars of their growth and as an organisation GPL believes in complete transparency in all our dealings.

GPL makes sure that all their projects are pre-approved by major banks in India, which not only provides the assurance to their customers but also helps them make a secure buying decision. They work alongside banks and offer customers some very interesting finance schemes including the subvention schemes which provide a seamless home buying experience.

GPL has tie-ups with all the major banks and housing finance companies in India. n

Of colonial mindS and India’s political and cultural life is still subservient to borrowed ideas

Watching the Other World’s Spirits from the Gardens of Babylon by riyas komu

The freedom

I S S U E

ESSAY

other demons

BY Murali Balaji

Murali Balaji is with the Hindu American Foundation. A Fulbright Specialist and former journalist, he had previously taught at Temple University, Lincoln University and Penn State University

F

or second-generation Indian-Americans

like me whose parents left the country in the 1960s, Indian independence is more of a peripheral emotion than something tangible. We can understand it from the oral histories of our parents and grandparents, but the actual celebration of Indian independence across the Diaspora—replete with festivals, flag-waving parades and other social gatherings—still tends to befit the idea of a nationalistic aesthetic. That’s why writing about this issue is a mixed bag for me: I’m both physically and emotionally distant from yet intellectually engaged with the idea of an independent India.

While the concept of Indian independence—and the reality of Partition for those whose families were impacted by it—becomes more distant with every generation within India (and even less significant for those living outside), the expanse of the Diaspora remains beholden to and in many ways imprisoned by the legacy of colonialism. Every major discussion about Indian—or South Asian—identity, as well as the politics that revolve around them, seems to spring from the colonial framework, driven by and defined by it.

When Indian-born scholars such as Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha—drawing from the ideas of the late Edward Said—talk about the ‘postcolonial’ position, they seem to emphasise the ‘post’, when it’s still questionable whether we have actually gone past. Indeed, colonialism is like a zombie to the Diaspora—not alive but not dead either. Like the undead, it keeps coming back because we keep denying it exists. When I speak to young Indian-Americans about colonialism, I often feel that we’re having a conversation inside a barn surrounded by zombies. We know the undead are all around us, yet we seem to ignore or downplay their presence (cue your favourite horror movie).

Within India, the denialism seems to be much stronger because independent India was tethered to the British colonial era. Many of India’s leading nationalists were either Macaulayites or devotees of Harold Laski, the British political mind whose ideas of secularism were digested in full by leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Krishna Menon (though Laski himself was a proud Zionist). As a result, India’s intellectual development was monopolised from the very beginning by those who, unwittingly or not, embraced the Macaulay idea of ‘persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and

India’s intellectual development was monopolised from the very beginning by the Macaulay idea of ‘persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes’ expanse of colonialism’s influence.

Some on the right—particularly Hindu right-wingers—have disproportionately cast blame on colonialism for everything that ails India, while others on the left have framed their own critiques of the Indian state from a Eurocentric binary. It has thus become extremely difficult to have an organic, homegrown assessment of what India is and what it means to be Indian today. Indian independence still seems to be fraught with a sort of Stockholm syndrome when it comes to developing a postEuropean framework of dialogue.

The Colonised Mind ron burton/keystone/getty images

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at 10 Downing Street with VK Krishna Menon in 1949

in intellect’. Indeed, the independence movement thinkers rejected British rule but sought to mimic British views and society-building paradigms. Concepts of secularism and religion, sex and sexuality, and even caste and class, were driven almost exclusively by the colonial narrative.

Historian Ramachandra Guha has written about what this sort of intellectual development has done to the study of Indian history, noting it has been encrusted into a rigid partisan and ideological binary: you are either a Marxist or a right-wing Hindu (or, like Guha, a Nehruvian), thereby precluding anyone who falls outside those categories. Not only has this made discourse next to impossible, it has shrunk the potential for debate and turned India’s intellectual class into a caricature of itself. Many Indian intellectuals, particularly on the left and living outside of India now, chase a Hindutva bogeyman, in part because they were never able to separate the religion from the political ideology or adapt to the changing discourses on religious identity that have shaped the Diaspora. To them, Hinduism and Hindutva are one and the same, whether you live in India, Bhutan, Bali, Guyana, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, the United Kingdom or the United States.

As Shiv Visvanathan wrote several months ago, India’s intellectual class never seemed to accept the fact that religion could co-exist with rationalism.

This is why colonialism remains the zombie gnawing at India’s intellectual, social, political and cultural fabric. Very few Indians are appreciative of the 30 open 25 august 2014

One of the most devastating consequences of colonialism is India’s collective failure to tangibly understand its impact, and how virtually every aspect of society has been impacted to the core by the colonial era. Indian bureaucracy, jurisprudence, and its magnificent— and often decaying—physical structures are all vestiges of the colonial mastery over natives. Ironically, the nearly three centuries of sustained colonialism—whether done indirectly through British, Portuguese or French trade administrators or directly through each country’s rule—was not syncretic.

Colonial administrators might have borrowed ideas or tried to placate communal disputes, but there was never a semblance of discourse or equal exchange of ideas. Colonial frameworks were imposed upon Indians.

In many ways, Indians became what Frantz Fanon described of the plight of the natives in France’s African colonies in the 1960s: perpetually inferior and

unable to break away from the psychological bondage of the mandate of French superiority. It’s what many scholars later termed ‘internal inferiorisation’. Indians were educated in missionary schools, socialised under norms that the British—and, to much lesser, localised degrees, the French and Portuguese—reified through laws of that era. Even India’s history, one that is being debated by what Guha calls ‘captive ideologues’, was written primarily by the British or those schooled by them. The study of Hinduism was defined by missionary frameworks. This isn’t to discount the Orientalist perspective as a legitimate view, but it’s also ludicrous to downplay the influence such a perspective has had in shaping how Indians understand Hinduism which got conflated with caste and ritualism—two things

that Indian independence leaders wanted nothing to do with.

As such, the study of Hindu thought became stunted within India—and lampooned by many intellectuals—and began to flourish outside, which is likely why many Hindus in the West Indies, South Africa and even the United States are much more philosophically versed in Hinduism than their counterparts in India. It’s why so many Hindus in India—particularly among the educated elite—are reluctant to identify themselves as Hindu for fear of violating some rhetoric of secularism. Similarly, even the exchange of ideas among Indians of different religions (and non-beliefs) has become essentialised to a narrative of communalism.

And this is the rub of discussions about India’s relationship with its colonial past. Like an abuse victim, the country has collectively repressed the extent to which colonialism left a self-sustaining—and traumatic—imprint on the country’s psyche and the views of its post-Independence Diaspora. To many, the British continue to be seen as a civilising force that somehow managed and mollified communal tensions, when in fact, the opposite was more often true.

The British imposed a sustained campaign of psychological violence matched only by the pilfering of the Subcontinent’s natural resources and cultural wealth, and they exacerbated—and in some cases helped create—the communal tensions that have played a significant role in the country’s social and political narrative over the past 60-plus years. Even India’s controversial laws, such as its archaic ban on homosexuality, are relics of that colonial past.

The Modern Aesthetic British Prime Minister Winston Churchill scans enemy positions in Italy in 1944

afp

Perhaps the most troubling impact of colonialism’s zombie-like presence is that India’s post-Independence race to modernity has been shackled by a regressive discourse that frames the West as an ideal to mimic. This is the modern aesthetic—a binary in which mimicking Western patterns of consumption is somehow tantamount to progress. Indeed, the ideological battles over ‘Westernisation’, and the frequently moronic comments from Indian politicians about its evils, actually divert attention from a larger issue: the inherent belief of Indians that modernisation and traditionalism are inextricably intertwined with the East-West dichotomy. Such a belief premises progress upon the notion of conspicuous consumption being the great liberator. By this logic, wearing short-shorts or dancing to Pharrell’s Happy is somehow progressive, as opposed to substantive efforts like an intellectual deconstruction of Kabir or the eco-feminism of Vandana Shiva.

This isn’t to say that we need to be angry at the British—or the French or Portuguese, for that matter—and rally to demand reparations. But what we must do, if India and its Diaspora are to progress holistically, is to acknowledge the trauma and work to address it in a constructive way. That would mean processing the extent to which the country’s psyche and that of its people have been profoundly shaped by the rule, norms, and biases of ‘Others’. Perhaps then we can achieve true independence and stop measuring ourselves by the way others have defined us. Until that happens, however, we are still staring into the mirror with the zombie staring back at us. n 31 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

The freedom

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footprints of struggle Champaran

Where Gandhi Became the Mahatma

This village, where Gandhi put satyagraha to test for the first time in India, was until recently a crime haven. Signs of recovery are visible now

BY PR RAMESH photographs by PRASHANT RAVI When Khan Bahadur Azizul Huq, one of Motihari’s best-

known police officers, left his fingerprint on the history of Bihar’s East Champaran district and the world through his work with Edward Henry on the nascent science of champaran finger print classification, he was in the company of illustrious men. Among them, the workmen who built the world’s tallest Buddhist stupa, the Kesaria stupa (dated between 200 CE and 750 CE), and one of the world’s tallest leaders, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The region, which later became synonymous kidnappings as much as its sugarcane fields in which kidnappers could hide, has shown considerable lethargy in both the discovery and celebration of its heritage, though. It was much

later that the world dusted off layers of local apathy to reveal whorls of greatness left behind by famous fingerprints.

The district’s Buddhist legacy was only discovered as late as 1998 during excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India. And it was only in 1972, 55 years after Gandhi’s launch of his Champaran Satyagraha, that Bihar’s Governor DK Barooch laid the foundation stone for the Gandhi Memorial Pillar here. The 48-foot long chunar stone pillar, situated in the exact spot in Motihari where Gandhi, on 18 April 1917, was produced in the court of the

then Sub Divisional Magistrate and charged with violating Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). India’s Independence Movement had begun.

Interestingly, Gandhi had made his acquaintance with Champaran and its people’s woes only a few months earlier. This was at a gathering of nearly 2,000 delegates in Lucknow for the 31st session of the Indian National Congress held in December 1916. This historic city of the United Provinces would prove to be the launchpad for his Swaraj—‘self-rule’—movement in the neighbouring state of Bihar. The 1916 meeting was the party’s first since it had split five years earlier, with extremists and moderates parting ways. Gandhi was there with his son Devdas, alongside Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and it had been almost two years since his return from South Africa; at the behest of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, he had spent the past 22 months with his ear to the ground, listening to the problems of people he met across the length and breadth of the country.

Asked to speak on relations between tenants and farmers in Champaran while the Subjects’ Committee discussed two resoluA pillar commemorating Gandhi’s tions to be passed, the flabbergasted lawyersuccessful satyagraha in Champaran turned-political-activist from South Africa begged politely to study the situation in depth before talking about it.

Champaran’s farmlands by then were already dyed in indigo unrest, which would soon become a symbol of rebellion against an inequitable order under the Raj. It was Raj Kumar Shukla, the son of a rich Brahmin, who initiated Gandhi into the complex politics of indigo cultivation in an area dominated by two big landowners, the Maharaja of Bettiah and Rajkumar Babu of Madhuban.

The district of Champaran then, as now, was a Hindu-majority area with a sizeable Muslim population and small number of Christians.

The region was also home to a small but influential number of Bhumihars, the group to which the two landowners belonged.

Hundreds of Champaran’s villages, however, were not managed by landlords, but leased to tothikadars, or contractors, of whom the most influential were European planters of indigo shrubs, the extract of which was used as a natural dye for cloth and other products. The first indigo factory in the region had come up in 1813, with this dye industry witnessing a boom after the 1850s.

Synthetic indigo dyes developed by Germany had begun to pose a threat to natural indigo, only to be rescued by the First World War when the former’s supply was affected.

By 1917, greed for profits had led to the establishment of a ‘planter raj’ in half of Champaran. A highly exploitative system was devised by European planters through their local henchmen who would force productive land to be sown with indigo plants, even destroying the standing food 34 open 25 august 2014

crops of farmers to intimidate them.

Farmers were forced to sow indigo, at the cost of other crops, in lieu of small advances of money before the start of the cultivation season. This was the infamous ‘Tinkathia’ system.

The indigo farmers of Champaran had until then been considered slightly better off than their counterparts in neighbouring Bengal. Deenbandhu Mitra’s 1860 play Neel Darpan had brilliantly captured the oppression of indigo farmers in Bengal, which saw

sourced photo

revolts by farmers and a law brought in to bring some semblance of humanity in how they were dealt with.

Gandhi, introduced for the first time into this complex play of oppressed farmers and their oppressors, sought to meet all stakeholders, including the planters, to acquaint himself with the crisis. The local administration was wary of letting Gandhi in, but the provincial government did not share its fear that such a visit would whip up anti-European sentiment among the local farmers.

Europe was set for its own convulsions; on 16 April 1917, Lenin had reached Russia to steer the Communist Revolution. Two days later, in Champaran, Gandhi was served a notice by District Magistrate WB Heycock to ‘leave on the next available train as he was danger to public peace’.

A defiant Gandhi announced he would violate the order in response to his ‘higher conscience’.

In his 1928 book, Satyagraha in Champaran, Rajendra Prasad, then a young lawyer who would later become India’s first President, recorded Gandhi’s statement before the magistrate: ‘As a law-abiding citizen my first instinct would be, as it was, to obey the order served upon me. But I could not do so without doing violence to my sense of duty to those for whom I came.

I feel that I could just now serve them only by remaining in their midst. I could not therefore voluntarily retire.

Amidst this conflict of duty I could only throw the responsibility of removing me from them on the administration. I am fully conscious of the fact that a person, holding in the public life of India a position such as I do, has to be most careful in setting examples. It is my firm belief that in the complex constitution under which we are living the only safe and honourable course for a self-respecting man is, in the circumstances such as face me, to do what I have decided to do, that is, to ‘submit without protest to the penalty of dis obedience. I venture to make this statement not in any way in extenuation of the penalty to be awarded against me, but to show that 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.”

The magistrate’s efforts to get him to apply for bail also failed when he said he did not have the requisite Rs 100 to pay for it. An exasperated court eventually let him go free.

Gandhi had successfully launched his first satyagraha, a non-violent movement of civil disobedience against the British Raj. The district administration, from that point onwards, helped him meet planters, farmers and representatives of the local community to assess and record the plight of indigo cultivators. This movement saw the emergence of future leaders like Rajendra Prasad and Anugrah Narayan Sinha, who joined HS Polak, CF Andrews, Madan Mohan Malaviya and many others in holding public meetings and hartals to generate awareness of the problem.

As a member of the Champaran Enquiry Committee, Gandhi played an active role in its proceedings, and in the three months that followed, he galvanised public opinion in India and Britain against the exploitative system. The Enquiry Committee’s recommendations led to the passage of the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1917 that abolished the Tinkathia system. This first victory was to form Gandhi’s model for a sustained satyagraha against foreign rule.

Gandhi had made his acquaintance with Champaran and its people’s woes only a few months earlier. This was at a gathering of nearly 2,000 delegates in Lucknow for the 31st session of the Indian National Congress

I

f George Orwell, archly linked to Champaran’s freedom movement and

farming narrative, had been able to foresee the region’s future in the early years of the 20th century when he was born, he may not have imagined the things that would come to define it over the next hundred years. Champaran’s farming sector defined its identity well into the modern era. Close on 110 years after 1866, the district was divided into East and West, and Motihari became the district headquarters of East Champaran. Along the way, the distinct purple-blue of indigo and the opium haze of its fields gave way to rows of tall sugarcane that have lined its rural landscape for decades now. Sugar mills, once Champaran’s most visible landmarks, gradually began to crumble even as the region became infamous for kidnappings.

As with the rest of its heritage, Champaran, and in particular the town of Motihari, was oblivious to its connection to England’s most influential author of the 20th Century, Eric Arthur Blair, until as late as 2003. On the 100th birth anniversary of George Orwell (his pen name), the author of Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty Four (written in the late 1940s), dozens of journalists descended on the bustling town. Motihari, which had just begun to boom, woke up to yet another illustrious son, a champion of social justice who had written visceral books against totalitarianism.

As a political ideology, social justice was still resonant in the land of Orwell’s birth and had changed its socio-political profile dramatically. Unbeknownst to the satyagrahis led by Gandhi, young Blair was born in 1903 in a remote corner of Motihari, the town that marked the launch of the Champaran Satyagraha. Blair’s father, who had been posted there as a deputy in Bihar’s opium department, may have packed his son off as a one-year-old along with his wife and daughter to England, but the link remains—and explains plans by local authorities to build and dedicate a museum to Orwell in Motihari.

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Mutton sellers in Champaran who have turned the area near the pillar commemorating the satyagraha into an informal market

M

eanwhile, as with the socio-politics, Champaran’s rural landscape too

had begun to change its hues. Sugarcane farming collapsed with the mills and the region’s farmers discovered yet another distinct colour of identity: turmeric. The crop lent itself to intercropping with rabi crops, and could be sown even in the summer. In wetlands, turmeric grew roots in rotation with paddy, sugarcane and banana. In gardens, turmeric, so far grown primarily in the south and the west, began to be grown in rotation with sugarcane, chilli, onion, garlic, vegetables, pulses, wheat, ragi and maize. With a good support price, the new farm gold turned Champaran’s rural fields yellow.

Connectivity by road and rail to places as far flung as Kolkata and Kathmandu, Jaipur and Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Muzzafarpur meant that Champaran’s current generation of farmers could procure optimum prices for their produce even while changing the agricultural profile by growing a crop that was earlier only produced in the south and the west of the country. By 2011, when the then Chief Minister Nitish Kumar announced a plan to revive the region’s sugar industry, Champaran had already charted its own economic revival. Smaller towns such as Mehsi, entry points for travellers from Patna to Raxaul, on the Nepal border, carved out a niche for themselves with pearl buttons made of oyster shells. Raxaul, just 52 km from East Champaran’s district headquarters and closer still from Nepal’s second biggest town Birganj, gained both name for the free-flow of labour either way and notoriety for the smuggling of everything from PDS foodgrain to subsidised urea and kerosene across the border.

Consequently, it also gained disrepute for housing some of the most corrupt officials in various departments.

Today’s boomtown Motihari is a far cry from the muddy bylanes and pathways of its past in the early 20th century. The town has long lost its memory of indigo inequity and unabashedly rushed to embrace the glitter-and-bling of new bungalows and swanky apartments on either side of wide, well-lit streets.

In the centre of town, the chunar stone pillar commemorating Gandhi’s

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Champaran Satyagraha, designed by Nand Lal Bose and dedicated to the nation in 1978, still stands. Every evening, townspeople still throng around this landmark, but for a reason that neither Gandhi nor Orwell nor Huq would have dreamt of: mutton.

As the sun starts to dip, young men on motorbikes drive in with their wares, stop close to the pillar, hook hangers up on the walls of nearby buildings, and begin hawking what they have. Large chunks of skinned and marinated mutton, sliced with shiny cleavers on blocks of wood, their price haggled over, are purchased and then make their way to homes and hearths across town. The interstices of these makeshift meat havens are sharply defined by shiny artificial jewellery, shoes and skirts and make-up kits, mobile phones, cameras, T-shirts and cheap jeans and perfumes, bike accessories and wall hangings with the faces of deities peering out— all the shining shibboleths of an urban shanty town, most of it of Chinese make, brought in via Birganj and Raxaul.

Boomtown Motihari, like others before it, has grown like a Whirlpool ad into a town without a fingerprint. In an age when the once-chilling connotations of ‘Big Brother’ and ‘thought crimes’ have been long bypassed. n

The freedom

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HYPHENATED TO HISTORY topsy mathew born in 1975

Let there be diversity in political expression” Freedom according to an Emergency child

As told to rajni george

S

oon after the Emergency, the country reverted to multi-party poli-

tics. Very quickly, it receded from that short period of totalitarian rule.

In a lot of ways, a couple of decades of a typical democracy has genuinely wiped memories clear. When I look at how early days shape someone’s thinking around politics and political freedom, something to keep in mind is that, growing up, one of the early experiences you have is family members going to vote. When you see large contingents of your family going in to vote for various political beliefs, it shows that there is room for different political thought. They are breaking into more democratic notions of freedom; I see a big part of democratic politics being vibrant.

The biggest aspect of change which has happened over the last several decades is the decline of national politics or national parties, changing to more regional parties; therefore more regional views and demands seem to get fulfilled, which is going to drive or which has driven a large part of change. A state like Uttar Pradesh, a creation like Telangana, these are all creations of A couple of decades of regional, small politics—moving away a typical democracy from 1975.

Economically speaking, across parties, most has genuinely people are talking the same language. It will boil down to execution. A government gets wiped memories judged by the people every five years. To me, clear. There is room the changes that can happen which can imfor different political prove economic freedom in the country are going to be: a much more liberalised regime in thought now

terms of foreign investment and a much freer currency, where capital flows in and out of the country are much less restricted than they are today. Fundamentally, making finance and the benefits of the economy available to the masses. I was a firm believer in the trickle down; I don’t think it trickles down fast enough. For the size of population that we have, if it doesn’t get to the bottom fast enough— this is a problem.

While your line of work does influence people’s way of thinking, personal freedom is what is paramount in my eyes. This is the ability to communicate what you truly believe. Also, the ability to assimilate differing sets of cultures comfortably. Not with fear, not with prejudice.

In some ways, from a career standpoint, mindset, thoughts and beliefs are well-formed by the time you are finishing high school. I still remember Manmohan Singh’s inaugural budget

Topsy Mathew BM Irshad

The Delhi Police disperse a mob protesting Indira Gandhi’s arrest in 1978 after the Emergency Kish/AFP

speech, which was maybe when I was 15 or 16, and which clearly did have an impact: a vision of a more liberal, Westernised economy had its appeal.

The career line I chose was investment banking; a developed market phenomenon which started doing well in the mid to early 1990s. I chose to get into banking at a very early stage, through mergers and acquisitions.

The concept of freedom is driven by a broader environment than liberalisation. You see it growing up, it’s something you experience. I spent a large part of my youth in the Middle East— as part of a migrant population which is in some ways transient. It’s known that this is not home. Everyone knows you’re there for a period of time and heading back.

Similarly, I worked in Hong Kong and Japan. If you’re local, you do have less of a glass ceiling, which I didn’t think would exist in India. People confuse India for a billion people, but that’s not necessarily equal to a large amount of talent. India is still talent-short. The opportunity for individuals is greater.

There is less of a glass ceiling, but there were still less trained professionals, at that point of time, so I came back. There was some level of nostalgia to come back. When I did it, I thought there was

a lot of opportunity. I made that choice about 12 years back. This dwelled on the point that India was developing and changing. What the 1990s onward offered was a very different kind of economic growth.

Today, the set of people who can go overseas, travel and educate themselves is much broader than it used to be in the 1980s. Economic liberalisation has benefitted people in enabling them to do things like this, which in the past was very much restricted to the upper echelons. Today, you have an average middle class family taking an educational loan to study within the country or outside.

Those choices exist.

India in my mind needs tremendous amounts of growth to keep this boiling pot in place. The Keralite who went overseas to work and came back to India to work, for example, keeps doing this. You might want to work in one place and live somewhere else; work abroad and live here, or live here and work abroad.

People try to go to a lot of places, much more than before.

For me, choice is also about the freedom to be in a non-metro, to choose where to live. It’s a personal choice. I left Hong Kong to move to Bombay. Today, my setting up a second home in Kerala and spending as much time as I can here is a personal choice. An architect described luxury to be freedom. So freedom can be the freedom to experience green, the outdoors, wildlife.

Freedom is firstly of expression. Secondly, to exist and function in a manner wherein you feel most comfortable. This doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be expressed.

Freedom is making Can people live anywhere, say anything they the benefits of the want, have sexual preferences that are broad? economy available to Can I live in any building in Bombay, even the the masses. Today, an vegetarian ones? These are all aspects of freedom that are important. Are we there yet? No, average middle-class but we should not regress on this concept. n

family takes a loan to study within the country or outside

Topsy Mathew is managing director of Standard Chartered India. These are his personal views

mool lotus by sidharth

The freedom

I S S U E

ESSAY

she is on a high

Indian women may have made their mark in several fields of excellence. Newer horizons are still waiting for them. Are they up to it?

BY Vivek Wadhwa and Shwanika Narayan

S

Vivek Wadhwa is a US-based entrepreneur of Indian origin and an academic; Shwanika Narayan is a San Francisco-based journalist ilicon Valley has long been considered the perfect

meritocracy. Or so it was thought. Just five years ago, the subject of gender disparity in the tech field was hotly debated.

While gradual progress has been made in terms of highlighting the issue over the years, the recent release of diversity reports from tech giants such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Twitter, speak for itself: there was and is a gender problem.

A few years ago when a technology conference was hosted by the popular blog TechCrunch, the only women on stage were staff and a circus performer. Of the more than 100 companies featured, there was not one led by a woman. The audience was mostly young White males with a few token Indian and Chinese men.

The financiers fared no better. Almost all of Silicon Valley’s investment firms were male dominated. The few women found on their

websites were either in marketing or human resources. Venture Capital firms, or VCs, were the worst offenders—of the 89 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded.com list of top VCs, only one was a woman.

So this begs the fundamental question: are there differences in backgrounds between men and women entrepreneurs? Research concludes that there are none.

Men and women have almost the same motivations and success factors. However, women do have many advantages over men. To start with, firms founded by women are more capital-efficient than those founded by men. Women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates. Venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 per cent higher than those by men; and organisations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35 per cent higher return on equity and 34 per cent higher total return to shareholders.

Companies with the highest proportions of women board directors also outperform those with the lowest proportions by 53 per cent. They have a 42 per cent higher return on sales and 66 per cent higher return on invested capital.

The lack of diversity in gender isn’t native to Silicon Valley; India too could admit that there is an imbalance, and that the exclusion of women is holding back innovation and economic growth. And now is the time for change. It should begin with a much needed discussion.

The majority of publicly traded Indian companies—922 of 1,462—have no women on their boards. Women hold barely 5 per cent of board seats in India, in comparison with 17 per cent in the United States. Indian infotech companies have a bigger management problem. Look at the executive ranks of Infosys, Sarojini Naidu (centre-left), marches to a salt depot in Dharasana, Gujarat, in 1930 to protest against the British salt tax in colonial India

44 open 25 august 2014

Wipro, TCS, Tech Mahindra and others, and you will hardly find any women.

This is a cause for concern. ‘[W]hen women step off the familiar path, they are “irresponsible;” when they ask for the spotlight, they are “pushy” and if they speak up too loudly, they are a “nuisance.” I have been in institutions and jobs where I was in a minuscule minority—either by gender or by race,’ wrote Lakshmi Pratury, host and curator of the INK conference, in the upcoming book Innovating Women.

T

here are many explanations for why there is a dearth of women in the tech sector. From preconceived and unchallenged notions of gender, access to education, biases within the educational system against girls and women, negative stereotypes and the lack of resources and role models, it seems that the cards are heavily stacked against them. But Indian women nonetheless have taken impressive strides; they are rising and poised to lead the future.

ap

nadine rupp/getty images

‘When women step off the familiar path, they are “irresponsible”; when they ask for the spotlight, they are “pushy”,’ writes Lakshmi Pratury Observing a need to create a space for a women collective of entrepreneurs and learners, storytellers and engineers, and the many other roles women have without a proper place to showcase their ideas, Pratury brought TED talks—on ‘Technology, Entertainment, Design’—to India in 2009. The first TedIndia talk was thus held, and the following year she hosted and curated INK. Pratury tells the story of Madhumita Halder, an INK Fellow and an IIT graduate who worked in the tech industry and then quit to become a teacher for four years. Armed with the knowledge of combining learning with play, Halder co-founded MadRat Games, which designed the world’s first Indian language word game, Aksharit.

This has been translated into 11 different languages and adopted by over 2,500 schools. In the three years since she has been an INK Fellow, MadRat games has grown, and the firm now boast of hundreds of board games in multiple languages available for all age groups.

Shilo Shiv Suleman is a gifted artist who has a passion for bringing the Indian aesthetic to everything she does, be it designing an iPad app or performance stages, corporate events or a combination of all. Pratury helped produce her first iPad app, Khoya, which was shown to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak during his trip to India.

He wrote a personal note to her saying how much he loved it. She sold enough copies of it not only to break even but also contribute to the INK Fellows programme. She also launched an artist collective called Fearless to

Lakshmi Pratury, who brought TED talks to India in 2009

condemn violence against women, and is now working with other INK Fellows to create an installation for Burning Man 2014.

Sunitha Krishnan runs Prajwala. As a victim of a sexual attack, she decided to dedicate her life to fight violence against women. She rescues women from trafficking and gives them a home. In her talk, she shared the difficulty of finding a permanent home for these women. We worked with our community and corporate partners, and within 18 months she had raised enough funds to build a three-acre campus near Hyderabad. The women take care of the premises with pride and playfulness. In making a full-length feature film on human trafficking, Krishnan collaborated with one of Bollywood’s most popular music composers, Shantanu Moitra, who she met at INK. That music went on to win a National Award in 2014.

Pratury concludes by saying that it was important for her to return to India after working for years in the tech industry in the US. And she hasn’t looked back.

W

omen are helping women and it’s great to see the progress made. But men need to get involved in addressing the gender gap too. This really isn’t a ‘women’s issue.’ When one half of the population cannot achieve its full potential due to systematic and structural challenges, everyone should do what must be done to fix the problem. Men need to get involved and work with women in the tech sector to achieve gender parity. And it starts by admitting the problem’s existence.

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venkatesh l/india today group

Shilo Shiv Suleman designed an iPad app, Khoya, that was an impressive commercial success

But there is good news at the lower ranks. Unlike in the US, where the proportion of women studying computer science fell from 37 per cent in 1987 to 17 per cent in 2012, India’s numbers of female infotech students are increasing year upon year. According to Nasscom, an industry body, gender-diversity in infotech services ranges from 24 to 32 per cent; in the Business Process Outsourcing segment, this is 34 to 42 per cent; 1 million of India’s 3.1 million strong infotech workforce is female; and women now account for 38 to 40 per cent of all entrylevel recruits. This will give India a major advantage in the future. But while female enrolments in the so-called STEM fields—of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine—are on the incline, the Indian workplace is yet to reflect that. We need to find a way to get those numbers in educational institutions represented in the workforce and top Unlike in the US, leadership positions.

India’s numbers The technological landscape is advancing rapidly. It will create new trillion-dollar of female infotech opportunities and set the stage for solutions students are to many of the world’s major problems. increasing year upon Several technologies, such as computing, medicine, artificial intelligence, 3D printyear. But the Indian ing, robotics and sensors are advancing workplace is yet to exponentially even as their prices drop.

Inexpensive sensors can, for example, be reflect that used in the agriculture sector to monitor soil humidity, optimise watering and build onfarm diagnostic systems that minimise the use of harmful chemicals. These can revolu46 open 25 august 2014

tionise farming in India. Other types of sensors can monitor human health and test for diseases. Computer apps can combine health data withgenomic data to trace the correlation between our genome, habits and disease, and help develop holistic treatments. They can design robotic assistants to help care for the elderly and build tutors to educate the hundreds of millions of children who don’t have access to schools.

Robots can automate manufacturing, and 3D printers make it possible to produce sophisticated products anywhere.

Silicon Valley’s greatest strength is that it accepts failure and offers innovators multiple chances. It also encourages dissent and learns from its mistakes.

We had more than 500 women help ‘crowd-create’ a book titled Innovating Women, for which they shared their stories and experiences in the field of innovation. It is a collection of essays and anecdotes from female global leaders on how their experiences frame the future of entrepreneurship.

India’s best hope to dominate the future of technology and build the next $100 billion industry is to enable its women to take their rightful role in the innovation economy. n

Av e n u e s

LIC - The Icon L

IC has been a nation builder since its inception in 1956 with the main objective of spreading the doctrine of life insurance to every nook and corner of the country especially to remote rural areas and to reach the less privileged and downtrodden class of society.

Their vision is to become “A trans-nationally competitive financial conglomerate of significance to society and occupy a place of “Pride of India” in the heart of every Indian.

LIC’s mission is “to explore and enhance the quality of life of people by providing financial security through its products and services of aspired attributes with competitive returns, and contribute to the economic growth and development.”

Over the last 57 years, LIC has stood the test of time and is today an “icon” of trust, confidence and reliability. It is the world’s largest insurance company in terms of number of customers.

LIC serves its customers through 8 Zonal offices, 113 Divisional Offices, 2048 branches, 1346 Satellite offices, 73 Customer Zones, 25 MASH (Metropolitan Area Service Hub)centers, 30557 Premium Acceptance Points, 2137 Life Plus offices, with more than 1,20,000 employees and 11.95 lakh agents.

It provides insurance services internationally through branch offices (UK, Fiji & Mauritius), JVs (LIC Bahrain, LIC Nepal, LIC Sri Lanka, Kenya &Saudi Arabia) and a representative office in Singapore.

It provides other financial services through subsidiaries viz. Pension (LIC Pension Fund), Housing Finance (LIC HFL), Mutual Fund (LIC Nomura MF), Credit cards (LIC Cards Services Ltd.), Financial Products distribution (LIC HFL Financial Services Ltd), and LIC HFL Care homes.

LIC has been fulfilling its social responsibilities too, where most of the investments are geared towards industrial growth, infrastructural growth and national development.

They have also formed a Trust, ‘LIC Golden Jubilee Foundation’. For 2013-14, the grant amount sanctioned under various projects was Rs 52.34 Cr. They have been contributing to Prime Ministers’ National Relief Fund, Chief Ministers’ Relief Funds of various states and Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. They also provide ambulances and mobile health vans to hospitals. For senior citizens, they have pension schemes, LIC HFL Care Homes.

LIC, a wholly owned by the Government of India has declared dividends right from its inception. It has met all the guidelines prescribed by IRDA, with regard to Investment of funds, solvency and policyholder servicing.

They have different plans to cater to every segments of society like portfolio endowment assurance, and money back plans for those who need the security of life insurance and a lump sum to meet financial obligations. Pension plans and health plans that come with options like term riders and critical illness riders to offer greater flexibility, most of them offer tax benefits, too. It also offers insurance under group policies to like employer-employee, co-operatives, weaker sections of society etc.

LIC has a huge intelligentsia of employees who are from various fields like engineers, lawyers, CA’s, Company Secretaries, Actuaries and PGE programmers. They also have in-house training institutes and training programmes in Finance, Marketing, Investment, Legal matters, Strategic Management & Actuarial studies.

Some of the facilities and technologies available for better servicing are as follows: Online Premium Payment, ECS, EBPP, ATMs and online premium collection through Corporation Bank and AXIS Bank, Premium Collection through Franchisees, SBA’s, Empowered Agents, Payment through SMS, Customer Zones, IVRS) / Info-Centers, on-line sale of Policies and the LIC Mobile (in-house app for Android OS based devices) Some of the achievements are as follows: l LIC of India today commands a market share of 84.44% of all new policies issued and 75.33 % of the total first premium income that accrued in 2013-14. l In 2013-14, LIC sold more than 34 million policies; the First Year Premium Income was more than Rs 90123 Cr. LIC covered another 35.27 million people under group schemes earning more than Rs 48741 Cr as Group First Year Premium Income. l Their claim settlement performance (2013-2014) was over Rs 2.59 Cr and the amount paid more than Rs 91186 Cr. l During 2013-14, LIC won 31 awards, notable ones being Readers Digest Trusted Brand, Skoch Renaissance Award, Outlook Money Award, Annual Greentech CSR Awards, Maccia-IBN-Lokmat Award, Asian Sustainability Leadership Award. LIC also ranked among “Top-10 Most Trusted Service Brands in India” and was voted No.1 Most Trusted Insurance Brand in the ET Brand Equity-Nielson Survey-2013. n

Not Worth Your Salt Anymore Gandhi’s march here was one of the most dramatic moments in Indian history. The villagers today want to march out

by Lhendup G Bhutia photograph by ritesh uttamchandani 12 March 1930, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, along with 80 handpicked men, set out DANDI on what was perhaps his most symbolic and effective political gesture. He undertook a journey of almost 400 km on foot that lasted over 24 days, from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat, to challenge the Salt Act. Very few, as it is said, were convinced of the choice of salt to kickstart a fresh round of civil disobedience. But Gandhi generated quite some momentum as he moved from village to village, speaking of social reform and poorna swaraj (complete self-rule), drawing the attention of both the locals and people in other parts of the country.

On 6 April, when Gandhi raised a lump of salty mud and produced salt in Dandi, with the famous words, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire”, it was a watershed moment in the history of India’s On

The freedom

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footprints of struggle Dandi

Gandhi memorial at Dandi

The sea and its salt, the very elements that made Gandhi pick this place and make it famous, are curses the villagers wish they could do away with

Gandhi leads a march to Dandi in 1930 to protest the Salt Act

freedom movement. People from different communities and regions of the country participated in it, producing illegal salt and rejecting British goods, demonstrating for the first time since the non-cooperation movement of 1920—which had fizzled out after the violence in Chauri Chaura—the efficacy of non-violent resistance as a means of protest.

Eighty-four years since the Dandi March, as it came to be called, what could have happened to Dandi? Why has the cornerstone of this historic moment, perhaps even the most famous site in the freedom struggle, fallen out of the national consciousness? Does the place still exist? And, if so, in what shape?

T

o the people of Surat —the hub of diamond and textile manufacturing in the country—Dandi is that village. When you inquire about it, they will ask you if you mean the Dandi beach. But when you tell them ‘Dandi of Gandhi’s Dandi March’, smirks will appear on their faces.

On the road from Surat to Dandi, the route which Gandhi and his band of 80 satyagrahis walked along, you will now see at different points glittering shopping malls, the rotting corpses of road-kills that haven’t been disposed of for days, and skies that choke under the stranglehold of enormous factory chimneys. You will smell, as the journey progresses, the salt of the sea thickening in the air.

On the day of my journey, a part of the main route that connected the village to Surat was shut down for repairs, and I had to take another road. On this road, winding through periodic small bazaars and sudden forest patches where no humans could be sighted, there is no signpost that directs you to Dandi. You simply journey from the finger point of one passerby to another, travelling on a small road under a hot sun with

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little sign of human habitation, until you suddenly spot enormous new buildings arisen from the ground.

These opulent buildings of pornographic pinks and pastel yellows with green arches stand fenced with large walls around them. I stop a man walking by and ask him, “Where is Dandi?

How do I get to Gandhi’s Dandi?” He looks at me and says, “This is Dandi.”

D

andi is the place where the

spirit of Gujarati enterprise meets certain death. The sea and its salt, the very elements that made Gandhi pick this place and make it famous, are curses the villagers wish they could do away with. The salt in the coastal soil makes sure nothing of value grows here, the water from the sea would flood the village—often turning it almost into an island—until bunds were built by villagers to keep it away, and there is no drinking water here, save for a pipeline that the villagers paid for and

dinodia photos

constructed a few years ago and now delivers water for 20 minutes a day from a distant dam. There are no jobs, no tourists, and no hotels to stay or eat in. There isn’t even a chai stall for a cup of tea. People collect rainwater in small ponds and grow rice on small plots of land for themselves. They wash clothes on the steps of an ever-shrinking pond.

Men sit here under large banyan trees playing cards without money at stake, waiting in hope that the gloom of the present will at some point give way to a brighter future. Diyalbhai Patel, who at 83 is one of the oldest individuals in the village, says, “This is what they call a dead place.”

There is another peculiar aspect to Dandi. Most of the large buildings here are locked up. This is because the absentee residents of these buildings have migrated abroad, and each of the village’s 1,200 families is said to have absentees. The village is full of old people and children. There is almost an entire generation of inbetweens that

is missing. Those who haven’t migrated dream of doing so. Even the children here want to leave. The solitary high school in the village also offers vocational courses in carpentry and welding. Those who have moved out work mostly in factories or as shopkeepers, and send money back.

People here point to buildings and refer to them by locations on the world map: the ‘London home’ or ‘Canada home’, for example, depending upon where its owner resides. Unsurprisingly, when you visit Dandi beach, you will sometimes come across a family speaking Gujarati in an American accent.

The few career-makers who have not gone abroad are involved in prawn farming and cattle rearing. But these are small businesses because very little nonsaline water is available here. Strangely, no one pursues salt manufacturing here.

As Sumesh Modi, a Surat-based architect who was involved in a project in Dandi says, “For a long time I thought this was the wrong Dandi. There is not a single salt pan here.”

The young men and women who have been unable to find jobs abroad wait for suitable matrimonial proposals from overseas that will help them achieve this. Koli Patels make up a majority of Dandi’s residents, and they usually want to marry someone of the same community, say locals, preferably from the same village. “If you can’t go abroad, you approach the families of those abroad who are looking for a boy or girl,” says Pranav Patel, the 26-year-old unmarried son of the sarpanch of Dandi, “In the case of boys, it will help if you are a welder, an electrician or have some experience in factories. The family of the girl will easily agree to such a match, as such boys can easily get a job abroad.” Pranav, whose efforts at moving to the Gulf with a job befitting his education in mechanical engineering have failed, then says with some alarm, “Otherwise, you are likely to be without a wife or a [foreign job].”

When I ask the principal of Vidya Mandir High School, Mohan Patel, about this phenomenon of migration, he reveals with an air of dejection that he himself could only secure 57 per cent in his class 12 board examination. When I ask him what this implies, he says, “If I had got 58 per cent, I could have pursued a diploma. After that I too could have gone abroad.”

In a strange twist of fate, the villagers of this historic place, to borrow a phrase from the freedom struggle, have become part of another Quit India Movement.

I sit with Diyalbhai in his beautiful two-storied building as he discusses the village and its transformation. He speaks of how, as a youth, he and his fellow villagers thought of Dandi as a special place, chosen by Gandhi for the 20th century’s most powerful movement, and how that idea has descended into the reality of a village with absent residents. He goes on with his lament until he is too tired to speak. His wife offers him a few pills and helps him retire to bed. He looks frail and lonely. Outside, Dajibhai Patel, an 80-year-old former station master of Valsad who had come to visit Diyalbhai from a nearby village, straps on a helmet and tells me that Diyalbhai’s only son lives in London, and rides away on a scooter.

Although much has changed in Dandi, its residents still believe that they share a special connection with Gandhi, and that they In a strange twist of must somehow uphold his views. The fate, the villagers of village thus has never held elections this historic place, to for its sarpanch. Every time a new headhas to take office, the villagers meet borrow a phrase from man in the park where Gandhi delivered a the freedom struggle, sermon a day before he broke the Salt law, and pick a consensus candidate. The curhave become part of rent sarpanch, Parimal Patel, informs another Quit India me that no villager has been booked for any crime for several years. There is a Movement

solitary police chowkie that is hardly ever visited. Whenever a dispute arises, it is amicably settled by the sarpanch and village elders. When I ask him of the last time anyone was arrested, he says, “I don’t know. It’s so long back. Maybe during the Dandi March.”

Of late, there have been instances of people from nearby places visiting Dandi beach and getting into altercations with each other—often, the villagers say, under the influence of alcohol, which is prohibited in Gujarat. The likes of Pranav, along with a few other young men, have formed a unit that keeps a weekend vigil on the beach, breaking up fights if they occur and telling those who are drunk to give up alcohol.

Parimal has three children. His eldest son, Pranav, wants to work in the Gulf; and his other son, 23-year-old Pranay, is home after the completion of his twoyear job contract as a welder in an Abu Dhabi factory. Last year, when Parimal learnt that someone from a nearby village who worked in Montreal, Canada, was home to look for a bride, Parimal approached the family so that a marriage with his 21-year-old daughter could be arranged. No one was home when Parimal paid a visit. But the following day, the family visited Parimal and his daughter, after which the marriage was fixed. “You have to be quick with marriages here,” Pranav says of that incident with a straight face. “You can lose a good husband and a new country otherwise.”

During his youth, despite his elder brother having moved to Canada to make a career as a shopkeeper, Parimal never attempted to leave Dandi. He brought Dandi’s first car, a Maruti 800, in the late 1980s. Sensing a business opportunity, given the large number of villagers coming home on visits from abroad, he began using this vehicle to ferry people to and fro from the airport. As families started buying their own vehicles, he, like a few other men from the area, got into prawn farming. However, since one must rely on rain water for this, the operation is too small to generate the kind of income he wants. “I am not [dissuasive] when my children say they want to leave Dandi,” says Parimal, “There is nothing for them here.”

T

here is nothing in Dandi by way of a historical monument to celebrate

Gandhi’s March except the house he stayed in upon his arrival. Owned then by a religious head of the Dawoodi Bohra sect, Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb, the house, Saifee Villa, was donated to the government in 1961 for it to be converted into a memorial. This house lay locked up and crumbling until it was renovated two years ago. According to the caretaker of this property, government officers would often use this house to host parties and sleep in. When Sumesh Modi, the architect who was employed to conserve the house, was roped in, he found the house in a derelict condition. “There were water tanks where none existed, a room had been converted into a toilet, an entire balcony had been built, and windows had been walled in… It was nothing at all like the house Gandhiji had stayed in.”

Over the course of almost a year, Modi and There is nothing in his team of workers renovated the place, pullDandi by way of a ing down new structures and rebuilding those that once existed. The rooms of the house now historical monument display pictures and boards detailing which to celebrate Gandhi’s part of the house Gandhi slept in and the importance of the Dandi March. But it still fails March except to draw visitors. The only people who appear to Saifee Villa, the find it of any interest are couples from nearby areas who use the solitude of this space to pur- house he stayed in sue romantic endeavours, apart from neigh- upon his arrival 52 open 25 august 2014

bours who hang their week’s washing on the villa’s compound walls.

Also underway is a project to commemorate Dandi, along with the trail that Gandhi and the 80 others took.

This project, announced in 2005, has proceeded in fits and starts and is nowhere near completion. According to some observers, this is because the Gujarat government and the UPA-led Centre were at loggerheads at that time.

Falguni Desai, an architect in Surat who was part of that project, says, “Despite being initially agreed upon, for some reason or the other, the state government would put the project in limbo. Sometimes the idea wouldn’t be cleared, and sometimes they would simply ask us to wait.”

Desai had the task of building a Dandi March memorial all the way from the spot where Gandhi delivered his famous speech to the villa where he slept. She claims at least Rs 8 crore was invested in creating two buildings and setting up the foundations of a wall that would commemorate the event.

“But everything just stopped,” she says.

“And last year I found people even using the buildings and pissing on the walls.

It is such a shame. All this money, in the name of Gandhi, simply wasted.” She complained about this, she says, but the government in Gandhinagar just blacklisted her from all state projects.

She successfully fought a case against this order in the Gujarat High Court last year.

Yet, some work is on. IIT-Bombay, along with a team of sculptures and designers, has taken the lead in sculpting a statue of Gandhi and some other marchers. When this is ready, it is expected to be placed within the compound of Saifee Villa, close to the spot where he is believed to have picked up his lump of salty mud.

T

here is an iconic black -andwhite image of Gandhi bunching up his white shawl in his left hand, with three men and a woman looking on, as his right hand gathers salt from the ground. As it turns out, this picture isn’t an image of his open violation of the

india pictures

Satyagrahis defy the law by harvesting salt at Dandi

Salt law at Dandi, as often thought, but of some other place after that incident.

When I visit Saifee Villa, I find two large statues of Gandhi in the compound adjoining the house. The smaller statue is a re-creation of the blackand-white picture. And the larger statue has a rather muscular Gandhi picking up a fistful of salt from a large heap. If you ask villagers, they will claim that Gandhi picked up salt at the exact spot of the smaller statue. But if you ask Gandhi experts, they will tell you this is untrue. Apparently, far from being photographed breaking the Salt law, no one knows exactly at which spot Gandhi picked up his handful of salt.

“When Jawaharlal Nehru was about to visit the spot in 1961, locals, certain that Nehru would ask where in the area Gandhi broke the law, afraid of displeasing him, agreed upon a spot,” Desai

says. “Since then, everyone has come to believe this.”

Memory, as it turns out, can be a fickle creature. As most accounts of the incident go, Gandhi, on his way back to Saifee Villa after a bath, picked up a lump of salty mud and boiled it in seawater to produce salt. But some villagers reject this version. They claim that Gandhi never boiled seawater and mud. According to them, he simply picked up a pinch of salt from the ground. When I ask the villa’s caretaker Ramanbhai Chamanbhai Solanki about a large vessel hanging from a wall in the house, presumably the one Gandhi used, he says, “Oh this! This was used by a local some years back (after the new bunds kept the sea out and allowed natural salt deposits to form) to demonstrate to youngsters how salt can be created.”

Solanki also tells another interesting tale that may or may not be true, but which will certainly not find mention in any official book. Researchers claim that Gandhi chose Dandi because it was distant and allowed Gandhi to gather enough momentum as he journeyed to that point, and because the people of Dandi and nearby regions were known as fierce nationalists. Solanki, however, has another theory. “You see,” he says like an indulgent avuncular being, “People from this area were migrating long before Independence. Some of these people worked in South Africa and were acquainted with Gandhi long before he was famous. When Gandhi decided on his March, these people insisted that it culminate in Dandi.”

After spending around 10 days at Dandi in Saifee Villa, Gandhi moved further southwards and was arrested on 4 May after he had informed Lord Irwin of his plans of raiding Dharasana Salt Works. Gandhi moved on from Dandi, according to Desai, because of the harshness of this area and its paucity of drinking water. Solanki uses this information to buttress another point. “If Gandhiji couldn’t resist leaving Dandi,” he says. “Can you blame us if we do?” n 53 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

The freedom

I S S U E

HYPHENATED TO HISTORY Isha Trakru born in 1991

The World Is at My feet�

India according to a liberalisation child

As told to Gunjeet Sra

I

have never really thought about my idea of freedom.

Perhaps it was because I was born on the eve of the 44th Independence Day, which many view as the year when the country became free of its socialist pretensions. When I was born, my country was liberal, already free and on the brink of globalisation. Freedom, therefore, for me, is a state of being that arises from continuously coveting it, not necessarily struggling for it. The day you start questioning your freedom, you are not really free. You either have it or you don’t. There is no middle ground.

But I do realise that in a country as vast as ours, freedom is not an absolute term available to everybody. It is spurious and intermittent, based on your class and the society that you inhabit. The definition of freedom differs from person to person. Sartre claimed that we are all completely free, 100 per cent of the time. We are free to choose whatever course of action we might like and the only constraints we have are the ones that limit us as women. Politically speaking, this is never the case. Freedom seems to be defined always by the laws that govern us.

Freedom for India would mean to rid itself of its religious and

cultural biases, which are the biggest deterrents to its progress. My idea of a free India would entail how it originally started—with Gandhian philosophies of a just society. But I also do realise that this is slightly utopian in concept. On most days, I feel utter freedom and exhilaration but it is those little instances, where I am walking down the road and made to feel uncomfortable by men, that I realise the precariousness of my freedom. The biggest hindrance that I face despite coming from a so-called cushioned lifestyle, is being a girl, having an opinion and being in the field of technology. Having grown up in an atmosphere that never made me feel out of place, it was a rather big shock for me to encounter the skewed sex ratios in the field of science. It was then that I thought about the idea of freedom. My idea of freedom, given the circumstances of engineering colleges and corporate technology in India, would be to have more women in these fields. I am not talking about reservations. I am talking about creating an environment in which women can proliferate and grow. I love science and why should I be the only girl on a project as a trophy of an egalitarian work culture?

Another aspect that defines freedom for me is the quality of education. As a scientist, I would say there is abysmally limited freedom in terms of studying what you are really interested in. The education system in India doesn’t usually let you take aptitude tests to assess which field you are best suited for. Instead, they categorise your inclinations on the basis of your board results. The top five per cent get science, the next five are allowed to take commerce and so on. Even though this has changed recently, we still need to overhaul our idea of an education. For example: even at college levels, where we have a strict syllabus, access to laboratories is limited mostly to that of experiments in your course until you are in the final year. That is when you can choose to write a thesis on a particular project, if you might still be interested. All these predefined rules and textbook expectations from scholars not only curb their creativity but also don’t give one a lot of room to explore new interests.

Most importantly, to me, freesharad saxena/india today group dom means the ability to able to learn from my mistakes. If I wasn’t free, I wouldn’t be able to learn about life because I’d be constantly trying to toe the line and see what others expect of me. Freedom is my personal expression and it is an extension of my personality. It may sometimes mean not having the time to do all the normally expected right things, but that is okay.

The word 'freedom' means to me the ability to decide how and in which direction I want to lead my life. It entails elimination of all societal and cultural constraints over our thought processes over the years.

Freedom begins with having a choice to take a chance and we should all have our go at it.

Politically, the idea of Independence and Freedom in terms of India means liberty, Manmohan Singh, architect self-reliance, autonomy and selfof India's economic liberalisation, in 1991 government. This is the crux of 56 open 25 august 2014

The biggest hindrance I face is in the field of technology. I love science and why should I be the only girl on a project as a trophy of an egalitarian work culture? a free national identity and although we might all have degrees of variance when it comes to the idea, I am of the belief that we are one of the freest countries in the world. As we celebrate our 67th Independence Day, we ought to realise that, as a nation, we have come a long way. We have rid ourselves of dynastic politics, live in a secular environment and have a somewhat stable economy. Compared to the rest of the world, we are in good shape. Yes, we have issues, but we are not the only ones. Seeing the world and then examining where we stand will help put things in perspective for us Indians.

Being free doesn’t mean we do the impossible. It most importantly means that we enable ourselves to thrive in an environment that we are in. No matter what the societal limitations are, the idea is to push ahead and fix it. To get one’s hands dirty, to work towards improving things you are uncomfortable with and to end apathy. To realise that there is a bigger picture out there that needs to be worked on.

As a young woman in this country, I am not only willing but also able to be more than the sum of what we are right now, and I feel that will be our only redemption. People like me are unafraid to explore the world. We are rooted as well as global. After all, the idea of freedom is only valid so long as you have the will to be responsible to yourself. We owe that much to both— the self and the home. n Isha Trakru is a software engineer with HCL Technologies

The freedom

I S S U E

footprints of struggle Vaikom

An Equal Faith

Gandhi used a temple agitation in Kerala to make it a larger movement for independence. The shrine of Shiva, an architectural marvel, continues to attract believers and nature lovers

BY MG Radhakrishnan Vaikom is one of Kerala’s growing tourist towns on the eastern banks of the sprawling Vembanad backwaters. Pilgrims and tourists swarm into this tiny central Kerala town criss-crossed by coconut groves and lagoons.

The biggest attractions are the historic Shiva temple and the Vembanad backwaters. The latter is India’s longest lake and listed as a wetland of international importance by the vaikom Ramsar Convention.

Nine decades ago when Vaikom sprang up to transform Kerala’s history and grab national attention, it was only a sleepy fishing village by the lake. The legendary Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924-25 gave a major thrust to the yearning for freedom across the country. In the process, it ensured the onceobscure Vaikom a significant place in the country’s history.

The Vaikom Satyagraha was Kerala’s first well-organised agitation against ‘upper caste’ orthodoxy demanding basic civil rights for ‘backward’ castes—primarily the right to walk on public roads. It was the first major movement led by the state’s Congress party against social inequality. The agitation had active participation from not just ‘backward’ castes but a large number of progressive members of ‘forward’ castes as Gandhi’s strategy to well. The 20-month-long Satyagraha also unite members of marked the first time that the Congress—until then dominated by an ‘upper-caste’ elite— ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ began attracting ‘backward’ castes to the na- caste groups proved tional movement in large numbers.

No less than Mahatma Gandhi, the great sage to be a masterstroke; and reformer Sree Narayana Guru and the the former even held Dravidian firebrand Periyar EV Ramasamy Naicker from Tamil Nadu arrived at Vaikom to a ‘Suvarna rally’ to inspire the agitators. Akalis trooped in from support the agitation

faraway Punjab to hold a langar of free food for the agitators who came from various parts of the country.

And what was this agitation aimed at? It couldn’t have been more modest even by the standards of the day. The goal was to secure everyone’s right to walk on public roads around the ancient temple. The fact that ‘backward’ castes were banned within the temple was taken almost for granted. Thanks to social reform movements led by legendary leaders like Narayana Guru and Ayyankali—who were of ‘backward’ castes themselves—the royal government had hesitantly revoked the traditional ban on the use of public roads by these castes by the late 19th century. Yet, in certain areas that had stayed under orthodox ‘upper-caste’ Hindu domination, this ban was in place four decades later. Vaikom was one such dark region.

The demand for the right to walk on roads around Vaikom temple was raised at the turn of the 20th century by the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), a social reform movement founded in 1903 by Narayana Guru, who was an Ezhava, a caste now classified as OBC. The royal govern-

ment turned it down, calling the ban a religious custom not to be tampered with.

Notice boards continued to dot the roads leading to the temple forbidding the entry of Avarnas, just as signs barred people of colour from the Whites-only enclaves of apartheid South Africa.

According to a legend, a bunch of ‘backward’ caste youngsters had attempted to defy the ban many years earlier but were killed and buried in a nearby pond on the orders of the Dalawa of Travancore’s royal government. After that, the pond came to be known as Dalawa Kulam. Though it was filled in due course, its location is still known by the same name. “We built a public bus stand on the place a decade ago and dedicated it to the memory of the buried martyrs,” says PK Hari Kumar, former chairman, Vaikom Municipality, and a CPM leader who authored a book on the Satyagraha. “But I think we have actually travelled much in reverse since the Satyagraha. I wish ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ castes could join hands today on a major issue, like in [the days of] the Satyagraha.”

It was Hari Kumar as Municipal Chairman who took the initiative to complete the construction of the town’s Satyagraha Memorial Complex, which has auditoriums and libraries, in 2003. “We are an ungrateful society,” he says, “It is a proof of our disregard for such great events and martyrs that the memorial’s construction [languished] for 25 years after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi laid the foundation stone in 1975.” He points out that the late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MG Ramachandran was enthusiastic enough to have another Satyagraha Memorial built at Vaikom by the 1980s—in the name of Periyar.

Back in the 1920s, it was TK Madhavan, Narayana Guru’s disciple, journalist and SNDP’s secretary, who took the initiative against the ban on Vaikom roads and made it his life mission. He submitted repeated memorandums to the royal government and raised it in the state legislature. But all to no avail. Finally, he met Mahatma Gandhi at Tirunelveli on 23 September 1921 and briefed him of the injustice. This was around the time that Gandhi was planning to take up the fight against ‘untouchability’ as a major plank of the national movement.

On Gandhi’s directive, Madhavan attended the All India Congress Committee (AICC) meet at Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, in 1923, where he circulated a note titled: ‘A Request to the Indian National Congress on behalf of the Untouchables of India.’ Madhavan’s campaign, backed by Gandhi, led the AICC to adopt the struggle against untouchability as part of its main programme. Following this, the Kerala Provincial Congress Committee took up the issue and launched the Satyagraha on 30 March 1924 with volunteers of three caste groups—Dalit, Ezhava (OBC) and Nair (a ‘forward’ caste). They donned Congress caps and khadi attire, and jointly walked on the roads in open defiance of the ban. The royal government’s police promptly arrested them. This was followed by three other volunteers of the same caste trio courting arrest the same way. And then another. This went on for many days until every volunteer had been detained by the police. The courts sentenced and imprisoned them all. The evenings saw daily protest meetings.

“This agitation was the first instance that the Congress party in Kerala succeeded in bringing ‘backward’ castes to the national The proclamation movement. Until then, the party had only in 1936 by the ‘upper’ caste Hindus and Christians in its fold.

This marked its transformation from an elite royal government party to a truly mass organisation,” says throwing open all Mohan D Babu, a Congress leader of Vaikom.

Gandhi’s strategy to unite progressive temples to ‘backward’ members of ‘upper’ as well as ‘lower’ caste castes was a groups proved to be a masterstroke; the former even held a ‘Suvarna rally’ to support direct fallout of the the agitation.

Vaikom Satyagraha 62 open 25 august 2014

Narayana Guru, who had never been involved in any political issue until then, also arrived at Vaikom in September 1924 and openly pledged the agitation his support. Unlike Gandhi, who was against the use of even minimal force by Satyagrahis, Guru exhorted the protestors to break police barricades and enter the temple itself. They suffered physical atrocities at the hands of the police and sundry hoodlums, but kept up the agitation undeterred.

The orthodox Suvarna Hindus who administered the temple, however, remained apathetic. The royal govern-

india pictures

ment also kept looking the other way.

The agitation soon took a violent turn when hoodlums supported by the police began assaulting Satyagrahis.

Gandhi arrived on 10 March 1925, accompanied by his secretary Mahadev Desai, his son Ramdas, Rajagopalachari and Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, and advised those on the receiving end not to indulge in any counter-violence.

Gandhi made it a point to meet Indumthuruthil Devan Narayanan Nampoothiri, the Brahmin landlord who led the orthodox group opposing the agitation. Nampoothiri refused to

A photograph of Vaikom temple as it stands today

come to the Satyagraha ashram to meet him, so Gandhi went to his house— only to find the landlord unwilling to take his suggestions. Not only that, Nampoothiri refused to sit near Gandhi, saying he would get ‘polluted’ by such proximity since the Mahatma did not practise untouchability; Gandhi and those accompanying him were made to sit in the verandah while Nampoothiri spoke from an inner room!

The death of Travancore’s Maharaja Sree Moolam Tirunal on 7 August 1924 proved to be a turning point. He and his diwan T Raghaviah had been the most hostile to the agitation. But after Tirunal’s death, his niece Maharani Sethulakshmi Bai took over as the regent Rani. This altered the equation. Gandhi wrote to the Rani requesting steps to end the Satyagraha. He also wrote to WH 63 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

hindu archive

A photograph of Vaikom temple as it was in 1971

Pitt, the British Police commissioner of Travancore, to end the physical attacks on Satyagrahis. These efforts began to bear results, as the Rani and Pitt offered a settlement formula. The roads on three sides of the temple were thrown open to ‘backward’ castes. However, the street on the eastern side stayed reserved for the use of ‘upper’ castes.

Gandhi accepted this formula and called for ending the prolonged agitation, which was causing its participants much misery. There was criticism that it was a costly compromise, but Gandhi stood firm on it. The agitation was called off by November. However limited the success was, the Vaikom Satyagraha reshaped the history of Travancore and the Congress. The historic proclamation in 1936 by the royal government throwing open all temples to ‘backward’ castes for the first time, for example, was a direct fallout. The Satyagraha also helped the nationalist movement gain unprecedented strength in Kerala.

The Vaikom Satyagraha had many other interesting aspects as well. Most sig64 open 25 august 2014

nificant of these was the role of Gandhi as a master-strategist of mass action and his fierce commitment to ideals. Like in the case of other struggles he led elsewhere, Gandhi caused much heartburn to his followers on various occasions during the course of the agitation on account of his strange and stubborn ways. The first jolt was when Gandhi persuaded his associate George Joseph, who arrived at Vaikom enthusiastically to participate in the Satyagraha, to return immediately. Gandhi’s explanation was that the Satyagraha was an attempt within Hinduism to cleanse itself of sins like untouchability, and he feared that the participation of non-

Hindus like Joseph, a Christian, would fan the suspicions of Hindus that it was a move against their religion. He wrote to Joseph: ‘I think you shall let the Hindus do the work. It is they who have to purify themselves.’ Gandhi also persuaded the Akalis to return to Punjab, closing their langar. His argument on this echoed his plea to Joseph.

Gandhi’s differences with Narayana Guru formed another noteworthy facet. Guru wanted the Satyagrahis to not just walk the roads but also enter the temple. He warned against any form of violence but offered passive resistance.

In contrast, Gandhi felt that defying the prohibitory orders wasn’t wise. Gandhi

wrote of his differences with Guru in Harijan: Gandhi’s differences ‘His Holiness Sree Narayana Guru is reported to have disapproved of the present methods of with Narayana agitation...He suggests that volunteers should Guru were notable. advance along barricaded roads and scale Guru wanted the them...They should enter the temples and sit with others to dine. Now the action proposed satyagrahis to is not satyagraha. Scaling barricades is open vinot just walk the olence. If you may scale barricades why not break open temple doors and pierce its walls?’ roads but also Gandhi also pointed out that his adherence to enter the temple non-violence made strategic sense. ‘How are volunteers to pierce through a row of policemen except by using force? If they are strong and willing to die in sufficient numbers they can gain their point.’

Also of significance was Gandhi’s stiff opposition to the presence of Dravida movement leader Periyar and his wife Nagamma. The avowed atheist Periyar’s presence in Vaikom as a volunteer and the drama of his arrest, it was feared, would draw Muslim and Christian support and money for the movement.

Gandhi wanted Periyar to return to Madras after his release from prison. Periyar refused and courted arrest again. This made Periyar’s wife Nagamma join hands with the wives of other arrested leaders and launch a women’s Satyagraha that turned out to be one of India’s earliest direct political agitations by women.

Though led by the Congress, it is the Communist movement that made the most of the Satyagraha by way of political gains.

Most Congress leaders of the region joined the nascent Left movement, among them the legendary P Krishna Pillai, founder of the Communist Party in Kerala. Almost ninety years later, Vaikom remains a red bastion.

“The Left is the rightful legatee of the Satyagraha. For more than just an agitation to enter the temple roads, it was a resistance movement against all forms of authority—social, economic, political,” says K Ajith, the current CPI legislator from Vaikom who happens to be a Dalit.

Though the Satyagraha’s legacy and its contribution are undisputed, many believe Vaikom has been left behind on economic development. “Vaikom is caught in a time warp,” says C Gouridasan Nair, a local journalist, “I am sad that a region which witnessed such a hugely progressive mass movement has not made progress economically.”

The story does not end without its share of irony. According to Ajith, Vaikom’s economic backwardness also had much to do with the Satyagraha. “Most of the ‘upper-caste’ landlords who had money and assets deserted Vaikom after the agitation. This left the region with poor agricultural labourers and fishermen, with no money to invest, for long. The landlords never returned except to attend the annual Ashtami festival at the temple!”. n MG Radhakrishnan is a senior journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram 65 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

The freedom

I S S U E

ESSAY

to write or not to write

The right to express oneself is an undeniable freedom. But isn’t the freedom not to write about what the markets, literary establishments and general Joes demand an equally enshrined liberty?

BY Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi is a poet and novelist based in Tamil Nadu. Her latest book, Everything Begins Elsewhere, is a collection of poems

A

writer presenting your latest book to a small but dedicated audience in one of the country’s dwindling cultural institutions. A newspaper editor or some media personality has been dragged in to ask intelligent questions about your book. You sit on sofas and face each other. The desired effect is to create the aura of a private conversation between two wellmeaning friends, on which the audience is allowed to eavesdrop. A passage of suitable length is read aloud to reassure readers that your prose really is mesmerising. There will be some amount of chit-chat interspersed with laughter, revelations about your writing process and universal declarations about the role of literature. Finally, after adequate back and forth, a trapdoor is lifted, and the audience is invited to a Q&A session.

One person will be relied upon to begin. Usually, this falls to the Stalwart in the group, a veteran book-launch goer. Attempts to avoid this situation have led to the author planting a friend or mother in the audience with a stupendously lucid opening question. But Mama will be no match for the Stalwart, who will not even wait for the microphone to launch into his preamble. He will be followed by others who pose unanswerable questions, statements, concerns, discrepancies and insights you could never have predicted. On occasion, someone might even pull out a newspaper clipping from his pocket and proceed to read excerpts of a stonkingly negative review of your book and ask you to respond. At some point in the dialogue, unfailingly, there will be a question about why you didn’t write about something else.

“Sir, you write excellently about the morale and mindset of the soldiers, but why not a single mention about the First Indo-China war?”

Er, because this is a book about the First Afghan war…

Or, “In your book you make great metaphorical connections between cricket and embroidery, but why not between cricket and miniature painting?”

Er, say what?

Or, and this is a personal favourite: “You know, why don’t you just write a poem about a really good fuck?”

illustration by anirban ghosh

Some of these questions will make you seriously consider your professional options, others will give you ideas for future poems. But the validity of the question remains. Why the hell did you write about the things you wrote about and not about the gazillion other things you could have written about?

THE DILEMMa What about the freedom not to?

Let us assume the freedom to write, express and publish, is a given. Let us assume that rationally and ideologically, it is a good thing to protect writers who live in despotic lands, under threats of surveillance, slaughter, disappearance, imprisonment and censorship. Let us go so far as to say that it wouldn’t kill us to extend a similar kindness to those writers who’ve never suffered any of the above listed extreme threats, but who have probably suffered the tyranny of the blank page and the shackles of their own tortured uncertainties.

At a recent dinner party, I was privy to an interesting conversation about the failure of American novelists to respond to a post 9/11 world. The consensus was that Americans weren’t doing enough to question their government’s role in the war on terror, that fiction writers had relinquished all moral authority to nonfiction writers, with the notable exceptions of Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Kevin Powers, Amy Waldman and a few others. The underlying tenor of the argument, as I understood it, was: why would you want to continue writing about the terror of suburban American life when you have drones and the NSA to work with?

This is the Stalwart’s bristle. The eternal complaint: why did you choose this, not that?

Expectations from readers, publishers and writers themselves form an unspoken bulwark of censorship. There are categories that define writers—ethnicity, india pictures

gender, race, language, geographical location, genre—and each of these categories bears a certain weight.

Expectations coo in your ear. Asian writer, take note: family sagas are out, unless they are pinned to a magisterial historical backdrop, preferably something that can shed light on a contemporary issue such as Islamist militancy.

American writers, listen up, in theory you can continue writing about Minnesota or Brooklyn or wherever it is you live because your books are the most translated in the world.

Chinese writers, what do you mean by not criticising your government’s wayward ways? Latin Americans, don’t even think magic realism. Jhumpa Lahiri, are you really going to write another book about Bengali immigrants?

And so on and so forth.

A writer’s right to express herself is an undeniable freedom. But isn’t the freedom not to write about what the markets, literary establishments and general Joes demand of you an equally enshrined liberty?

THE OMNIPRESENT AXE OF UTILITARIANISM: How is this useful to anyone?

I recently began writing a poem with the title, While the War in Syria Rages, I Sleep, which could work with several permutations: While the War in Gaza/ Libya/ Sierra Leone Rages, I Eat/ Plant Seeds/ Talk on the Phone.

One of my concerns as a writer has been this question of involvement, of bearing witness. And as much as I hate the word ‘usefulness’, I have to admit, it has snuck up on me with the regularity of a Tamil Nadu power cut. I could blame my Protestant-Gujju genes, which often push me into thinking I should pursue more practical options in life—like becoming a Sleep Guru or a Cement Paint Baroness. But I think it’s normal for writers to wonder about the futility of their craft. Who is going to read it? What’s the point of writing it?

What impact will your work have? Or

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses remains banned

is even thinking about these lofty questions utterly fantastical because everyone knows that most books are going to end up at the bottom of an abyss called ‘Gaming Has Taken Over The World, Dodo’? In other words: why bother?

Joseph Brodsky, a man who ranks high in my pantheon of poet gods, was 24 when he was held on trial in Leningrad for being a parasite, or more precisely, for being a ‘literary drone’, who wrote poetry of all things. This was 1964. His sentence: five years exile on a collective farm where he would have to clock in daily hours of physical labour.

His crime: not having a ‘real’ job and therefore being a parasite, sucking on the righteous arteries of society.

He went on to serve only 18 months of his sentence, and in 1972 was forcibly exiled to the United States, but throughout his career he strove to resist the ‘dissident poet’ label. He remained indifferent to the Soviet regime, and in his poetics, insisted on steering away from the political. He had been prophetic as a 24-year-old. “I’m no parasite,” he said, calmly standing in the dock.

“I’m a poet, who will bring honour and glory to his country.”

Not all of us can be Brodskys. There will be poets who choose different paths. Poets like Neruda, who after writing about what spring does to cherry trees, would turn intensely political because of the events of the Spanish Civil War. ‘And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry/ speak of dreams and leaves/ and the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets…’

And then there are poets who are simply immobilised by the futility of having to go through ordinary life while parts of the world are burning. Poets who wonder what the point of writing is unless they deal explicitly with environmental degradation, world hunger, the seasonal deadly epidemic, when all they really want to write about is sex, love and death.

AUTHENTICITY But your body language is not Indian!

One of the greatest insults I’ve received was delivered by a stranger in a snack bar (although I’m convinced she didn’t

intend to be cruel). I was telling her that I worked with an Indian dance company and she blurted out, somewhat aghast, “But your body language is not Indian!”

It’s an insult that carries almost the same level of hostility, as: “Oh, but that novel is totally autobiographical.” Both insinuations imply a basic lack of authenticity.

As a writer battling for various freedoms, there’s a good chance you’ll be called upon to defend your authenticity at some stage. Top authenticity failures include defecting from the motherland, defecting from the mother tongue, writing about a place/religion/culture other than your own unless you happen to be Caucasian and working for an important Western publication (but there’s been serious backlash here), writing about Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus was pulped being a woman when you’re a man or vice versa, writing as an autistic person when you’re not, daring to write about the danger of big dams without a PhD in mechanical engineering…

And yet, if there’s the slightest hint that you’re espousing that famous dictum supposedly attributed to Mark Twain, immortalised in creative writing syllabi across the world—‘Write what you know’—you will be accused of shamelessly robbing the stories of your friends, family and paltry life in order to recycle them as fiction.

Should writers develop the skin of a sperm whale and just get on with it?

Undoubtedly. Could their sense of freedom be somewhat enlarged if they didn’t get struck by a harpoon every time they lifted their weary heads out of the ocean of literature for a breather? Probably.

IT’S SO LOUD IN HERE

Must I have an opinion on everything?

Despite being hacked by a Facebook freak and bullied by a Twitter impersonator who had the levity of an earthworm and the meanness of three disgruntled teenagers put together, I remain optimistic about the internet. I don’t buy Jonathan Franzen-style lambasts about the evils of the web, but believe instead, that the democratic platform of the internet has made the world a significantly more open place for writers, corporations and child-molesters alike.

No discussion of a writer’s liberties can be complete without taking into account technological advances, which essentially hope to eliminate the need for libraries, publishers or ever having to meet a human or humanoid again. Bliss, for the solitary writer. Besides, with the unstoppable proliferation of social platforms, networks, blogs, soapboxes et al, and the internet skies thundering with diverse invitations from voyeurs, trolls, lovely ladies from a book club in Chandigarh, it’s no exaggeration to say that the 21st century writer is experiencing freedom at its peak. So much freedom in fact, that she may not have the time, inclination or headspace to write any of the things she will later be held accountable for. n 69 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

The freedom

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footprints of struggle Chauri Chaura

A Fire in Memory

In 1922, the mob here set a police station on fire, forcing Gandhi to halt the non-cooperation movement. The village in eastern UP still bears the scars

BY Divya Guha photographs by Raul Irani The warm rain after days of intense humidity feels disgust-

ing on the skin. Even the air seems infected in Gorakhpur.

The town has open drains that get wider and more conspicuous as one wades into the centre of the district. The occasional CHAURI CHAURA open space—unless embellished with a memorial—is usually a sea of discarded plastic. The narrow buildings crowd together like chaotic afterthoughts. There is evidence enough that the people who inhabit this unplanned, dirty town don’t really cherish it. Modern sanitation, like many other kinds of basic amenities, remain mere aspirations in this town, as do traffic rules and the wish of locals that they be subject to fewer than 10 hours of power failure daily. And in the town’s crowded centre at the circular Golghar— the main landmark of the town’s so-called ‘business district’—stands a statue of Mahatma Gandhi: bespectacled, danda-equipped, knobble-kneed, and in mid-step, marching defiantly forward to take his pride of place amid Gorakhpur’s urban misery. It is unclear if the memorial serves to establish the Father of the Nation’s glory, or, if it is an imposition on a place where people still have mixed feelings about the great man.

Ninety-two years ago, a 24-year-old man, The busts wear dried Shikari, who called himself a ‘freedom fighter’ but is known in judicial records from 1922 up garlands around as a ‘pardoned informer’ let off by the their marble necks.

Magistrate for a crucial confession after being accused of participation in a riot that killed 19 Congress activists policemen in Chauri Chaura, would become wore such garlands to the prime witness for the prosecution after the mark themselves out infamous massacre. He was bright and quickwitted, said the report of the judge, who was as leaders at rallies

impressed by the detailed accounts of the incident that were cross-examined with due care. The administration was still looking to nail culprits for the riot of February 1922. Policemen were beaten and charred to death as a mob of 3,000 anti-Raj agitators stormed and set the Chaura thana on fire.

For fuel, the agitators had used the wild long grass that grows in abundance in the region’s alluvial soil, in addition to some kerosene snatched from Bhagwan Kalwar, a local oil merchant. No one has been able to establish who cast the first stone, as it were, or which individuals were responsible for the atrocities against the men in uniform, but villagers still believe the riot was a spontaneous ‘danga’. In his publication Young India, Gandhi wrote the following: ‘Before we think of real swaraj we must first learn to behave ourselves.’ His objective was to quell country-wide violence and political assassinations. ‘Do not for one moment mix up Satyagraha with civil disobedience which no doubt is a branch of Satyagraha. It comes not at the

The bust of ‘Shahid Dudhai’ lies in neglect off its pedestal in Chauri Chaura 71 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

hilton archive/getty images

beginning but at the fag end. It presupposes immense discipline. It presupposes great self-restraint,’ said Gandhi. He suggested that those who had ‘some experience of public life should take up this movement and make it their own’, warning that non-violent non-cooperation (‘satyagraha’) was a fine piece of weaponry, but it was not to be ‘dabbled’ with.

I

n 1921-22, several meetings had taken place in the local areas around Shikari’s

home in Dumri, a village close to Chaura. These were facilitated by local Congress workers, and names such as Hakim and Nazar Ali who put out Gandhi’s writings in Urdu pop up often in judicial records, as do those of Ramphal and Sarju. These men also helped recruit Shikari. Hundreds of spirited men joined the ranks and more ‘leaders’ were appointed by the district Congress committee.

They catechised budding nationalists in the principles of non-violence, a fundamental element of the national non-cooperation movement. The quest for independence had gathered momentum over the previous two years under Gandhi’s leadership. Activists were lectured about sowing cotton, making yarn and wearing it; advised to settle quarrels among themselves and not involve the thana; refrain from buying toddy or foreign spirits and disallow others to drink these.

The hopeful and the charged among the workers said they had been promised cheaper food and a chance of owning land if swaraj—or self rule—was won.

Gandhi had said that no two people in India would agree what independence meant. “The fact of the matter is that we do not know what our distant goal is. If we are wise, we will take care of the present and the future will take care of itself,” he said in the 1920s. A part of their daily duties was to collect chanda and chutki (a fistful of rice or flour) from the village folk. The poorer farmers, who owned next to nothing, were not difficult to win over. Besides, there was the promise of flour and rice as remuneration while they worked for the good cause of freedom. Months of pamphleteering and planning behind, each Congress worker chosen as a ‘leader’ was tasked to take on 150 others to join the rising revolt. Governable groups were formed to picket Wednesday and Saturday markets where outlets selling foreign cloth, overpriced food and all kinds of intoxicants were to be blockaded.

On the morning of the fateful day that the thana was set alight, people met at a threshing floor in a village called Dumri near Chaura village. They marched peacefully, gathering force in numbers as they proceeded towards the market town of Mundera—a mandi that still exists in Gorakhpur district. Meanwhile, British authorities were growing tense. The local police sub-inspector or daroga, Gupteshwar Singh, too, knew trouble was brewing as the Congress was fast gaining force, though Gandhi always meant for the revolution to be political and never militant. Locally, anger was palpable among villagers over two peaceful demonstrators (one of them a government pensioner) having been beaten and driven away from the market; the grandson of one of those attacked, Ramrup Barai, still lives in Chauri Chaura.

Singh, the daroga, had stockpiled ammunition and armed his sepoys; according to his informers, the agitators were expected to Locally, anger arrive at Chaura by 2 pm, making stops along was palpable the way from Dumri to collect groups of other non-cooperation activists. He also paid an among villagers ambivalent visit to his family—his wife and over two peaceful two small daughters—for lunch at noon, not really knowing it would be his last meal demonstrators who with them. had been beaten Over in Dumri, a Malaon pandit forewarned the agitators of the daroga’s firepower. He said and driven away ‘bloodshed and violence’ were inevitable, and from the market

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since everyone knew Gandhi’s strict dictates of ahimsa, he warned them not to go ahead. Undeterred, the rally left Dumri, ‘ready to sacrifice their lives’, in the words of Nazar Ali and other marchers. They walked peacefully towards Mundera singing revolutionary songs whose deliberately cumbrous Urdu paraphrases made little sense to the British. They clapped and waved the tricolour with a charkha—the swaraj flag. In Chauri, chaukidars at the thana who frequently subjected Satyagrahis to casual violence jeered them on like school bullies. The leaders told the daroga they had come to question police authorities about why peaceful picketers were being subjected to beatings at weekly markets. Four men, including Shaymsunder, Abdullah, Ramrup Barai and Nazar Ali, came forward to offer the Congress workers’ case. After a mild verbal altercation, the daroga, losing his

The mob surrounded the building, and set it ablaze with several police officials, including the daroga, still inside. Constables who tried to escape faced a barrage of stones and lathis

Several policemen and inspectors were burned to death at Chauri Chaura; Gandhi was appalled

cool, declared the gathering unlawful and ordered everybody to disperse.

When orders were ignored, warning shots were fired into the air by the police, and the agitators responded with a shower of kankars and dhelas—pebbles and brickbats they had collected from the nearby Chaura station’s railway line.

This provoked a counterattack, with police bullets aimed directly at the mob.

Volunteers Kheli Bhar and Budh Ali were the first to die, by Shikari’s account while many others were injured. The police kept firing until they had no bullets left, and then ran back into the thana to fetch more. The mob took this opportunity to surround the building, and began setting it ablaze with several police officials, including the daroga, still inside. Constables who tried to escape asphyxiation faced a barrage of stones and even blows of lathis that the rioters had looted from the police station. The daroga never made it to the

horse his ‘syce’ (a person who takes care of horses) had kept saddled all morning that day; he was killed. The mob dumped the dead inside what remained of the lawkeepers’ estate, breached railway tracks next, and then went on to destroy telegraph wires before quitting the scene. Many rebels, including Shikari, expecting government retaliation, escaped to Bihar, while others fled to Nepal. They were now rebels and fugitives, not just in the eyes of the law, but among fellow satyagrahis for breaking the covenant of non-violence.

Given the disruption of telegraph facilities, the message of the carnage was conveyed to the country by Dashrath Dwivedi, the then district Congress secretary. “It will never be known what Gandhi really heard,” says Ram Narayan Tripathi, 72, grandson of the late Shahid Meghu who was hanged for his part in the agitation. He can only guess why he took such a quick decision to “call off the non-cooperation movement and quit politics altogether for a whole three years, until his return in 1925”. It could not be determined with any certainty who began the violence in Chauri Chaura, or who was the first to respond to provocation against the strict rules of satyagraha, though the official investigation tried to identify individual culprits. It found 172 miscreants—or scapegoats perhaps— guilty of ‘treason’ and sentenced them to death.

C

lad in cotton and khadi, a group of animated old men with raspy

voices gathers in a circular hall with dirty grilled windows. The wrought iron grills were commissioned as an afterthought against rioting monkeys that had knocked about marble busts of the 19 Congress volunteers memorialised as 73 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

martyrs of Chauri Chaura by villagers. The marble busts sit atop plywood pedestals and stare at the green wall opposite them, with wooden armchairs strewn about in an otherwise empty space. Shabby hand-painted letters in red tell us their names, nicknames and fathers’ names, as also their ages when they were hanged in July 1924.

The busts, safe from monkeys, if not the depredations of dust, wear dried-up garlands around their marble necks. Back in the day, Congress activists wore such garlands to mark themselves out as leaders of groups at rallies where everyone was dressed in khadi. It is August now, and the marigold has been drying since 4 February, the Chauri Chaura anniversary, a day when families of revolutionaries commemorate their sacrifices.

Local political luminaries gather twice a year to honour the dead agitators and hoist the Indian flag, though the current administration has “no part in it�, says 74 open 25 august 2014

Tripathi, who had to waylay the state authorities to acknowledge the fact that the memorial that existed was one dedicated to the dead policemen by the British authorities in 1923. It still adjoins Chauri Chaura police station, but offers no convenient access to visitors.

Tripathi informs me that it is the locals and families of the hanged who contribute money for the annual commemorations. The other occasion when the place gets spit-and-polish treatment is Independence Day. This year, they

Shaheed Smarak, the martyrs’ memorial at Chauri Chaura

hope to spend Rs 50,000 on the function, he says proudly. In the long periods when nothing happens in Chauri Chaura and no one visits, wild grass— the firestarter used by the rioters— grows tall around the museum-library where the busts are kept locked. This ramshackle building’s foundation was laid by Indira Gandhi—in 1973. The library houses a collection of 4,000 books

locked in glass-fronted steel almirahs. Copies of judicial records from 1922 that recount the events that led to the hangings also languish here. But since the only staff in the library are two chowkidars and one gardener, books cannot be lent out.

Tripathi, a local advocate until three years ago, is traceable on most afternoons to the local Gandhi ashram, the Khadi Bhandar, drinking tea and chewing tobacco with his other retired friends. It is clear that Gandhi is not very well liked in Chauri Chaura. “To offer the other cheek is something only Gandhi could do,” he says, “Subhash Chandra Bose and his lot certainly couldn’t… but even Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru and Govind Vallabh Bhai Patel couldn’t.” Speaking in Hindi, he says: “Jab Gandhiji ne andolan-vandolan sab vapis le liya, sab darrey huay thhe” (When Gandhi withdrew the movement, everyone was scared).

Subhash Chandra Bose had called Gandhi’s withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement a national tragedy: ‘Just when people’s enthusiasm for freedom was at a boil, to sound the bugle for retreat was wrong and sad. Mahatmaji’s closest colleagues Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, Motilal Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, who were all in jail, were also pained by his decision in the same way India’s masses of common people were.’ A plaque in the museum commemorates this message.

When the government of the day began its full-scale investigation of the incident, covering all 70 villages around Chaura, it threatened to take away homes and land from families of those allegedly involved in the attack. Shikari, for example, said he was in hiding in Motihari in Bihar when he got a letter from his family asking to turn himself over to the authorities.

The penny dropped among national leaders when the 172 were sentenced to death. The Congress district secretary Baba Raghav Das, The busts sit atop whose name is borne by several educational institutions and hospitals in current-day east- plywood pedestals. ern UP, approached Madan Mohan Malaviya, a Shabby hand-painted lawyer who had then quit law to focus on buildletters in red tell ing Banaras Hindu University. “He put his lawyer’s robe back on and plunged into trying us their names, to save the freedom fighters being tried as crim- nicknames, and inals,” says Tripathi. “When the argument was on at the appeals courts, heard by five judges, all also their ages when White, Motilal Nehru jumped in,” says they were hanged Tripathi, alleging that the famous father of India’s first PM had not shown any interest in in July 1924 taking up the cases until then. “The judges were so affected by Malaviya’s touching appeal that one judge stepped up to say that all the accused should be freed.”

Tripathi pauses, taps the table in an insistent way, and adds, “They still killed 19 people—is it incidental that the number of policemen killed had also been 19?” I ask to confirm if this numeric symmetry was more than just a coincidence. Maybe so, but it is a connection that locals have always made, he says.

The colonisers exacted retribution, but the martyrs have got little validation for their sacrifice. “Compared to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, where people died passively, unable to escape, Chauri Chaura was an incident when real organised action was taken but no credit was given to those who lost their lives,” says Tripathi.

Gandhi had once said, “English administrators chaff us for our speech and occasionally betray by their acts the contempt of our speeches and thereby tell us more effectively than by words ‘act if you dare’.” Which the revolutionaries of Chauri Chaura did—and were not honoured for what was heroism all the same, even if in violation of ahimsa. n 75 open 25 august 2014 www.openthemagazine.com

The freedom

I S S U E

67 67

Years in

ECONOMY

1961 4.27%

The average growth achieved by the economy during the second Five Year Plan, against a target of 4.5 per cent

1960 707

The Boeing model of aircraft used by Air-India on its first international flight to New York via London

1960s: Struggle

1950 5

1978 54

The number of multinationals that applied to exit India in 1977 and 1978, under the Janata Party Government, following the 40 per cent cap on foreign shareholding. Among them were global megacorps IBM and Coca Cola

1977 Rs 2.8 crore

1959 100,000

1966 57.4%

1976 57,290

1958 Rs 200 crore

1967 15.9%

1956 Rs 4,800 crore

The planned expenditure of the second Five Year Plan, under which the Union Government took up large-scale hydro-power and steel projects

The percentage by which the rupee was devalued to avoid a trade deficit crisis that had been brewing since 1950 The rate of inflation this year, due to a drought that resulted in falling food production. Inflation dropped the next year to 11.1 per cent

1968 28.8%

The percentage increase in foodgrain production this year, after two years of negative growth. Production increased to 95.6 million tonnes

1969 14

The number of commercial banks nationalised by the Government, with more than 85 per cent of deposits

The number of Indian specialists that had been trained via Indo-Soviet projects. Most specialists were trained in two industries: iron and steel, and machine building

1975 22%

The rate of inflation in 1973-74, caused by rising oil prices, and cited as one of the reasons for Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for ‘total revolution’, which led to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency

1974 97.75%

The peak tax rate established for income or profits above Rs 2 lakh.

The tax rate was 26 per cent in the 60s before Indira Gandhi pushed it past 90 per cent in the 70s

1955 7,526

1973

1954 1 million tonnes

1972 10 million

The number of non-Indians working in foreign-controlled firms in India, 90.5 per cent of whom earned above Rs 1,000, as compared to 3,995 Indians

1953 51%

The plan-period used by the Planning Commission set up this year

1951 Rs 2,069 Crore

1952 364

The number of Lok Sabha seats won by the Congress to form India’s first democratically elected government

40%

The maximum allowed foreign holding in domestic companies established by the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, which later caused an exodus of MNCs

The output of a Hindustan Steel plant set up in Bhilai with help from Russia The Government’s new majority holding in Air-India, which began as Tata Airlines, started by JRD Tata in 1932

The planned expenditure of India’s first five-year plan, which targeted annual growth of 2.1 per cent

Number of people killed by the Machchhu-II dam bursting, in Morbi town in Rajkot district of Gujarat.

Some estimates suggest the death toll was closer to 20,000. India’s worst dam burst is often cited by anti-large dam activists

The sum of money raised by Dhirubhai Ambani’s Reliance Textiles (now Reliance Industries) as equity from the public at a time when bank funding was the norm

The period a creator’s rights over a piece of work are guaranteed under the Copyright Act passed this year

The number of financial institutions established after independence, starting with IFCI. Six years later, ICICI would be incorporated; and IDBI nine years after

1979 1,800

Farm output after the Green revolution began, pivoting around using highyielding seeds, double cropping and expansion of farmland. From 65 million tonnes this year, India’s foodgrain output was 232 million tonnes in 2010-11

1957 60 years

1949 3

The corpus of Unit Trust of India, India’s first mutual fund, in its first year. Other government entities were allowed into the business in 1987; and the private sector in 1993. Today, 46 fund houses manage over Rs 9.9 lakh crore

1965 65 million tonnes

India’s foreign reserves, in rupee terms, at the time of its balance-of-payments crisis

The number of categories Independent India’s First Industrial Policy Resolution divides industrial activities into: state-run, state monopoly, state regulated and unregulated private enterprises

1963 Rs 25 crore

The food aid supplies received by India after foodgrain production fell short of demand despite a normal monsoon

The number of Bajaj two and three wheelers sold in the decade following the licence it was granted this year

1948 4

How long the Indo-China war lasted.

Decisively won by China, it saw India divert scarce economic resources to the war and lose territory

1964 7 million tonnes

Numbers

1950s: Build

1962 33 days

1970s: Nationalise 1970 7 years

The period for which a patent can now be held after the Patent Act of 1911 is replaced. In pharmaceuticals, the new law recognises only process patents, reducing the holding period from 16 years

The number of refugees in India after the 1971 war with Pakistan. The added financial burden required the Government to spend Rs 450 crore on care for the displaced

1971 1/10

The fraction India’s trade deficit is of what it was back in 1966 when India devalued its currency sharply, making exports cheaper and imports costlier

1999 21

1998 5

1980s: Deregulate 1980 526

The number of foreign collaborations cleared by the Congress government when faced with a three per cent contraction of the economy

1981 Rs 10,000

The startup capital for Infosys, which is currently valued at $33 billion and employs 150,000 people

1982

50,000

The number of colour TV sets allowed for import by the government at a ‘concessional’ duty of 190 per cent

1983 796

The engine capacity of the Maruti 800, developed in a joint venture between the Government of India and Suzuki of Japan

1984 4,000

The number of people killed when gas leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal

1985 25

The number of industries delicenced and relieved of price controls in India’s first set of economic reforms done by the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress Government

1986 Rs 64 crore

The kickback allegedly paid to Indian middlemen for a $285 million contract of purchase for artillery guns

1987 Rs 75 crore

The earnings from the Minimum Alternate Tax in its first year, which rose to Rs 25,000 crore in 2013-14

1988 Rs 30 crore

The funding allocated by the Government to develop an indigenous supercomputer after being denied access to US Cray supercomputers

1989 100%

The literacy rate recorded in Kottayam in Kerala, the first town to achieve full literacy; 22 years later, India has a literacy rate of 74 per cent overall

The number of underground nuclear tests conducted by India, resulting in US economic sanctions

1997 30%

The new peak income tax rate under P Chidambaram’s ‘dream budget’, down from 40 per cent

1996 $2.5 billion

2000s: Globalise 2000 Rs 499 crore

The cost of Enron’s power plant at Dabhol, which became a poster child for political interference and crony capitalism

The amount paid by Satyam Infoway to buy IndiaWorld, an online portal with a turnover of Rs 1.3 crore. This set off a dotcom boom that later went bust

1995 Rs 2.8 crore

2001 Rs 1,651 crore

Opening balance sheet of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, led by E Sreedharan; 12 years on, the balance sheet is at Rs 39,422 crore

1994 5%

The flat rate of service tax introduced. In 2013-14, India collected Rs 1,65,000 crore via this tax

1993 Rs 1,805 crore

The value of trades executed by the National Stock Exchange in its first year of operations

1992 40%

The crash in stock indices after trader Harshad Mehta was found to be gaming the system by SEBI, the new regulator of capital markets

1991 60 tonnes

The total gold pledged by India to the IMF for an emergency loan just before the Narasimha Rao Government kicked of the New Economic Programme

1990 37.5%

The quota for OBCs in government jobs and institutions of higher education established by the VP Singh Government

1990s: Reform

2014

334

2013

$1.5 billion

2012

122

2011

2

2010

20.2%

The number of Lok Sabha seats won by the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance in the General Election—the largest victory margin since 1984

The number of private players bidding for the 48 blocks put up for oil and natural gas exploration and drilling

The price set by the Government for pan-India mobile telephony licences. The Government also switched to a revenuesharing model. In 2003, incoming calls became free as well, and India’s tele-density shot up from single digits to close to 75 per cent today

2002 Rs 5,342 crore

The amount raised by the Vajpayee Government by disinvestment sales of VSNL, IBP, Hindustan Zinc and IPCL shares, following on the heels of the sale of Balco and CMC in 2001

The estimated valuation of etailer Flipkart.

A year later, India’s internet user base crossed 200 million and Flipkart was valued at $7 billion

The number of telecom licences the Supreme Court cancelled by overturning the executive decision made by UPA Telecom Minister A Raja in 2008

The number of states and union territories shown by Census data to have an equitable sex ratio. Kerala and Puducherry were alone on this list in 2011

The rate of inflation for food in February 2010. The rate did not fall below 10 per cent till February 2011. This was cited as one of the reasons why UPA-II lost in the 2014 elections

2010s: Reboot

2003 Re 1 to Rs 500

The price band set by Captain GR Gopinath, the owner of Air Deccan, India’s first low-cost airline. Though he was forced to sell out after four years, low-cost airlines had already become a fixture in Indian aviation

2004 8.50%

Record GDP growth, barring 1975-76 and 1988-89. A purple patch begins: in each of the next four years, annual growth was above 8 per cent, fuelled largely by private investment

2005 Rs 10

Minimum price to access governmental records under the Right to Information Act which came into force in this year.

It empowered citizens to seek written information from government entities

2006 100 days

The minimum number of days of work guaranteed by the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) This was the first of several steps by the Congress-led UPA that positioned the Government as a welfare provider

2009 600 million

The number of applications processed so far by the Unique Identification Authority of India, which was headed

by Nandan Nilekani

2008 $8.4 billion

India Inc’s global shopping bill for the year. Hindalco buys Novelis for around $6 billion, while Tata Motors snaps up Jaguar Land Rover for over $2.3 billion

2007 $1 trillion

The size milestone crossed by the Indian economy this year, an estimate based on the exchange rate of the time, making India the world’s 12th trillion-dollar-plus economy

By Howindialives.com

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Dare You Call Me Bossy!

After blockbuster director Rohit Shetty completed Singham Returns in six months flat, the director began catching up on the new releases he’d missed watching as his schedule cleared up. One of those was 2 States, the Arjun Kapoor-Alia Bhatt hit based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel.

Turns out the director couldn’t stop cracking up over Amrita Singh’s character in the film, the garrulous Punjabi mother who keeps making snide remarks about her son’s “Madrasi” fiancée and her family. The character, Shetty reveals, reminded him of his own mother. When he told his family to watch the film to see their mum on screen, Mama Shetty was not pleased her son was comparing her to the bossy screen diva. But everyone else at home, including the director’s wife, smiled conspiratorially, fully endorsing the parallels.

Personal Grudges and Public Grouses

Ram-Leela director Sanjay Leela Bhansali is reportedly seething. He’s not thrilled that his Khamoshi star Salman Khan has been dissing him lately. In a video interview the actor did last week with his Hum Aapke Hain Kaun director Sooraj Barjatya, Salman said each time he saw Bhansali lose his temper on the set or throw things at assistants, he would ask him to take a page out of Barjatya’s book. Barjatya is famously soft-spoken and calmtempered and is currently working with Salman on their fourth film together. According to a wellplaced source, Salman routinely attacks Bhansali on his temper, his “overrated” talent, and his “tendency to make films that nobody watches”.

Not long after the release of Guzaarish some years ago, Salman gave an interview saying “not one makkhi (fly) went to the theatre to see that film”.

It is no secret that the actor has had a love-hate relationship with Bhansali since working with him on Khamoshi and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam—two of Salman’s better films, most would agree. He openly criticised Bhansali when the director approached Shah Rukh Khan and not him to play the lead in Devdas. Salman had claimed that he’d salvaged Bhansali’s career by working with him in a second film (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam) despite the failure of 25 AUGUST 2014

Khamoshi, but that the director repaid him by moving on to SRK when he finally had a hit under his belt.

Salman was also upset that Bhansali had chosen to work with Aishwarya Rai, and not him, after the former real-life couple had split amidst much controversy and reports of acrimony. Salman and Bhansali buried their differences temporarily when the director approached him to make a guest appearance in Saawariya, but the actor’s camp says Bhansali didn’t keep his end of the bargain—he’d reportedly promised to make Bajirao Mastani with Salman after Saawariya, which he did not.

The Perfectionist’s Cube Obsession

They don’t call him the Earnest Star for nothing. But his constant efforts towards perfection sure find a way to tick people off. This leading man, who happens to be pretty good with a Rubik’s Cube, thought it would be a good ice-breaker if he demonstrated his nifty Cube-solving skills to an Oscarwinning British filmmaker who came visiting him a few years ago when he committed to co-produce a film that the actor was involved in.

Like an enthusiastic eight-year-old, the actor claimed he could solve the Cube in a record one minute, and proceeded to demonstrate. Only, he took well over two-and-ahalf minutes. Insisting he’d do it in a minute in his second try, he went at it again. This reportedly went on about half a dozen times, until he eventually achieved his target. But by then the filmmaker and his entourage had lost their patience.

More recently, another Oscar-winning filmmaker was scheduled to meet the star at his home when the former was in town to promote a new film that he’d shot in India. As it turns out, the studio representing the filmmaker was the same that had flown in the previous heavyweight.

This filmmaker was specifically warned not to bait the actor if he brought up the Rubik’s Cube claim.

Of course he did when they met, but the filmmaker didn’t react, and quickly moved on to another subject to discuss.

Apparently there was a collective sigh of relief from the reps escorting him. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 79

open space

At the Stroke of the Midnight Hour pib/afp

“Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments. To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill-will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell…” —Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, in his Tryst with Destiny speech on 14-15 August 1947 at Parliament House in New Delhi

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25 AUGUST 2014