Patralekha Chatterjee

By Ramachandra Guha

Rs 699

Ramachandra Guha laughs at the suggestion that his latest book, Patriots and Partisans, is likely to earn him new enemies.The BJP already detests him and the Congress treats him with suspicion, he points out. There may be some new enemies, but Guha hopes the book will also make him new friends. The acclaimed author and historian who, incidentally, did his masters in economics and his PhD in sociology, says his book
is “an appeal to liberals to speak more loudly and more consistently.”

In this free-wheeling conversation with Patralekha Chatterjee on the lawns of Delhi’s India International Centre, Guha talks about environmental degradation, Hindutva hate mail, chamchagiri, renewal of public institutions in India, the electronic media and a lot more. Excerpts:

A writer is known by the enemies he makes. In Patriots and Partisans, you say that the plural, inclusive idea of India has three enemies — Hindu fundamentalism, the extreme Left and ethnic separatism. To these you also add inequality, corruption and environmental degradation. Do you expect your new book to make you new enemies?
(Laughs) Possibly. That is okay. It will make me new friends, too. Someone like me is clearly detested by the BJP. The Congress treats me with suspicion. But in a country like India, it is still possible to defend the liberal middle ground. So it (the book) will probably stoke some old enmities. Narendra Modi acolytes will be even more angry. The Congress chamchas will also not like it. I may make a few new enemies among young Indians with a conscience who, in their sweet, naïve, unhistorical way, think that the solution lies in this great insurrection by rebels in the jungle. Fidel Castro writ large — that kind of stuff. In the first chapter, I talk about my trip to Dantewada in 2006 and my understanding of the brutal commitment to violence that the Naxalites have. That is as antithetical to democracy as Hindutva. So the new enemies could possibly be those young Left-wingers, those enchanted with insurrection. But I hope the book will also make me some new friends.

Where will these new friends come from?
I have no idea.

In your new book, apart from familiar terrain like Hindutva, ethnic separatism, communist dictatorship, you also touch on other areas like inequality and ecological degradation. Not that many people among today’s youth are aware of your work on environment.
I started as an environmental historian. I was in Calcutta in the ’80s, doing a PhD on the social history of forestry. Then I lived in the United States and worked on environmental issues. That continued till the mid ’90s. After that I moved into contemporary history. I have had a long-standing interest in
the environment. It was revived by recent developments — the venom that was poured on
environmentalists.

You say they are called the “party poopers”…
Yes, that is how they are seen. They are seen as people holding back India’s great growth dream. Had it not been for the likes of Medha Patkar, we would have been Singapore and rubbish like that… The complexities of rural life in India and the dependence of rural people on natural resources for sustenance is why any new project has to be planned very carefully, so that it does not undermine the basis of social survival. In one of my essays I quote Anil Agarwal, that great pioneering environmental journalist who said that the environmental issue in India is “beyond pretty trees and tigers”. It is about livelihood, sustainability, the way depletion of ground water aquifers affects Indian agriculture, health questions and so on. So I moved away from the environment as a scholarly pursuit, and began to see it as a social, lively concern which had been neglected in the media. There were fine activists in the field, very good young scientists doing good work on alternative energy, biodiversity, but the press did not talk about them. Since I follow the field, I knew the importance of these issues. I wanted to bring that back as one of the five or six major challenges facing India.
Inequality, for example, is talked about but I raised a new issue in this context. To address inequality, you need a real renewal of public institutions. We need better healthcare. I, as an upper-class Indian, can afford private healthcare. My househelp can’t. My children go to a good private school. Poor children don’t. So it is a question of creating equality of opportunity, of improving the capabilities of state institutions. There are key concerns like politicisation of bureaucracy. Chamchagiri is actually far more pervasive than the Congress Party. You appoint a person as a head of a government department because he is close to a minister or he has political pull. Take the NCERT. It was revived by Dr Krishna Kumar and is now again in some kind of limbo. Much of this book is about the urgent need for renewal of institutions. There is a need to look critically at institutions that sustained us in the ’50s, ’60s and the ’70s and were created by my icons — Nehru, Ambedkar. They created infrastructural institutions. What are the new good institutions that are being created? The ones we have are being degraded.

But this renewal that you talk about is premised on ideas which are hotly contested. Which essay in your book has the most incendiary or controversial ideas?
I don’t want to talk about controversies. My favourite essay may be the least controversial. Of course, what you call “incendiary” essays are the ones titled Hindutva Hate Mail, A Short History of Congress Chamchagiri and the one on the assessment of Nehru. But my favourite essay in the book, the one I took the most pleasure in crafting and where I think I have made a really original argument, is called The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual. We had a rich, bilingual culture — that is going. I ask what has caused the decline. I also like the essay on Nehru. I was trying to understand why his reputation has declined, how much of this decline is merited and how much of this is completely anachronistic. We use knowledge and facts that we have in 2012 to critique what he did and why he did it.

Your book talks a lot about liberal India’s icons and seems to be pitched at liberals. Is the liberal middle ground shrinking in this country?
No, I don’t think it is shrinking but it does not voice its concerns vigorously and consistently. The extremists shout louder and continuously. The electronic media magnifies the extremes. If there is a debate on FDI (foreign direct investment) or on economic globalisation, the TV channels will put up a kind of gung-ho free marketeer and one loony Leftist who thinks everything foreign is bad. But actually there is a middle ground. It is a complex, grey issue. Likewise with secularism. A media debate on the Ayodhya controversy will have a mullah and the Sangh Parivar. The middle ground is not given enough space but it is well-populated. In a sense, my book is an appeal to liberals to speak more loudly and more consistently.