Lost Worlds (also published as "By the Rivers of India" in the Financial Chronicle of Weekend February 22nd 2014
Two women became the symbols of Kerala as it stands today. One brought her two school going daughters and infant son to Jantar Mantar in October 2013 to protest against illegal sand mining in Kerala. It was Jairam Ramesh who immediately wrote to Oomen Chandy asking that he look into the case.( see Firstpost.com.) October is not a very cold month, but it took all of four months for Oommen Chandy to respond to the environmental crusader. Sand mining is one of the most visible of illegal occupations, and no one speaks of it, for fear of being killed. A cursory web check will show the fear in which people live of the sand mining mafia. Yet, construction activity cannot ostensibly be supported without it, though now crushed mortar is providing a recycling alternative. Dr Samuel Paul has argued that 60 percent of Kerala is now urbanised. The promise of IPL games brought with it its own crushing sense of the morass of traffic, which besieges Kerala with a consumerist culture, now well in place with the Gulf Diaspora returning and looking for what they were used to. Internet parks and shopping malls became the common cause for an industrialising nation everywhere. Sunanda died leaving her families and friends distraught, because by all accounts she was likeable and amusing. Development strategies, however, which come with their leisure packages are not without costs. According to a resident in Kuruvillangad, (a wealthy rural gulf diaspora Syrian Christian outpost in Kerala with its proliferating colleges and ritual sites,) “Sunanda was so charming, she could sell sand to desert inhabitants in Dubai”. Jazeera, the autodriver however, had to sit in the freezing Delhi climate when temperatures went down to 4 degrees, to protest against the rampant death of rivers in Kerala. Jazeera’s protest, was supported by her school master husband. The future of Kerala lies in the hands of those three children who survived Delhi’s bitter cold, though the files to Oommen Chandy took four months to be cleared, before he could intervene.
Bureaucracies are the spine of the nation.
If one disrupts officialise there is vagrancy. Yet Hannah Arendt said that
because the bureaucrat follows orders, and because the bureaucrat is never
responsible, the banality of evil is rampant. When Varun Gandhi invoked the
name of his father and wished to return in the name of his father, I shuddered,
for Emergency excesses were huge, and Sanjay Gandhi’s youth brigade who
roistered through the streets of Delhi were very energetic.
I was 17 when the Emergency happened.
Coming back from the Delhi University, (before the Mudrika bus seva had
completely reinvented our lives), I had to catch a connecting bus to Nizamuddin,
where I lived, from Daryaganj. In those days, a lone 57 number bus went to
D.U, and you had to find a place to catch it from. So Daryaganj was where I
boarded and got off, mornings and
afternoons, in 1974, all a good forty years ago. And there, every day, I would see
the government officers who would put up little tables, where people came and
signed up for a vasectomy or a tubectomy because they wanted something from the
Government. If one had three children, then one had to sign up and get a sterilisation certificate. Brinda Karat
upturned the apple cart by stating some years ago, that women should decide the
number of children they wanted. Working classes, as Mahmud Mamdani argued
in one of our prescribed Sociology
readings on the 1970s, see children as the substitute for pensions, which they
don’t receive in our country, as they are poor and usually contract labour does
not receive identity cards, for what permanent address do they have?
Interestingly, on 18.7.67. Panampilly
Govinda Menon wrote a note in his capacity as Union Law Minister, to say “To subject a person to the operation of
vasectomy or tubectomy is to inflict “grievous hurt” as defined in Sec 320 of
the Indian Penal Code on that person. Currently in our hospitals and family
planning centres these operations are done with the consent of the persons
operated upon and therefore are not penal. The case here is not of
sterilisation with the consent of the person sterilised but under compulsion of
law. And the question is whether such law would be within the competence of
Parliament” ( NMML Manuscript Section,File 190 xxxv 176)
P. Govinda Menon does not have a problem
ethically with people being sterilised compulsorily so long it is not “deprivation of personal liberty by naked executive order.” After having clarified that none of the “religions of the world”, besides the Roman Catholic
one, is against contraception, (and this community may be exempted along with other conscientious
objectors,) the law for compulsory sterilisation may be seen as a reasonable
one. “Since the proposal is to have
legislation for compulsory sterilisation, the order to be issued to an
individual by the appropriate officer will be according to procedure
established by law and protected; unless the Courts further stipulate the law
in this respect should be a reasonable law; and the stature on scrutiny is
found to be unreasonable.” (ibid)
In another note in the same file, which is preserved as Symposium on Greater
Cochin Development Concluding Speech, dated 1967 he says, “It is time that Malayalees dropped the habit of staying in separate
house, each standing in its own compound. The density of population and the
scarcity of land does not permit it. Multistoreyed buildings into flats for
residential purposes would be the only possible solution for the housing
problem in this region. I am sure the Malayalees
would be able to adjust to this type of living.”
The
Malayalees love for gardens is a characteristic, and growing fruits and flowers has been now
concretely translated by Diaspora into terrace gardens, since Kerala government runs courses on growing
runner beans, bitter gourds and ladies finger and curry leaves on one’s own
terrace, or in pots. Any sorrow for lost gardens is ostensibly nostalgia, which
most modernists see as potently limiting. I would just presume that having more
agricultural colleges is necessary in the 21st century, and new
agriculturists should by right be nurtured, instead of the Indian State going
the Bt way monotonously. The survival of rivers, as Jazeera argued, is the most
significant thing for those who live in our riverine and ancient civilisations.
These are living and sustainable traditions, not to be axed in the name of
Development, and archived through Proud Parade marches. Watching the Ladakh
villagers growing apricots, apples,
turnips, radishes, runner beans, celery, potatoes, even grapes (in
Kargil) for the consumption of the
Indian army, and farmers with small gardens hoping for roads to Delhi to market
their excess produce was an eye opener.
Amit Shah would have us believe in television
rhetoric, that prosperity is a neutral
thing, and that when water or electricity is provided, Gujarat provides equally
to both, in the same village. However post 2002, many Muslims continue to live
in refugee camps or ghettos. Muzaffar Nagar has proved that in some states,
segregation of communities is sought. Industrialisation comes with heavy cost
to the rural poor, many of whom come to the city to earn. Whether town, country
or metropolis, the City decides the future of the hinterland.
