Friday, 20 November 2015

In defence of Pandit Nehru

Darryl D'Monte talks about his recent participation in a discussion on Nayantara Sahgal's book on Nehru, which delves into Nehruvian policies, his cherished dreams, his lasting legacy and its importance in today's time.


At a time when the entire legacy of Nehru is being questioned – admittedly the pitch has been queered by the dubious, corrupt Congress party regime in recent times – it was appropriate that none other than the Nehru Centre in Mumbai held a discussion on his niece Nayantara Sahgal’s new, edited book Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation (Speaking Tiger, 192pp), which this columnist chaired.


Cover image of Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation. Pic: Speaking Tiger

All ten contributors and his niece in her introduction put up a strong defence of the first Prime Minister. Predictably, Mani Shankar Aiyar, a close buddy of his grandson, Rajiv, distinguishes Panditji not only as a man of action, but of the right action, as distinct from Vallabhai Patel. To elaborate this point further, he questions whether Nehru was the thinker and Sardar the doer, as is often stated nowadays.

Aiyar lists four great contributions of Nehru: Democracy, Secularism, Socialism and Non-alignment. He reminds us that of the 150 countries liberated in the world after 1947, India is the only one of its size and diversity to remain a democracy. One has only to cast an eye on our immediate neighbours, even across the Palk Straits, to drive home that point.

The one exception among the contributors is the journalist and author Hartosh Singh Bal, who was born in the 1960s and therefore didn’t treat Nehru as his Chacha or in other words, inherit his legacy.

Historians Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee note that at independence, over 8 out of every ten Indians (over 9 in the case of women) couldn’t read or write. An Indian could be expected to live for around 30 years, which meant the poor died much younger, echoing Susan George’s 1976 expose How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger (freely downloadable at https://www.tni.org/en/publication/how-the-other-half-dies).

Per capita income had been shrinking annually at 0.2 percent per year for the 30 years preceding 1947, encompassing the terrible Bengal famine. Farm output was shrinking at 0.72 percent per annum and foodgrains even faster at 1.14 percent. They write: “Nehru was to launch a brilliant multi-pronged strategy to lift India out of this morass which set an example to numerous other countries emerging out of colonialism after the Second World War.”


Author of Nehru’s India and Nehru's niece Nayantara Sahgal. Pic: Speaking Tiger

However, as the historians observe, neo-colonial authors like Tirthankar Roy, a labour expert formerly from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and now in the economic history department of the London School of Economics (LSE) and his fellow LSE economist Lord Meghnad Desai, who was once a leftist, dismiss the colossal economic achievements of Nehru.

Desai characterises the first 44 years after independence, till the ushering in of economic liberalisation in 1991, as a ‘wasted opportunity.’ They probably derive this inference from the runaway success of the erstwhile Asian Tigers, now joined by the mother of all big cats, China, which substituted a protectionist policy towards domestic industry by export-led growth.

However, as has often been pointed out, all the Tigers, Japan in particular, also relied on fierce state-led industrial protectionism in their early growth years. Also, they weren’t faced by a unique Indian dilemma: how to propel a huge country like India, with half its population below the poverty line, into the 21st century?

Sunil Khilnani, in his The Idea of India (1997, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York) writes: "It was by no means a foregone conclusion that, after 1947, India would embark on a path of planned industrialisation. Its huge agrarian economy was one of the most impoverished in the world; from Gandhi it had inherited a vision deeply opposed to the project of industrial modernity; and, although it possessed powerful industrial capitalists (at the end of the Second World War, India was the tenth largest producer of manufactured goods in the world), they did not form a united class strong enough to push through a project of industrialisation against a society of rentiers, farmers and traders.”

All capitalists like the Dalmias and Birlas made their killing by hoarding goods (hence, rentiers) during the First World War (the Tatas from opium sold to China) and investing their considerable surpluses in a wide range of industries.

While it is undeniable that post-independence, in many cases, protectionist policies coddled Indian industrialists and shielded them from the searing winds of global competition, the state did help manufacturers to grow by capturing the “commanding heights of the economy” – the public sector – which laid the foundation for a somewhat delayed private sector take-off.

Rather than Nehruvian policies, or possibly only partly because of them, Indian industry chose to take the path of least resistance and look to short-term gain rather than invest for the future. Nowhere was this clearer than in the textile industry, which first was hamstrung by the British Raj protecting and promoting Manchester rather than Bombay or Ahmedabad.

However, cotton textile mill owners like the Tatas and Mafatlals chose to bleed their mills and invest their considerable profits into more lucrative industries in Mumbai such as heavy machinery, chemicals and petro-chemicals, in chronological order. When the time came in the 1970s and 1980s for the mills to compete with the Tigers, they couldn’t because their machinery was obsolete.

The Mukherjees state upfront that had India adopted a laissez faire policy in the 1950s, it would surely have headed towards becoming a “banana republic”.  Indeed, at the Nehru Centre book discussion, a member of the audience asked panellists what would have happened had the Jan Sangh, the progenitor of the BJP, ruled India instead of the Congress in 1947.


The audience at the discussion, Nehru Centre, MumbaiPic: Nehru Centre Library

According to Aruna Pendse, who teaches politics at Mumbai University and was one of the two participants at the discussion, it would have almost certainly meant throwing in our fortunes with those of the US. That would have further meant participating in the Cold War instead of adhering to Nehru’s non-alignment.

She cited, as an exemplar of such kowtowing to US imperialism, the case of Thailand which, incidentally, has never been colonised but may be said to have felt the hot breath of neo-colonialism under US tutelage. It has served as an US army base for decades. During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, it was an “R&R” (rest and recreation, partly a euphemism for prostitution) centre for American troops. That undermining of the country’s morals persists, as any visitor to the fleshpots of Patpong in Bangkok or the beaches of Pattaya can testify.

Moderating perspectives

Lest the reader infer that this columnist is a die-hard Nehruvian, one must set the record straight. All environmentalists believe that many of the so-called development policies that Nehru and his daughter pursued actually ended up adding to the misery of the marginalised.

In 1985, I published a book titled Temples or Tombs? Industry versus Environment: Three Controversies (Centre for Science & Environment) where I turned on its head Panditji’s oft-quoted remark (in Hindi, actually) when he opened the Bhakra-Nangal dam in 1954:

Probably nowhere else in the world is there a dam as high as this...As I walked around the site, I thought that these days the biggest temple and mosque and gurdwara is the place where man works for the good of mankind. Which place can be greater than this, Bhakra-Nangal?

The fact is the emphasis on such infrastructure and heavy industry – the commanding heights – were at the cost of agriculture, village crafts and small enterprises, which explains why much of India is still mired in poverty.

Although Nehru once said that “Everything can wait but not agriculture”, it took the food crisis of the 1960s which propelled us towards reliance on US “ship-to-mouth” PL 480 grain aid shipments, to serve as a wake-up call.

Ironically, it was only through another US-inspired innovation, the Green Revolution in wheat, that the country became self-sufficient in food (though it became reliant on input-intensive agriculture, now veering into cash crops instead of food).

Again, Nehru’s attempted land reforms were so necessary for farm output to increase by allowing sharecroppers or the landless to acquire their own two or so acres. But at best, these were half-baked; at worst, the contemporaneous Gandhian Bhoodan (voluntary land donation) movement hardly dented the problem.

Still, the failed transformation of agriculture took place in a democratic framework, unlike our Big Neighbour to the East, China, where countless peasants – demographers put it between 18 and 32 million – died in “The Great Leap Forward” from farming to industry.

Daniel Thorner -- the renowned American economist who fled his native country during the McCarthy era, made India his home and introduced peasants in the study of agriculture along with D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma -- once pointed out that India achieved on the farm front in just 21 years after freedom what it had taken the previous 200 years to accomplish.

Incidentally, Nehru himself said, in 1948, “What is a young man’s ambition today?...They think of becoming economists, because an economist plays a big part in the modern world.”

Current debates

In today’s India, more than Nehru’s economic policies, it is his political and sociological inclinations, particularly on Kashmir and secularism that have come under severe fire. The late poet A.K. Ramanujam once likened Nehru’s penchant for diversity to what an Irish politician said about trousers.  The very same vestment was singular at the top, but plural at the bottom.

In somewhat the same vein, ecologists believe that tropical ecosystems harbour the most diverse life on the planet; by extrapolating this to India’s society, the more diverse it is, the more robust it will turn out to be.

 
At the discussion- Aruna Pendse( left) , Darryl D'Monte (center) and Rakesha Chaturvedi (right). Pic: Nehru Centre Library

At the Nehru Centre book discussion, a discordant note was struck by the other panellist, Rakesha Chaturvedi, who teaches junior college at the NSS Hill Spring International School in Mumbai. She called for the integration of the minorities into the “mainstream” and asserted that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh shouldn’t be blamed for Muslim fundamentalism.

By contrast, Bal elaborates on the perceived wrongs on the part of the Hindu right in his chapter titled “The Truth-teller”.  He writes, “The RSS’s worldview has internalised the idea of defeat by colonial powers, and now seeks refuge at hostility at everything suggestive of that defeat.” He goes beyond the Raj to cite the psychological wounds inflicted by Islamic rulers and adds: “The RSS’ hatred of Christianity and Islam is only a manifestation of a much larger malaise.”

Upping the ante, Chaturvedi advocated splitting Pakistan into four separate ethnic nations which alone would ward off the unwanted attentions towards India of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Otherwise, Pakistan was held together only by the hatred of India. “India is a nation with a military, Pakistan a military nation,” she remarked.

Pendse replied that dismembering Pakistan would be most unsustainable for that country. Besides, what kind of nation would we then have on our border? It would bring the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria (ISIS) to our very doorstep, and considerably heighten the threat of terrorism.

She asked the audience to remember the threat posed by the separatist movement of Khalistan.  Had he been alive, Nehru -- who believed in the five principles of Panchseel – would never have interfered with the internal affairs of his neighbours in the aggressive manner that Chaturvedi spelt out.

In conclusion, I remarked that after two visits to Pakistan, I have learnt what Pakistanis think of India. They perceive us as this huge country, with the fourth or so largest army in the world and one which has beaten Pakistan to becoming a nuclear power.

I could have added that if anything, Pakistan suffers far worse Islamic terrorist attacks than this country, almost on a weekly basis. I could have further added, quoting Gandhiji, someone who is also the Hindu Right’s bĂȘte noire: “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."

These times call for a much greater and reasoned adherence to Nehru’s cherished ideals than ever before.

Darryl D'Monte
24 September 2015

Darryl D'Monte, former Resident Editor of The Times of India in Mumbai, is Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India and founder President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.




On the waterfront in Mumbai

Mumbai’s port land should be redeveloped to benefit, among others, the dock workers and slum dwellers, says a recently released report by city based NGOs Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) and Hamara Shehar Vikas Niyojan Abhiyaan. Darryl D’Monte analyses the report.



Mumbai’s port land extends over 752 hectares (ha or 1,858 acres), occupying one-eighth of Mumbai’s island city, making the Mumbai Port Trust (MPT) the city’s largest owner of real estate. The port comprises the largest of 12 ports owned by the central government. The 14-km-long eastern waterfront stretches from Colaba at the southern tip to Wadala in the northeast of the city.

However, with the development of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port at Nhava-Sheva on the mainland across the creek from the island city, the MPT is in decline. For two decades, the central and state governments have been debating what to do with the land now valued at up to Rs 1 lac crore in the market. MPT earns only Rs 200 crore a year from port revenue and by leasing out such land to corporates like Taj Hotels, Hindustan and Bharat Petroleum.

The fate of Mumbai’s port land acquires national significance because it will send a signal when other derelict industrial and infrastructure land in older cities like Kolkata and Kanpur come up for redevelopment.



Mumbai port around Darukhana, the site of ship-breaking industry. Pic: Prabirkumar Talukdar
YUVA & HSM

Mumbai based NGOs Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) and Hamara Shehar Vikas Niyojan Abhiyaan Mumbai (HSM) recently released a study report titled People’s Perspective on the port redevelopment in which they question the corporatisation of ports, recommended by the World Bank in its India Port Strategy Report in 1995.

The World Bank report suggested large-scale privatisation, easing of government controls, modernization of infrastructure and making way for experts to manage port affairs. Last year, an international consultant was appointed to suggest amendments of the Major Ports Act, 1963.

The NGOs allege that once converted into entities under the Companies Act, ports will get financial and operational autonomy. This will enable ports to monetise land, which is their biggest asset, and poor stakeholders like the workers, slum dwellers and fisherfolk will get a raw deal in the process.

In a chapter titled “Mumbai in the Dock”, which dealt with this subject in a book I published in 2002, Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills (OUP), I cited how London’s Docklands were privatised by Margaret Thatcher, virtually doing away with planning. Among other problems, this neglected the need of local residents, many of of them Bangladeshis, and didn’t address their housing or employment.

The NGOs have conducted a survey of the encroachments and informal settlements of the poor on MPT land. This, they say, will establish the right of these communities and give them a slice of the pie when the land is up for redevelopment.

They call for abandoning current planning practices which have vitiated the holistic development of Mumbai and argue for an inclusive, participatory model which takes all stakeholders into account. It must also prioritise social goals and people’s concerns.

The NGOs advocate incorporating these concerns into the draft Development Plan, the earlier version of which was scrapped after public outcry earlier this year and is now being redrafted. However, this is the domain of the municipal corporation, whereas the MPT land belongs to the central government.

The case of the mill land

From the mid-1990s, Mumbaikars lost the opportunity to wrest 162 ha (400 acres) for public housing and open spaces when the land occupied by the mills, 242 ha (600 acres) was to be redeveloped, according to Mills for Sale: The Way Ahead (Marg, 2007), edited by me. The mills occupied only a third that the docks do, and the redevelopment of the latter should avoid the mistakes committed in the former instance.

In 1991, the Maharashtra government instituted a one-third formula, whereby mill owners or developers had to surrender a third of the plot they occupied for low-cost housing, another third to the municipal corporation for amenities like open space, and sell or develop the remaining third. However, they received floor-space index or buildable rights in relation to the size of the plots on the two-thirds they gave up.

In 2001, the state government introduced a new clause, which required owners to part with two-thirds of only vacant land. Since mills – for that matter, factories or ports – have a large footprint, Mumbai lost out in the process. The metropolis has only 1.2 sq metre of open space per inhabitant today, one of the lowest in the world, specially for a mega city with more than 10 million people.

Rani Jadhav panel report

The two NGOs have analysed the proposal of a committee headed by the former MPT Chair, Rani Jadhav, which was submitted last year but has still not been made public. However, repeated leaks have revealed its findings.


Mumbai port redevelopment plan, Rani Jadhav report. Pic: Urban Design Research Institute

It ascribes the dereliction of MPT docklands to changes in the shipping industry, mainly to the switch to container traffic, which Mumbai can’t accommodate due to its shallow draft. This explains why bigger ships move to Nhava-Sheva.

The NGOs question the excessive emphasis in Jadhav’s report on catering to the tourism industry, with a “world-class” cruise terminal for luxury liners and a giant Ferris wheel on the lines of the London Eye. It also recommends a floating hotel or “floatel”, food courts and creation of 161 ha (400 acres) of open space. Many such activities may exclude locals not only from employment but access.

Jadhav’s report begins by pointing out that port cities worldwide face the global syndrome of the de-industrialisation of city centres. The relocation of industrial activity due to modernization of manufacturing and goods handling methods has led to dereliction and redundancy in vast tracts of inner city harbours.

MPT’s inept handling of changes in cargo and shipping has resulted in a shift of such activities to new ports, leaving land open for a variety of entertainment and waterfront activities that, it says, can be enjoyed by all classes of society.

The report cites how MPT handled 59 million tonnes of cargo in 2013-14, around a tenth of that handled by major ports. As much as 77 percent of its cargo -- 61 percent of ‘liquid bulk’ like oil products and 16 percent for transshipment to other centres – is handled offshore, which shows that the port can remain operational despite opening large tracts for redevelopment.

The revenue from liquid cargo makes up for the losses on general goods. MPT also has to pay large pensions to its retired dockworkers. The report recommends that future activities should be offshore, for which the MPT has built a long jetty, enabling larger oil tankers to dock, releasing the pressure on the waterfront and making it available for public purposes.

As much as 275 ha have been leased to public sector companies, oil and petroleum industries and the defence authorities. Another 136 ha have been leased to private parties for commercial uses.

After litigation, the MPT was able to retrieve 64 ha from tenants. According to an incomplete survey by the port estate department in 2002, 7.5 ha have been encroached upon, with 14,365 hutments.

Certain areas on the waterfront have been transformed into informal small-scale industrial units for ship-breaking – a hazardous and often banned activity – and ship repairs etc that even supply materials and skills for the country as a whole. These workers have been classified an informal and migrant, and the informal economy occupies this 7.5 ha.

A ship-breaking unit in Darukhana, Mumbai port. Pic: Prabirkumar Talukdar

The Jadhav report envisions opening up 28km of the waterfront – twice the current length – much of which is occupied by derelict docks. A 121 ha area will be created into an environment zone and at least 30 percent of the land will be converted into parks, playgrounds, plaza, maidans and so on.

Its vision is described as Open – for new recreation and tourism uses; Connected – for seamless local, regional and national connectivity, through multiple transport modes on land and sea; and Green – with promenades and open spaces.

A citizens’ initiative called APLI – A Port Land Initiative – Mumbai took a more people-friendly approach towards redeveloping the area with mixed-use residential areas which would include “project affected people”, a heritage corridor centred around the much-neglected Sewri Fort, a watersports facility to replace the toxic ship-breaking yard and a marina, along with a cruise ship terminal. It had the backing of the Indian Merchants’ Chamber and the Graduate School of Architecture of Columbia University.

What the NGOs report

The two NGOs take a different view of what they term a vibrant informal economy that has been in existence there for decades. They oppose the proposal to create a centralised planning agency, the MP Land Development Authority, which will bypass the municipal corporation. The authority can constitute a Special Planning Authority under the Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning (MR&TP) Act, negating any role of elected representatives.

By declaring the port “sick”, exactly like the 54 cotton mills were, the government is opening up a Pandora’s Box of privatisation, they fear. Most mills, almost entirely those in private hands but also those in the public sector, have been transformed into malls, glitzy office complexes and high-end residential towers.

The rehabilitation of these workers when they are displaced hasn’t been addressed. There is no consistent housing policy, and those living in the port communities live a “sub-human” life. There are ten toilet seats for around 15000 people.

The NGOs estimate there are 30000 slum households – twice what the 2002 survey assessed -- with 150000 people on this land. Mumbai city is a stakeholder too, they assert, in sharp contrast to what happened with the mills.

The two NGOs argue that Section 33 of the MR&TP Act also gives a local planning authority powers to prepare detailed micro-level plans for areas requiring “comprehensive development”. This follows the same process as preparing the 20-year Development Plan, which requires public hearings at the local level.

Other port redevelopment projects

They have cited international experience to bolster their case. London, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and Barcelona are some cities which have rejuvenated their docklands with varying results, as we have seen in London’s case. The City in London – with a capital C, the world’s financial capital – is situated there and there is little local employment or housing.

The Jadhav committee looked somewhat closer home, at ‘smart city’ examples of Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and even Australia, where digital technologies boost port efficiency and reduce the use of resources.

The NGOs specially cite the redeveloped port area of Ciudad Vieja, in Montevideo, Uruguay, which is home to primarily poor residents in spite of banks, trading companies and other business enterprises in the vicinity. There is a special scheme for this area, within the overall Montevideo plan. The heritage of this historical city centre is preserved and the decline of its population arrested by projects to resettle inhabitants. There are moves against urban segregation, while more public space has been opened to the public, with improved public transport and restrictions on the entry of cars.

In Singapore, which has the advantage of a deepwater port, efficiency has ensured the vibrancy of this area. Long term planning, rigid political control and decisive administration are the key political elements that have earned the city-state its exemplary status for urban planning.

Darryl D'Monte
25 October 2015
Darryl D'Monte, former Resident Editor of The Times of India in Mumbai, is Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India and founder President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.