Greater than the sum of its parts

An attempt is being made to project the Dinesh Trivedi controversy as a crisis in Centre-states relations. It’s nothing of the kind. It’s a clash of egos on Trinamul Congress’ single-track line with the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre virtually an innocent bystander. But after being grilled for more than an hour last week on a TV channel’s live webchat, I can understand public anxiety to clothe the conflict in constitutional respectability. Some questioners were perturbed about declining parliamentary standards; others feared India might be splitting at the seams.

I’ll come to the first anxiety later. Regarding the second, I, too, have often wondered if India is a state of many nations or a nation of many states. Both are tempting propositions, especially after Jaswant Singh’s thesis that India didn’t have a defined territory or explicit borders until colonial times. It was not a state. But it’s always been a nation.
So, perhaps, have Malayalis or Assamese. If they had to fend for themselves, they might also have acquired the attributes of statehood. After all, the neglected eastern districts of undivided Bengal evolved a distinct Bangladeshi identity through a process of religious awakening, political consciousness and economic growth. Each fed on and strengthened the others to create both nation and state.
Some older readers might recall that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam hoped for a similar evolution. A journalist with The Hindu even famously boasted he would be his paper’s first foreign correspondent in New Delhi! When secession became ultra vires of the Constitution, V.R. Nedunchezhiyan, who had twice acted as Tamil Nadu chief minister, told me the DMK would make its case more discreetly, displaying its “rising sun” symbol in secessionist films. Sivaji Ganesan, the great Tamil star, was then a strong supporter.
The movement fizzled out primarily for two reasons. First, Tamils realised that parliamentary elections gave them a say in policy-making over a wider region than the immediate habitat. Second, the market economy and the system of easy communications that facilitated it was a form of globalisation before globalisation became an international cliché. Mahatma Gandhi’s argument against railways — that they enabled farmers to hoard grain for sale in distant markets where prices were highest — powerfully supported national unity. Nothing is more persuasive than the profit motive.
There’s always been haggling for power within the system but it was muted in the early years. India was like a joint family with the patriarch (Jawaharlal Nehru) dealing with influential regional satraps like Govind Ballabh Pant and Bidhan Chandra Roy. These leaders acquiesced in the Planning Commission even though it drove coach and horses through states’ rights and received in return Central projects and funds. It was an expedient compact.
Things changed somewhat in 1967 when it was said one could travel from Calcutta to Amritsar without setting foot on Congress territory. Indira Gandhi’s amused comment at a meeting of chief ministers immediately after the Lok Sabha election was that though the faces were different, the voices were the same. They had the same demands. They still do.
But today’s chief ministers are on the whole more timid. A sulky Mamata Banerjee might refuse to accompany Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Dhaka but Bidhan Chandra Roy acted like a sovereign authority. Ignoring the Centre’s monopoly on foreign affairs, he thought nothing of shooting off a protest to the governor of East Pakistan, Khan Abdul Monem Khan, about border encroachments. Pakistan’s deputy high commissioner in Calcutta, a retired Bengali judicial officer, used to complain about the diplomatic impropriety. He was particularly vexed when Padmaja Naidu, West Bengal’s governor, mentioned the border incidents in her inaugural speech, which, of course, Roy had written.
There’s more internal politicking nowadays. Chief ministers form cliques and caucuses, play footsie with disgruntled Congressmen, snipe at the UPA while supporting it, and stab allies in the back. Naveen Patnaik dreams of a Third Front, Arun Jaitley fumes about “a systematic attempt to usurp the powers of the state,” Akhilesh Singh Yadav and Prakash Karat hug each other fraternally, and the Marxist politburo issues statements denouncing the Centre’s “growing encroachment” on states’ rights. All this posturing and threatening must be very annoying for the UPA. But despite the pride in regional identity that a questioner mentioned, people can rest assured that India’s unity isn’t endangered in the least. When the chips are down, these regional leaders can’t do without the Centre.
As for standards, it must be recognised that all institutions — legislatures, the judiciary, bureaucracy, media, and academia — function today at a lower level of integrity and efficiency than in 1947. A presidential system won’t help for the problem is with the singer not the song. I am reminded of O. Henry’s short story Roads of Destiny in which a peasant lad leaving home to seek fame and fortune comes to a trijunction. He takes each road in turn and each time dies from a bullet from the revolver of a particular marquis. All those eager questioners on the webchat should reconcile themselves to the knowledge that there’s no escaping fate.
What does cause concern — and this too a questioner noted — is that educated young Indians are so disinterested in politics. When N.R. Narayana Murthy was mentioned in this context, I had to remind the speaker that Lee Kuan Yew had pleaded with the Infosys founder to enter politics because only people like him could “transform India”. Narayana Murthy had laughed at the suggestion.
The silver lining, slight though it be, that occurred to me as the questions kept pouring in was that such avid interest in public life means that, unlike some neighbouring countries, India can never be seized by a small coterie.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author