The way society is run
Review by Surjit Hans

Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Pages 175. Rs 175.

Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order. Pages 244. Rs 250.

Both by Noam Chomsky. Madhyam Books, Delhi.

CHOMSKYhomsky is an anarchist. "According to anarcho-syndicalist vision, any structure of hierarchy and authority carries a heavy burden of justification, whether it involves personal relations or a larger social order. If it cannot bear that burden — sometimes it can — it is illegitimate and should be dismantled. When honestly posed and squarely faced, that challenge can rarely be sustained. Genuine libertarians have their work cut out for them."

Chomsky subscribes to "the humanistic conception of economic activity". According to American philosopher Dewey, the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. For Russell, the goal of education is to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community in which both liberty and individual creativeness flourish, and working people will be masters of their fate, not tools of production.

Keeping in mind the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chomsky writes:"One of these systems has fortunately collapsed, but the other is on a march backwards to what could be a very ugly future."

In the 19th century the new spirit of industrialisation was repugnant to an astonishingly large section of the American people. The primary reason was the decline of the industrial worker as a person, the psychological change, the loss of dignity and independence, democratic rights and freedoms,... imposed by state and private power, by violence when necessary.

The neo-liberals are stubbornly silent about a number of things. Adam Smith, the father of liberalism, who wrote "the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no reason to exert his understanding and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be. In every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor fall unless the government takes pains to prevent it."

In fairness it must be conceded that neoliberalism harks back to Malthus and Ricardo who demonstrated to the people with their new science (economics) that they have no rights.

Contrary to what they foolishly believe, they have a free choice: the labour market, the work house prison, death, or go somewhere else made possible by the extermination of indigenous populations not exactly by market principles. Today the last option has been ruled out.

Bakunin predicted that the new class of intellectuals would follow one of the two parallel paths.They might seek to lead popular struggles to take state power into their own hands, becoming a "Red bureaucracy" or offer themselves as the bought priesthood of really existing capitalism, serving as managers or apologists.

The ghost of Chartist times is around to vex the masters of globalisation — "we can deny them the right to live, but they can deny us the right to rule."

Chomsky tears the veil of "really existing democracy" when all it is concerned with is "manufacture of consent". Hume was intrigued by "the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, the implicit submission with which men resign their fate" to rulers. He found this surprising because "force is always on the side of the governed".

That people must submit is taken for granted pretty much across the spectrum. In a democracy, the governed have a right to consent. The populace may be "spectators" not "participants". This is the political arena. The general population must be excluded entirely from the economic arena.

A famous philosopher argued that the principle of consent is not violated when the rulers impose plans that are rejected by the public, if the masses later consent to what they have done in their name. This is the principle of "consent without consent". Later the principle was extended to the conquered countries.

The enormous public relations industry, from its origins early in this country, has been dedicated to the "control of the public mind". The fact that it has roots and major centres in the country that are "most free" is exactly what we should expect.

Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science, warned that the intelligent few must recognise "the ignorance and stupidity of the masses", and not succumb to "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests".

The US Constitution was intrinsically designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period, delivering power to the "better sort" of people. Madison, one its architects and the fourth President of America, declared that the primary responsibility of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority".

An important manual of the public relations industry opens by observing that "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of a democratic society". The intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically. Therefore, "our society has consented to permit free competition to be organised by leadership and propaganda", another case of "consent without consent". Engineering consent is the very essence of the democratic process.

The ruling America talks of "the crisis of democracy" not when more than 50 per cent of the electorate does not bother to cast their votes but when normally passive and apathetic populations become organised and seek to enter the political arena to pursue their interests and demands, threatening stability and order anywhere in the world.

Over 80 per cent of Americans think that the government is run for the benefit of the few; 80 per cent that the system is inherently unfair; 95 per cent that corporations should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of workers and communities. Public attitudes remain stubbornly social democratic in important respects, yet the implementation of the business agenda over the objections of the general public is with the consent of the governed, a form of "consent without consent".

All this is very natural in a society that is to an unusual degree business-run with huge expenditure on marketing; $1 trillion a year, one-sixth of the gross domestic product, much of it tax deductible, so that people pay for the privilege of being subjected to manipulation of their attitudes and their behaviour. The "end of history" has been reached in a kind of utopia of the masters.

The political spectrum in the USA, always very narrow, has been reduced to near invisibility. The 1996 campaign for the election of President was one of "historic dullness". When more than 80 per cent of the population feel that the democratic system is a sham the "consent of the governed" is going to be very shallow.

The media arranged the devil’s litany of "consent without consent". Media leaders have surely known all along about the proposed Multilateral Investment Agreement and its broad implications, as have public intellectuals and standard experts. The business world was both aware and actively involved. But in a most impressive show of self-discipline, with exceptions that amount to a statistical error, the free press has succeeded in keeping those who rely on it in the dark, no simple task in a complicated world.

The public hardly matters when the Congress does not. "How has this agreement been under negotiation since May, 1995, without any Congress consultation or oversight, especially given the USCongress’s exclusive constitutional authority to regulate international commerce?"

As guns fell silent in the Gulf War, Bush returned to the earlier practice of lending support to Saddam Hussein as he crushed the Shaite and Kurdish uprisings under the eyes of the victorious allied forces. The reason? Kurdish autonomy in Iraq would be a problem for Turkey in its brutal repression of its own Kurdish population. Israel feared that Kurdish autonomy might "create a territorial, military, contiguity between Teheran and Damascus", a potential danger for Israel. These facts are unwelcome, hence consigned to their usual place in favour of an audacious version. In the corridors of power, the basic ideas are understood well enough, though it is not considered good form to speak too frankly. These again are things "it wouldn’t do" to say. Therefore, the whole story is rated "X" — out of history.

The people in the slums of Cairo or the villages of Lebanon and others like them, have neither wealth nor power, hence no rights by simple logic. Their concerns, too, are "incidental", not an end.

As for Palestinians, they not only lack rights but, worse, are a nuisance. Their unhappy fate has been an irritant, with disruptive effect on Arab popular opinion. Therefore, they have negative rights; a fact that explains a lot: the meltdown of the Osho accord. Israeli expansion at the expense of Palestinians is traditional USpolicy, reaching new levels under Clinton. The condition of Palestinians"would be the closest thing in our time to slavery".

Of course, Israel could never have achieved such goals on its own, and probably would never have dared to pursue them. It could do so only by becoming a client of the world ruler.

We observe clearly the principles of the world order: world affairs are governed by the rule of force, while intellectuals are counted upon to disguise realities to serve the needs of power.

Indonesia occupied East Timor in 1975. International human rights monitors estimate the death toll at more than a quarter of the population and half the remnants of the population driven by 1979 into closed camps where it suffered famine conditions. Washington furnished the decisive military and diplomatic support for the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust.

Prior to the Indonesian invasion, coverage of East Timor was quite high in the press because the fate of the Portuguese empire was causing concern. Media coverage reached flat zero in 1978 (as it did in Canada) when the Indonesian assault reached its peak. President Carter — of human rights fame — sent new deliveries of arms to expedite the slaughter.

In 1979 Australia gave de jure recognition to the Indonesian occupations of East Tumor. The treaty with Indonesia to rob East Tumor’s oil was signed in 1989.

In the year 2000 Australia and Clinton are the champions of the Timorese and the press is taking suitable interest.

"By 1792 Madison warned that the rising capitalist developmental state was substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty, leading to a real domination of the few under an apparent liberty of the many. He deplored the daring depravity of the times as private powers become the praetorian band of the government — at once its tools and its tyrant, bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by its clamours and combinations." The 18th century American experience is inscribed in blood on the globe.

India can certainly do with its own Chomsky along with our Nayyars and Sachars. It is a matter of joy that new publishing houses like Madhyam Books are joining the business to help radical politics.

Women’s tales by a woman, men can read too
Review by Deepika Gurdev

By the Sabarmati — Stories by Esther David. Pages 188. Rs 200.

Rediscovering Dharavi — Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum by Kalpana Sharma. Pages 209. Rs 200.

Both by Penguin Books, New Delhi.

WHEN I think of Gujarat I think of a lot of things: colour, humility, safety... above all these, I think of women. Strong women who have emerged in their own right from Bhavnagar to Bhuj, from Ahmedabad to Surat, from Rajkot to Bhavnagar. Whether it is established women like Mrinalini or Malika Sarabhai, Kumudini or Meera Lakhiya, Ela or Sheela Bhatt or the more ordinary mortals like Lakshmiben, one of the women carriers of the coolie tradition at the Bhavnagar railway station, the images that spring to mind are those of women — strong, independent and always on the go.

Having written about them during my five-year stint as a journalist based in Gujarat, I am inevitably drawn to Esther David’s second book "By the Sabarmati", a collection of 22 stories from the lives of women which all of us would have known in or out of Gujarat. These are young women and old, struggling against disappointment, failed love and death of their loved ones.

If you are looking for whole and well-rounded stories, you are bound to be disappointed for Esther with her clever pen and equally adept brush strokes sketches out the sharp, jagged, tip of the iceberg variety kind of stories which challenge you and probe you to ask questions. Most of the stories are disturbing just like life itself, but they are a remarkable testament to heroic and moving endeavours of women to rise above the ordinary.

Most of the dramatis personae in the book like Sunil’s mother in "Homecoming", Manjari in "A bed of roses" or Ruchi in "Nobody will know in Ahmedabad" or Maya Desai in "Maya Desai" leave a lot of lingering questions in the reader’s mind. Why did Sunil’s mother have to put herself to the grind and continue playing the forgiving mother, why didn’t Manjari walk out of a non-existent marriage earlier, why did Ruchi bother about her parents when they had shown very little love for her in the first place and Maya Desai, oh, heartbreakingly painful "Maya Desai", why didn’t she just get going rather than wait for the end?

But then posing questions that are meaningful to the writer and the reader is definitely more challenging than just offering the expected answers. Esther’s writing has its roots in real life, inevitably all the stories are imbued with a deep sense of realism. Some stories begin with an idea, some with an image but the message in each one of them is clear: "That when women hold hands, they experience strength, a feeling of well-being and togetherness which help them fight their battles. I have, therefore, placed myself in the circle of their experience, which I have tried to understand in the first person, like a first story, my story — your story."

While images of Gujarat reverberate in each story, the message in each of the stories is universal. Yes, there are the pols, the Guptanagar slums but the victories and defeats of the women in the pols speak louder than the local context in which they are represented.

There are strong metaphors, chilling endings but each of the stories keeps you asking for more. The one that has stayed in my mind is the very first story "Father" which is the story of Maghi’s marriage to Mulji. Her marriage moves her to a much warmer and more liveable place than the open ground next to Anjali cinema. That night as she lies in marital bliss, happens to be the coldest night of the year in Ahmedabad. "Many people died that night," and Maghi’s father Deva was one of them.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not a book with expected or expectable endings. So if you are in a mood for more tales of the unexpected, "By The Sabarmati", is well worth it.

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WHAT attracted me to this book was the enticing smile of the lovely little girl who appears disarmingly on the cover and seems to say: "Read this book to know more about people like me, the people of Dharavi."

The blurb promised this and more. "Written with rare sensitivity and empathy, ‘Rediscovering Dharavi’ is a riveting account of the triumph of the human spirit over poverty and want." It was to tell the spellbinding stories of Haji Shamsuddin, Ramjibhai Patel, Khatija and Amina.

Well, it does tell their stories but not in the heartwarming manner that has been promised in the blurb and not in the manner it would have been expected from a book that wants to dispel a lot of myths and "cold statistics" about Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi. Just when Ramjibhai’s stories appears to be warming up and you want to find out more about his life, the journalistic streak in Sharma takes over the story teller’s and you get a factual drone about what it takes for the survival of the fittest in an explosive, yet changing landscape.

There is no denying the fact that this is a professionally written and well-researched book but the fact that there is no excess of any kind makes it the kind of book that will not make you sit up all night to find out what truly makes Dharavi.

It would have been better if the author or the editors of the book had segregated the book into parts, one that tells you about the history, the composition and all the other clinical facts about Dharavi. The other that unravels the story of all the feisty people who live there. Then "Allah ka gaon", "Turning scrap into gold", and "A house for Khatija" would have made more sense and the stories of the people would have definitely lingered in the reader’s mind.

Right now, unfortunately, this book just happens to be neither here nor there.

The Word From Paris: Essay on Modern French Thinkers and Writers by John Sturrock. Verso, London. Pages 206. £ 18.

THOUGH Francophobes represent the temperamental tension between the British and the French, it cannot be denied that it is exactly this love-hate relationship that has been the mainspring behind the cross-fertilisation of a significant body of intellectual discourse that has occupied the academic world on both sides of the English Channel and the Atlantic.

For young scholars and radical philosophers of last century, for serious-minded semiologists wanting to deconstruct areas as incongruous as Keats and Bob Dylan, Batman comics and Shakespeare, detective fiction and the Latin American novel, and for fans of Proust, the father of the formal novel, France has remained the source of stimulation and radical ideas so passionately brought to the shores of the Anglo-Saxon world. These Francophiles have brought the word of an extraordinary sequence of intellectual and artistic developments taking place in Paris, the centre of avant garde movements and uninhibited artistic innovations.

John Sturrock is one such Francophile who has occupied a special place in Anglo-French intellectual interchange. He represents the radical philosophers of the 1960s searching out intellectual enlightenment in Left Bank cafes and book shops. He has written for many years about French literature and thought and here represents a wonderfully accessible account of the various movements which have dominated the French intellectual scene — existentialism, the nouveau roman, structuralism, the OuLipo.

He illustrates how their proponents inspire and excite. How Jean-Paul Sartre, originally an author of little known fiction, fused politics and philosophy to become one of the best-known intellectuals of the century; how Jacques Lacan’s flamboyantly expressed ideas made him a cult figure among professors of literature while offending many of his fellow psychoanalysts; and how Boris Vian, who trained as an engineer, celebrated in his writing much of what was enjoyable to the French about American jazz music, a mysterious criminal underworld, an irrevocable youthfulness.

Indeed, "The Word From Paris" is a remarkable portrait of French metropolitan culture, raising a number of central issues of politics of literature and culture.

Adopting a "mid-channel" stance, Sturrock has, with elegance and utmost empathy, presented Parisian metropolitan culture, all the time acting as a mediator who tries to bridge two opposing cultures in a love-hate relationship. Being a literary journalist, his style is a blend of the journalistic and the academic, the literary and the theoretical, a kind of an unexpected alliance between Francophile and the Francophobe which tempers his enthusiasm with critical detachment.

He, therefore, comes across as a modest, generous man totally wrapped up in his writing that indicates his transparent devotion and the English brand of the human that underlies his collection of essays, especially the one on novelist Raymond Queneau, a contemporary of Sartre, who answered the same question which Sartre had asked: "What is literature?" Whereas Sartre answered by declaring the literature is "in a word ... in its essence, the subjectivity of a society in a state of permanent revolution", Queneau said in three lines of fauxnaif verse that it is, "A simple game/that I made up/in the dark."

The style of these lines is hardly Sartrian, yet the implicit philosophy is. His philosophy is existentialism with a human face and like Sartre, he is aware that we must all of us live, metaphysically speaking, in the "dark" as "transients of scant significance in a cosmos seeming to possess a degree of rhyme but absolutely no reason".

But from here they part company: whereas Sartre contrives to "raise our dereliction into a perverse source of grandeur on the Romantic assumption that we deserve better of the universe in which we find ourselves adrift", Queneau remains wryly down-to-earth, unwilling to see either his humble self or any of those around him in the exalted guise of an existential hero.

For Queneau there were no utopian answers. He modestly kept a sense of proportion about the importance of a writer in the scheme of things, but immodestly showed his appetite for books reading "thirty three books in thirty one days". In his journals published in 1996, 200 pages were taken up by the list of books he had read. Probably for this reason he was made the presiding editor of Encyclopedie de la Pleiade.

Sturrock’s first essay "Intellectuals since 1945" brings out the fusion of politics and philosophy, an event that marked the emergence of intellectuals as a political force and first seen in Emile Zola’s "J’Accuse" which is a defence of Alfred Dreyfus. This commitment which was later advanced by Sartre shows the notion of the public intellectual intervention constituted with exacting intellectual response and heartfelt social demands. As Sartre would argue, "the intellectual is someone who brings the competence-cum-notoriety earned in a specific context to bear on a wider public issue".

Such thinkers, especially from the Left, actively participate in the whole enterprise of historical production of genuine social change "directing the thoughts of their fellow citizens". This legacy of the "intellocrats" that had a far-reaching impact on the cultural terrain of post-war France is seen in essays on Barbusse, Proust, Celine and Roussel but with an underlying regret that the breed of intellectuals like Sartre and Andre Malraux is now extinct.

Interestingly the material bankruptcy of France during the war was compensated by the spurt of creative energy seen in the works of Pablo Picasso, Sartre, Albert Camus, Claude Levi-Strauss and Georges Braque. Paris itself became the cultural capital of the world with a boldness that left its artists free to express in ways that were unconscious and with no reflex to look over your shoulder in a self conscious complex that goes with any new movement or creation.

The two essays on Sartre and Camus indicate the notions of freedom and authenticity so dear to the people of the occupied France. The two finally went on their own individual trajectories, Sartre getting aligned with the French Communist Party, utterly Stalinist in complexion and ideology, and Camus bravely standing alone, a dissident voice in a Communist-dominated Paris.

Moving from these philosopher-giants to "theorocrats" like Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jaques Lacan and Paul de Man, Sturrock endeavours to simplify these rather opaque writers, thus giving a wider exposure to them as well as making them accessible and interesting to the readers of the Parisian theory.

In this brief review article I shall not go into explaining the extensive influence of the French school on the Anglo-Saxon world as well as the Third World because of the constraints of space, but one essay that is remarkable for revealing certain facts about Louis Althusser’s life I cannot help but mention. His murdering his wife and its links with his intellectual pursuits is a rather interesting subject. Althusser’s "L’Avenir dure longtemps" (The future lasts forever) is an adroit attempt at the manipulative product of a theoretical intelligence "turned narcistically on itself, and a pre-emptive exercise in the discourse on, not of, madness."

It is rather a grievance against medical and legal rules in France that gag an accused from speaking out. The most innovative Marxist thinker of the post-war period becomes the star of his own story, compelling the wife he killed also to serve his rhetorical and apologetic ends, an exculpation of himself.

The strangling of his wife is merely an "irruption", a term that in his writings stands for "disaffiliation" of particular structures — the capitalist mode of production, the Freudian unconscious — that we are not to believe are simply derivative from the structures which preceded them. His bourgeois family, on the other hand, becomes for him the "ideological state apparatus", an exploitative and violent institution of insidious dominance. The unmasking of his parents becomes the domestic version of the larger theory of history and ideology.

In another essay on the dissident Nietzchian intelligence of Faucault, Sturrock skilfully demonstrates the connection between Foucault’s free and audacious life with the published oeuvre, thus making his life into an aesthetically satisfying whole. But in spite of this, there are no easy connections especially when Faucault, like Roland Barthes, offer a structuralist view, whereby authors are responsible for the disposition of their discourse and of the various meanings it contains, but are neither the originators nor the owners of those meanings. The so-called death of the author thus becomes problematical.

With Jaques Derrida and Paul de Man, the prophets of deconstruction with a strong reaction against the "metaphysics of presence", become a new idiom, a literary and critical vocabulary that was to completely set the Anglo-Saxon world into a turmoil unheard of before. But it cannot be denied that the difficulty of demystifying and simplifying these philosophers remained somewhat of a dream.

Compared to the first section, the second section is less heavy reading and begins with a wonderful account of Proust, the prodigious letter writer with a Tartuffian fervour for friendship though deeply sceptical about it. His letters are mannerly and smack of an urban tactician of the drawing room, not the "serpentine and malicious deviant". For him the social and the creative self can never come together; the person you dined and talked with in the cafe was not the same person who went home and wrote his masterpiece. There is a surface self that operates in company and the deep one that writes and creates when he is alone.

No wonder, after Proust the possibility of writing a Balzacian novel completely disappeared, as is argued by Nathalie Sarraute whose first book, "Tropismes" (1939) marked the start of the nouveau roman. Nothing really happens in her novels except "the troubling things that are felt but do not get spoken". Perhaps her plays bring out her subtle intelligence and "the power-play that underlies human relationships".

The trouble with these writers along with Alain Robbe-Grillet, the high priest of the nouveau roman, and Claude Simon is that they remain as opaque as the theorists. The only accessible books by Sarraute or Robbe-Grillet are their autobiographies "Enfance" and "Le Miroir qui Revient". On the other hand, the only really appealing and accessible novelists are Queneau or Perc with their light humour at once anarchic and concealing the tragic.

In the context of the theory wars that rage across the English Channel and the Atlantic, and in which the rabid nativists have now pitched their tent, vehemently castigating the teaching and "injecting" of French theory and jargon into the so-called "innocent" minds of the students, all the time forgetting that indigenous poetics can equal the West in a bout of critical jargon, this book is an objective account of French theory and culture as well as a critique of the supposedly invincible nature of critical paradigms originating in the West.

The present is the scene of innumerable theories and discourses jostling and confronting one another. The future for theory lies in taking a stand against the unidirectional flow of discursive power that tends to silence the other by damaging the variant modes of social formation, dismantling economic systems, and causing material destruction.

These questions are not altogether new, but culture here is taken as the locus of influence, a site for intervention, dislocation and struggle; and theory, not as a metahistorical formation, but a significant metaphor for subtle relationships between power and knowledge, and between culture and control.

Shadows of a Princess: Diana, Princess of Wales 1987-1996 by P.D. Jephson. Harper Collins, London.

YOU already know the story of the princess and the pea. This book is the story of the princess and the penile substitute. Or rather — for fear I might have made you want to read it — one paragraph tells that short, sadly pointless story. The rest is about the princess and a pea-brained employee who fawned on her, forgave her trespasses, cried for her and now seeks to profit from defaming her.

Back, however, to the dildo. Diana, Jephson breathlessly confides, returned from Paris in 1992 sporting a souvenir — "a large, pink, battery-powered vibrator". By now she knew she’d never get her hands on the orb or sceptre: this plastic knob would have to do. It had "the aim", Jephson notes with courtly tact, "of raising royal morale at critical moments". But he denies that it was actually aimed at the critical royal part, and insists it was "never used for its designed purpose". Eventually Dodi assumed the role of royal morale-booster, which made the cheeky pink chap redundant.

Meanwhile, it is curious that Diana should have felt she needed this bulbous, buzzing personal attendant. After all, she already had Jephson, who was her private secretary during the decade covered by his book, and he saw himself as a dildo in a pin-stripe suit. When he took the job, a courtier, seasoned in sycophancy, warned him: "To these people you’re just a toy. They’ll wind you up and watch you whiz all over the place, then they’ll throw you away and get another one."

Jephson prided himself for a while on being Diana’s "current favourite toy", and even aspired to function as a marital aid — rather than a bureaucratic aide — for the estranged Waleses. A few days after Diana acquired the dildo, Jephson smarmed into Charles’s office to remind him: "I joined this household to serve both Your Royal Highnesses."

But Charles had mentally metamorphosed himself into a snuggly sanitary pad, and Jephson’s ministrations could hardly be counted on since his batteries were starting to go flat. He resigned in 1996, petulant about Diana’s secret Panorama interview. That, at least, is how he tells it.

In fact, Diana executed him electronically by sending him a malevolent anonymous message on his pager. Jephson could no longer claim to be her best-beloved toy, her faithful and indefatigable stand-by. She had reduced him to the size of the transistorised gadget which stirred to life in his trouser pocket. Life, alas, would never be quite so vibrant again.

Jephson piously professes to regard Diana as "a global force for good", though his account of her kills the poor woman all over again. The charities she adopted, he makes clear, were excuses for foreign junkets; she used public money to subsidise her career as an "independent celebrity". Her temper was vile, her humour crude, and her laugh asinine. Jephson, impeccably proper, winces when her braying reaches "the delicate ears of outsiders such as Queen’s flight crews".

Despite her global frolics, Diana had not the foggiest idea about the destinations to which her private planes — jet-propelled vibrators, if you come to think of it — were headed. At the White House just before the Gulf War, George Bush asked her about the invasion of Kuwait. The opinion she vouchsafed was a meditative "um". Jephson rejoices in her embarrassment, but reserves his haughtiest outrage for a more clandestine vice, her addiction to chocolate. "I frequently watched her eat a whole bar of fruit-and-nut between engagements," he reveals, and pauses to listen to us gasp.

He is slavishly discreet, by contrast, about the elder Windsors, who are alive and liable to sue. Reneging on his contract to supply title-tattle, he opaquely paraphrases their dialogue. Charles, infuriated by Diana’s refusal to spend a weekend at Sandringham, expressed his annoyance — Jephson informs us — "in blunt and peremptory tones". We are left to imagine the four-letter words the heir to the throne actually used. The evasion is characteristic of this cowardly book, too hyprocritically high-minded to get down to its job of scandal-mongering.

Though he disdains his mistress, Jephson has a lofty opinion of himself. Describing how he supported Diana against her detractors at St James’s Palace, he positively glows as the memory of his chivalry: "If all this sounds rather overprincipled, then it probably was." He admires the Queen’s stoic immunity to emotion, and boasts of sharing it: between them, they uphold "so many of the great British strengths which had withstood all the tests that Empire and war could bring".

He is also deeply, nauseatingly religious. When Diana jabs him with that message on his pager, he "told nobody of my agonised thoughts except God. He had heard most of it before". Now, thanks to Jephson’s book, God generously shares this privileged information with everyone who reads a tabloid.

Unplugged by the princess, Jephson apparently "decided to take up writing". He had served his apprenticeship ghosting thank-you notes for Diana, so he is proficient at ornately arranging cliches. She and Charles exchanging insults remind him of pots and kettles. She wants to have her cake and eat it, while sipping from a poisoned chalice.

Jephson adds a pinch of salt when she gossips about her adulterous in-laws. For a while, she rides the crest of a wave, though a straw finally breaks the camel’s back.

Sometimes, Jephson makes his catchphrases copulate. Thus the last meeting between the separate staffs of the Waleses is "the merest fig leaf, the fag end of a process". Just try to picture that: a fag posing as a fig.

The vibrator rears its pert head on page 267. Otherwise, there is no reason at all to read this empty, imperceptive and crassly opportunistic book.

Assam: a Hindu militant stir
Review by Padam Ahlawat

The Periphery Strikes Back — Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland by Udayon Misra. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Pages 276. Rs 400.

UDAYON MISRA has had long association with the region called the North-East. Having been brought up and taught at the Dibrugarh University, he is no stranger to the social and political reality in the region.

Out of the seven states, the writer, it seems has chosen Assam and Nagaland after careful cerebration. If Nagaland was reluctant to join the Indian Union prior to independence, Assam had a history of Congress-led freedom fighters who played a role in consonance with the national struggle. The insurgency in Assam is a later development, the result of legal and illegal migration of Bengali Hindus and Bangladeshi Muslims. This gave rise to the Assamese fear of being swamped by Bengali culture.

If Nagaland was populated by tribals professing the Christian faith, Assam was populated by an overwhelming majority of Hindus and a large minority of Muslims.

Those who held the view that insurgency in the entire North-East was being fomented by Christianity were in for a rude shock when insurgency spread to Assam, a land of Hindu majority.

India being a young nation-state is very apprehensive of insurgency in any part of the country. It has led us to believe that conceding to any demands would be a beginning of the end of the nation-state. Insurgency in the North-East and Jammu and Kashmir has undermined our conviction in Indian nationalism. The conviction is that barring these two regions, nationalism has very deep roots and all regions are willing constituents of the nation. The greatest threat to Indian nationalism or the nation-state arises because of the inability to resolve regional issues. It is very essential that these are sorted out to the satisfaction of the people. Prolonging the insurgency would not only sap our strength but also sap the faith in Indian nationalism. Separatism can spread to new areas not because a solution was found in the North-East and J&K, but because the problem was allowed to linger on.

Udayon Misra takes a look at the insurgency in Nagaland and Assam. Very little is known about the early history of the states of Nagaland, Arunchal Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur and Meghalaya. Among these Meghalaya comprising Khasi and Jaintia hills had a developed agriculture and trade. The tribes spoke Tibeto-Burmese group of languages which had no script. The Khasis speak a language belonging to the Austro-Asiatic group, while the Jaintias of Meghalaya are the only ones to be Aryanised. These tribals followed their own rituals and traditions and belonged to the Tibeto-Burmese group.

The Naga tribes had lived in isolation for centuries until they came in contact with the Ahom kings in the 13th century. The Ahoms came into conflict with the Naga tribes in the 14th and 15th centuries but they never extended their rule to the Naga hills.

The British acquired Assam and its dependencies from King Ava of Burma by the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826. British rule defused tribal wars, economy was partially monetised and traders and businessmen emerged. The greatest impact was in the field of education and spread of Christianity.

As the freedom struggle gained ground in the rest of the country, the Nagas submitted a demand to the Simon Commission in 1929 to exclude the Nagas from the proposed constitutional changes and be directly administered by the British. Consequently, the Naga Hills District Council was established in 1945 and this gave rise to the Naga National Council and the consolidation of the Naga tribes.

Being a very small minority, the Nagas were apprehensive of coming under Indian rule fearing the new rulers would erode their cultural identity. The Naga Council talked of regional autonomy to protect its rights. However, a section of the Naga Council also demanded an independent Naga homeland. Extremists gained an upper hand and Phizo declared independence of Nagaland on August 15, 1947.

Insurgency by one group or the other has been endemic in Nagaland ever since. It has been fuelled by the village regrouping scheme. The formation of a separate state of Nagaland with the Union pumping in money has not placated the Nagas to give up insurgency or the demand for independence. The NSCN has been spearheading the Naga struggle, trying to unite different tribes to demand a greater Nagaland. This demand is looked upon with suspicion by other North-Eastern states. At present a precarious ceasefire exists in Nagaland, which could erupt into insurgency if talks do not make headway.

Assam, or the Brahmaputra valley, was open to influence from the east and west. From the east came the Mongoloid people and their tribal ways. From the west came Hindu religion and language (Assamese). They also brought in iron, cattle, wet rice and the plough. The 13th (1228) century saw the coming of the Ahoms, a northern Tai or Shan tribe of Burma. By the 16th century the tribals of Assam, Bodos Kacharis and the Ahoms had embraced Hinduism.

The last decade of the 18th century saw the disintegration of Ahom rule. The Moamaria revolt began in 1769 and continued intermittently till 1805. The civil war upset the administration and social structure. The Darrang Raja too revolted. The Ahom rule was saved when the British responded to the call for help in 1792. On an appeal for help from the Ahom ruler, the Burmese invaded the province in 1817 and again in 1819. But they refused to go back and established their rule.

The British saw Burmese rule in Assam as a threat to theirs. They defeated the Burmese in 1825 and secured Assam by the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826. Once the Khasis were subjugated in 1832 the British annexed Cachhar, Jaintia, Lushai hills, Gari hills and the Naga hills.

The forested Assam hills were an invitation to the burgeoning Bengali Muslims who were encouraged to migrate by immigrant leaders like Maulana Bhasani and later by the Muslim government of Bengal. C.S. Mullan in the 1931 census highlighted the threat posed by the immigrant Muslim Bengalis during the two preceding decades to the culture and identity of the Assemese people. The Assamese people had backed the Congress during the freedom struggle, hoping that their interest was safer with India.

After independence a Hindu migration followed, drowning all hope for the Assamese. Assam Congress leaders were coerced by the central leadership to accept refugees. Migration from East Pakistan continued and the number of Bengali Hindu refugees increased from about three lakhs in 1951 to over six lakhs by 1961. But, over the next decade Muslims from Bangladesh continued to trickle in. In 1971, some ten million refugees poured into Assam, of which one million stayed back.

Added to the Assamese woes was its sense of being economically exploited of its coal, oil, tea and wood reserves. Since the tea industry had its head offices in Calcutta, Assam received very little by way of sales tax. The state received very little royalty for oil, while forests were cut down and the beneficiaries were non-Assamese businessmen and transporters. By then Assam had been restricted to the Barak and Brahmaputra vallies. Exhausted and defeated, the old leaders yielded to the students of Assam, who led the statewide agitation in 1974. This gave way to the Assam movement of 1979-85, demanding all illegal immigrants be identified and sent back. The stage was gradually being prepared for the emergence of an extremist group that would eventually demand a separate sovereign Assam.

The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) grew in strength, creating a popular base by targeting bootleggers, profiteers and anti-socials. By 1985, insurgents had arrived in Assam and they took advantage of their links with the All Assam Students Union leaders, now the Asom Gana Parishad, to spread its influence. Despite the AGP government again coming to power in 1996, the immigrant issue remains unresolved and the identification of illegal immigrants remains equally controversial.

Write view
Sardar Patel and his today’s clone
Review by Randeep Wadehra

Titans of Indian Politics by A.B. Kohli. Reliance Publishing House,New Delhi. Pages x+221. Rs 295.

IT was not such a long time ago that Indian politics was synonymous with the Indian National Congress. Like a colossus, this party overshadowed all others in the pre-partition subcontinent and the post-partition India. Today it is a pale shadow of its vibrant self. Often an organisation is more than the sum total of its members, emphasising the adage that no individual is greater than the party. Yet such were the stalwarts who bestrode its political firmament that the party reached dizzy heights in public esteem, giving the impression of being invincible for ever.

The Manchester Guardian once wrote about Vallabhbhai Patel, "Without Patel, Gandhi’s idea would have had less practical influence and Nehru’s idealism less scope. Patel was not only the organiser of the fight for freedom but also the architect of the new state when the flight was over. The same man is seldom successful as a rebel and a statesman. Sardar Patel was an exception."

Born in a lower middle class agricultural family, he was proud of the fact that his father had participated in the sepoy mutiny against the British and was captured by Malharrao Holkar. Strong willed, he bore personal calamities with fortitude.

A brilliant lawyer, he secured the first position in the bar-at-law examination. With such credentials, it goes without saying that Patel was a man of action, and complemented the Gandhi-Nehru duo by giving practical shape to their vision of a free and strong India.

Beginning his political career with the Kheda satyagraha, Sardar Patel went on to earn accolades for his unique traits during the Borsad and the Bardoli satyagrahas of 1923 and 1928 respectively. In fact he earned the sobriquet "sardar" after the Bardoli agitation. This iron man of India remained with Gandhi through thick and thin, even when the Mahatma ignored his claims to be the first Prime Minister of India.

It is also well known how he hammered the disparate princely states into one solid Republic of India through sheer will power. If today India is able to withstand the various fissiparous forces, the credit should go largely to Patel’s foresight. He was truly the titan of Indian politics. If only he had lived longer!

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was another titan. He rose from the ashes of penury to become President of India and the most respected Indian philosopher-statesman the world over. Even today he is a role model for many idealist youth. Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi are the other leaders who left an indelible mark on India’s political scene.

However, Kohli’s enthusiasm for the Congress seems to have got the better of him. Otherwise how does one explain the presence of Desai, V.V. Giri, Sanjiva Reddy et al in his list of titans? Though all these were men of substance and had qualities of head and heart that marked them out as leaders of men, titans they certainly were not.

Here is something to chew: were there no political giants among other parties? How could we forget MA Jinnah, for instance?

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Milestone 50: Stories from India’s Freedom Struggle by RK Murthi. Vikas Publishing, New Delhi. Pages 126. Rs 135.

"Quit India" in English. "Bharat chodo" in Hindi, "Vellaiyane veliyeru" in Tamil and their equivalent slogans in other Indian languages merged into a freedom song that sent shivers down the spine of the colonialists.

Thanks to the inspirational role played by several freedom fighters, the desire for an independent India began to gather strength with the passage of time. People from all walks of life started to reclaim their self-respect. Consequently, defiance started proliferating even in day-to-day interaction with the colonial rulers and their minions. This book is a collection of stories that illustrate how a spirit of independence came to grip the people of the British-ruled India.

Take the very first story that narrates how when Sir Ashutosh Mookherjee was travelling by train in a first class compartment his British co-passenger threw Ashutosh’s chappals out of the train’s window. In return Ashutosh threw his tormentor’s coat and tie out to "fetch his chappals". Tit for the tat indeed!

Or, the case of Usha Mehta whose father was a judge on the brink of retirement. While studying at Wilson College, Bombay she was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s "Quit India" call and decided to join the freedom movement. Usha’s father pleaded with her, "Think of me. I am a government official. I am at the fag end of my career. Your action may earn me the wrath of the regime."

Usha responded with a written note declaring that she alone was responsible for her actions and gave it to her father saying, "Keep this, father. Now you won’t run into any trouble."

When the old man pointed out that she too could run into trouble, her response was typical of the patriots of her generation. "I know that, but this is not the time to brood over dangers. Now is the time to act."

With an attitude like this, no wonder the British found it increasingly difficult to keep the jewel in their crown.

Then there is the story of how Subhas Chandra Bose hoodwinked the police guarding him at his Elgin Road residence. He made good his escape in the garb of a maulvi.

Another story narrates how, as a child, Indira Gandhi identified herself with Joan of Arc, and how she assembled her Monkey Brigade (Vanar Sena). There is also the anecdote of Janaki Das’s interaction with Mahatma Gandhi. If you do not know who Janaki Das was, probably you never read The Tribune or watch old Hindi movies. The tale of Vir Savarkar is also told, as also of Chandra Shekhar Azad, the Bombay Chronicle’s editor Horniman, Bhagat Singh and many others.

This volume is invaluable. Not only does it tell us of those freedom fighters who have become household names, but also of those whose contribution to the patriotic cause was great but somehow could not get the popular adulation they deserved.

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Managing People in Organisations: The Challenges of Change by B.R. Virmani. Response Books, New Delhi. Pages 237. Rs 395.

With each passing day the market place is becoming increasingly competitive. Thanks to globalisation, it is no more possible for inefficient units to survive in any part of the world, especially in emerging buyers markets like India. New technologies and techniques — in production, distribution and management — are being rapidly devised to retain the cutting edge of one’s enterprise. No wonder, the accent is shifting perceptibly from the legal and welfare approach to treating the human resource function as a tool for the development of an organisation.

Therefore human resource management (HRM) and human resource development (HRD) are the time-tested instruments for running any business or industrial set-up. Virmani has elucidated these two concepts in this volume, keeping the Indian perspective in mind.

We all know that HRD enables a worker to upgrade his skills at regular intervals through reorientation and refresher courses designed by his employers, so that he may realise his full productive potential. The HRMis basically a management tool that aims at using the available human resources to the optimum level to achieve the corporate goal.

Virmani, while dwelling on two HRM related themes, explains the macro-level antecedents of HRMin India and western countries and its transplantation in other economies with special emphasis on India, where recently there has been an animated HRM debate. Virmani points out that there are many unresolved questions regarding the HRMmodel that would be most suitable to India — namely, what sort of HRMexample are we setting? Can it be transferred from one economy to another? Are its policies and practices internationally applicable? And, do these contribute to strategic management?

The second theme relates to the organisational context in which the HRM has emerged and now operates. This is a complex process that helps us understand the nature of organisational life and the role of human resources in meeting strategic challenges.

Virmani also deals with the nature of management issues, especially those related to HRM, in the Indian context, cross-cultural issues, the conflict with foreign management concepts — eventually analysing the key areas of HRM and HRD in order to trigger off an informed as well as informative discussion on the issues affecting the management of people in the contemporary competitive situation.

Rapid technological changes and economic liberalisation have made it imperative for the Indian government as well as the various business enterprises to improve their competitive capabilities. To fully avail of the emerging business opportunities and for staying in the highly competitive environment, a greater degree of responsibility and innovative spirit is required.

In order to bring about a professional attitude among our entrepreneurs, they should be enabled to understand the strategic dimension of various policies and practices that have a bearing on human resource planning, development and management.

Since most of the HRMpractices in India are borrowed from the West, these often clash with our traditional values and environment. Contrarily, attempts to arrive at a workable solution run into conflict with the western management precepts. Since the indigenous education system could not or would not be developed, we have to depend on the western model. Now that we are caught in the vortex of intense international competition, we feel impelled to rapidly industrialise and compete in a global environment based primarily on the western model.

The support facilities created to train and develop management personnel too are based on borrowed concepts. Consequently, a hiatus has developed between the westernised manager and his subordinate personnel who are substantially imbued with the Indian ethos. This leads to conflicts, frustrations and compromises. Quantitative as well as qualitative production goals remain elusive. All planning goes haywire.

The sad scenario is reinforced when foreign companies set up shop in India believing that their managers would be able to establish instant rapport with the Indian workers just because our education system is based on the western model. Often they realise their blunder, and it is too late. Eventually, the peculiar Indian socio-cultural environment moulds the personality of the management practitioners and influences management practice that turn out be very different from the professed principles. The first chapter of this book tries to solve this riddle of the incompatible avowed principles and actual practices.

Chapter two deals with the question of how to plan for the HRD in order to upgrade the employees skills and knowledge. It also discusses various issues connected with the development and redeployment strategies required because of the technological changes.

Chapter three highlights the methodology to be adopted by organisations in order to link their corporate strategy with the nurturing of human resources, while chapters four and five deal with the evaluation model to make training and development more effective.

Other important chapters are technology transfer, assimilation and human resource development, redefining industrial relations and Indian initiatives in organisational change through networking, and the case of the oil sector.

Overall, an excellent reference book for students of management as well as for professionals and academics.

Weaving a brand new fabric
Review by M.L. Sharma

Evolution of Modern Textiles by J.N. Vohra. Originals, New Delhi. Pages 128. Rs 220.

"EVOLUTION of Modern Textiles" recounts the developments in the manufacturing technology of textiles from early times when the operations were manual to the modern age of automation. A great deal of automation has already come into operation in the developed countries. Marketing of textiles to the consumers and retailing have undergone changes along with advancement in information technology. But the Indian textile industry has yet to catch up with these changing trends in the development fields. It is to this that the book draws attention.

Vohra, who holds a post-graduate degree in textile technology and is an expert in the field, has underscored the relevance of emerging technologies and the work paradigm with particular reference to the Indian textile industry. He presages hard times of tough competition for the Indian textiles industry after the opening up of global markets. "We have seen in the past that textile companies, which failed to upgrade with the latest technologies, lost their competitiveness or withered away. The future poses even grater challenges than the past."

The ground rules in the manufacturing area have considerably changed and the prosperity or the boom, which some Indian textile mills enjoyed during the past 50 years, may no longer ensure future competitiveness in the global markets. He favours the view that manufacturing companies must now be able to speedily produce large or even small quantities of world class products, which are economically viable, in response to the demand in the export market.

He sees a pivotal role for the information technology in ushering in a new work culture. The textile industry, like other industries, is fast becoming knowledge-oriented. In order to face the emerging challenges of the millennium, the textile industry has to get out of the morass of traditional work culture. The industry, which is out of pace now, is in dire need of trained and information-equipped manpower.

Atmosphere pollution is now a major problem facing all countries of the world although for a long time the developed countries were known for energy and pollution-intensive industries. Now textile processing and synthetic fibre manufacturing industries are growing twice as fast in the developing countries, a pollution-free production system is most vital and the need for this cannot be set aside. "Textile industry should take the environmental issue seriously and gear up to meet the impending challenges." He suggests a "cleaner production paradigm" instead of "end-of-pipe treatments" of textile effluents, for which alternative technologies in textile processing should be developed and adopted. It calls for a transition from the past systems to a "more agile manufacturing paradigm of the future".

With the advent of computersation the administrative, financial and marketing operations of several other companies are undergoing revolutionary changes. Unfortunately the textile industry, catering to the most important needs of human beings, is lagging far behind and is under stress for changes. It is imperative, Vohra says, that all companies operating in the field of textiles should be highly skilled and proficient in manpower, which is in tune with the present-day needs in global perspective.

Spread in 26 chapters, the book touches topics like "Changing scenario of textile mills", "Garment technology beyond 2000", "Cotton ginning", ‘‘Plant fibers; an ecological necessity’’, "Wool marketing mechanism" and "The traditional silk industry".

The chapter "Revamping Textile Education", provides useful guidance to the students anxious to join textile courses. But the author laments that a large number of institutions that are just "teaching shops" for fashion and textile designing, mushrooming these days, are hardly equipped with the basic facilities, equipment and trained faculty essential for conducting these courses. The chapter, "Modern Management Methods in Textile Industry", sheds light on several management techniques like total quality management (TQM), leading edge technologies, and human resource management.

In "Handloom, the Heritage Industry", the author points to the hiatus between production and marketing of the produce. This issue has become problematical. He says, "Unless some concerted efforts are made on national level and some export avenues are explored, the distortions in the production and marketing may well usher in an era of handloom crises leading to large scale unemployment".

The 14-page glossary of the terms is very useful for students as well as laymen. These words with clear-cut definition, are other than the textile terms used in the book.

The book will be highly useful for the textile teaching faculty, students, entrepreneurs and researchers.