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FOR A FOREIGN
AUDIENCE
In the following chapter, however, he faults the Supreme Court's refusal to halt the completion of the Sardar Sarovar Project at the instance of Medha Patkar's Narmada Bachao Andolan. The Narmada project has taken 45 years to fructify calculating from 1961 when Nehru laid its foundation stone. It must have meant loss of crores of rupees in cost overruns and denial of benefits to the people of the area. Even in normal monsoon years, perennially drought-prone areas like Kutch, Saurashtra and north Gujarat were vulnerable to degradation of environment on account of ingress of salinity, advance of desert, loss of green cover and erosion of biotic life. Possibly, the author is unaware of the background. He might not have also come across B, G, Verghese's books, published in India, detailing the obstructionist tactics of professional agitators. They drove the World Bank to withdraw its promised aid to the Narmada project when the Central and Gujarat Governments, manned by the Congress party, decided to pursue it on their own. Further, the author brings to bear an original approach on corruption and 'militarisation' of the Indian state among other aspects of post-second partition India. He touches on the Bofors scandal along with instances of 'whistle blowers' being put to death for seeking to expose corruption in road building and other public works. One does not know if clubbing of the run-of-the mill instances of malfeasance is meant to dilute the attention or belittle the gravity of the Bofors kickbacks. Patwant Singh's ex cathedra conclusion on Bofors rules out such hypotheses. His 'own view', he wrote clearly, was that Indira Gandhi's 'dynastic ambitions' (italics added) — 14 years after she had made it a fact of Indian political lif e—'and the labyrinthine atmosphere of the office he (Rajiv) occupied', plus 'the slick advice offered by self-serving courtiers' were responsible for the Bofors scam. There was no explicit mention of Ottavio Quattrocchi or the Italian connection. About the1992 Harshad Mehta 'scandal' too there was prudent skirting of the meltdown of Rs, 5,000 crores of securities representing the savings of tens of thousands of middleclass families, because it did not 'disturb the sleep' of Dr. Manmohan Singh who was finance minister then. As if to compensate for making short shrift of these scandals, the author goes to town with the peccadilloes of P.V.Narasimha Rao's nephew in Hyderabad. After all, 'corruption is universal.' More surprisingly, Laloo Prasad Yadav's fodder scam is totally left out, although discussing corruption without dwelling on it would be enacting Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. When Laloo 's parental party, Janata Dal, asked him resign the chief ministership to face judicial scrutiny of the corruption charges, he quit the party and started his own Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), to avoid facing trial. That was in 1997, ten years ago. When one of the criminal cases reached the prosecution stage, he stepped down to put his dutiful wife in the chief minister's chair! Of course, he is 'secular' prop of the Manmohan Singh Government. Liberalisation of the economy, which had earned immense popularity for Dr. Manmohan Singh, when he embarked on it in 1991 as P.V.Narasimha Rao's Finance Minister, leaves Patwant Singh cold. He sees it as an imposition of the International Monetary Fund on poor countries. "There was nothing egalitarian about liberalisation," he writes, " since it was the outcome of strategies framed by international institutions. Attention to social concerns such as the removal of poverty, in all its manifestations, was not the concern of such organisations. Only the moral, constitutional and ethical commitment of upstanding national leaderships can meet these concerns. The absence of India's commitment to its poor has aggravated the extent of their deprivation." Finally, his unequivocal opposition to India opting for the nuclear option: " India has no business," he declares, " indulging in world power fantasies while it has failed to meet the most basic needs of hundreds of millions of its people. If the money being drained away in nuclear adventurism were diverted to the deprived people of India, they would prove a bigger deterrent to aggressors than any nuclear weapons." OED.
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PATWANT Singh, a
celebrated author, better known abroad than at home, has a penchant for
foreign —international—sources than domestic publications and
television channels. Foreign publishers like it that way. Thus, even
B.G.Verghese's widely quoted warnings against neglecting water supply
and distribution are picked from Diane Raines Ward's 'remarkable book,' Water
Wars. The author highlights 'effective harnessing ' of water sources
as 'the critical element' in agricultural production, to shield food
production from 'the vagaries of the country's capricious monsoons.'
Accordingly, he lauds the construction by the (Nehru) Government of
'more than 1,500 dams along with canals and irrigation networks, many
able to generate hydropower ' as well.' That giant reservoirs on the
mighty rivers uproot tens of thousands of inhabitants, tribals and
plains people did not worry Patwant Singh.