Critical Mass

Title: Critical Mass – Decoding India’s Nuclear Policy
Author: Rajaraman R
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9789354359934
Pages: 450

When we were in college in the early 1990s, the suspense regarding India’s possession of nuclear weapons was an intriguing topic of debate. We were all unabashedly pro-nuclear: we wanted India to definitely possess nuclear weapons but not to use it till the last resort is exhausted. A nuclear test was conducted in 1974, but its euphoria had long died down. It was known that thanks to A Q Khan’s smuggling of nuclear material, Pakistan also possessed nuclear arms but they had not tested it. It was a nuclear ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ situation in the subcontinent. The uncertainty was dispelled on 11 May 1998 by the Shakti nuclear tests conducted by India at Pokhran and tests two weeks later by Pakistan. Both nations then officially declared to have possession of nuclear weapons. The US was totally taken off-guard by India’s testing and frankly, that was the icing on the cake. We were so overjoyed that for many years hence, ‘shakti’ used to be our computer password with some combination of letters or numerals. It was reported that the US President Bill Clinton came to know about it from TV news. Crippling sanctions on transfer of technology and supply of uranium for reactors were imposed on both nations soon thereafter. Anyway, the 1998 nuclear tests was a game changer. With it, India elbowed its way to the international high table. India’s rapid economic growth in the ensuing years finally convinced the US to allow it a one-time exemption from nuclear sanctions if India separated its civilian and military programs and subjected the civilian program to international surveillance and safeguards. A nuclear treaty was put in place in 2008 after more than three years of hard negotiations amid opposition from even the ruling party in both the countries. India also formulated a nuclear policy at this time which clearly defined its objectives in having nuclear weapons. R. Rajaraman was a renowned theoretical physicist of JNU who changed his theatre of work to nuclear policy issues and arms control after retirement. He has worked in international NGOs like International Panel of Fissile Materials (IPFM) and has attended numerous programs on nuclear issues and disarmament. Even though the author is ideologically positioned against nuclear weapons, he understood the futility of opposing it after 1998 and changed track to analyse the scenario objectively.

Being a physicist himself, Rajaraman clearly lists out the reasons for why India desperately wanted the post-1998 sanctions to end and reach a deal with the US which would automatically prompt other nations to follow suit. By 2020, it was estimated that the burgeoning energy demand of the nation would reach 300,000 MW of electricity. Out of this, 30,000 MW was to come from nuclear energy. However, uranium sources were very poor in India which could not meet the demand. Sanctions had caused the uranium supply to dry up. Another option was to ‘create’ uranium by transmuting thorium metal in a breeder nuclear reactor. But this technology was only in the design stages and tough technical challenges prevented its early maturing. Under the proposed deal, the civil and military programs were to be separated. India wanted to keep its fast breeder system in the military group but the US initially objected to it. Many, including the author, criticized India’s stand as it would torpedo the deal. India remained steadfast and negotiations remained in limbo for some time. Finally, the US blinked and the deal was signed. The author graciously acknowledges that ‘those observers, including myself, who felt that the Indian demand on the breeder was a deal breaker and should be softened in the higher interests of our nuclear energy needs turned out to be wrong’. This was made possible with a great deal of support extended by the then US President George W Bush in yielding to India’s demands. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged him for this, Singh was ridiculed by the Left intelligentsia. Rajaraman then quips that ‘it would only be poetic justice to rename the street in front of the what had been the world’s last leftist bastion – Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi – George W Bush Marg or Avenue’ (p.80). It should be remembered that the author was a teaching faculty at that institution for many decades.

Even though the nuclear deal was made functional at great risk of being aborted anytime in the middle, the author finds that India shot itself in the leg with a strange legislation whose only purpose was to scare away potential reactor suppliers. India passed a Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act in 2010 with stringent rules of compensation by the supplier in case of an accident attributable to negligence on their part. Even before reactors could be purchased and built, an extensive redressal system was put in place. In case of an incident, the reactor operator could sue the supplier if the incident was as a consequence of an act of the supplier which includes supply of equipment or service with patent or latent defects. No other country had stipulated such conditions for reactor purchases. When no supplier from the US, France or Russia was willing to enter into a contract on these terms, the government diluted the provisions. Supplier liability was then limited to the warranty period and capped at a fixed sum of Rs. 1500 crores. The book includes details of reactor negotiations with GE, Westinghouse and Areva. GE backed out due to the liability act while the others were mired in financial difficulties and bankruptcy. With the Fukushima reactor accident in 2011, many countries in the world chose to turn away from nuclear energy.

This book handles the issue of ‘credible minimum deterrent’ (CMD) in some detail which is the basis of India’s nuclear policy. This document states that India won’t use nuclear weapons first. But if it was attacked by nuclear weapons at home or wherever its troops are, it would retaliate with nuclear weapons to inflict an unacceptable damage on the enemy. A nuclear deterrent arsenal is required to convince the enemy of the stupidity of launching a first strike. The extent of the unacceptable damage is estimated and redundancy is added to arrive at the required number of warheads. However, the concept of deterrence necessarily assumes that the other side is rational who values human life. No deterrence is feasible against a suicidal jihadi group should one take over Pakistan as no amount of civilian deaths would deter them. Even Mao Zedong of China – may be only as a rhetoric – once declared that he was willing to sacrifice 300 million Chinese in a nuclear showdown with the US. The author then estimates that only two bombs are required as retaliation for a first strike on the major cities of Pakistan or China which would cause at least half a million deaths that is sufficient ‘unacceptable damage’. Hence he audaciously suggests just two bombs as sufficient CMD. This pittance is against thousands of nuclear warheads in China and hundreds in Pakistan. Why are our intellectuals so adamantly anti-national? The cold war arms race had accumulated around 60,000 warheads by both adversaries. The author suggests a ‘more is not better; less is enough’ principle. However, professionals in India’s nuclear technology front have outright rejected Rajaraman’s insinuations as ‘an amateurish oversimplification by a theoretical physicist unschooled in the complexities of nuclear technology’ (p.201). He then considers the delivery systems and concurs with the general view that the triad of delivery platforms such as land-based missiles (the Agni series), sea-based missiles from nuclear submarines and release from fighter jets. Assuming that many of them might be shot down by missile defence systems, conservative analysts feel that even 100-odd warheads will not be sufficient to arm the triad for ensuring minimum deterrence.

However cleverly one may play brinkmanship, the chance of getting struck by a nuclear bomb in a busy city cannot be entirely ruled out. This can also happen by accident or equipment malfunction even if not by intent. Rajaraman raises awareness of the requirement of a civil nuclear defence and complains that India has still not developed a system. The US had implemented several measures in the 1950s but the American civil defence was not revived once they petered out by the 1960s. Nobody finds it attractive enough to spend a lot of money on something that may never be used. The American public and government lost interest in maintaining such a high level of preparedness for an event that didn’t seem to be happening. Besides this may not even be practical in India because of the incredibly short time of response available to a missile launch from Pakistan. A nuclear device shot against India from the Sargodha air force base in Pakistan would reach Delhi in just six minutes! This book also hints that the Indian government should have conducted a referendum before going nuclear in 1998 because it was an existential issue for the public. Here again, he is demanding something from India which no other country had done before. In fact, this is an existential issue more for the author as his research, seat in international consultative bodies and stature are solely linked to his anti-nuclear stance. However, he is not much concerned about countries other than India possessing nuclear weapons.

An original idea which is fully explained in the book is estimating the casualty figures in case of a nuclear attack on an Indian metropolis. Based on international consensus charts, the author makes ballpark estimates of the number of civilian deaths in the event of a nuclear bomb exploding in various neighbourhoods of Delhi. This makes for sickening reading, but we must accept that it is a risk we have to contend with while living next door to our arch enemy who was willing to eat grass to get nuclear weapons. Rajaraman describes about the numerous international conferences on nuclear issues he had attended around the globe. Some photographs are included which do not go above the level of ‘selfies’. Many of these meetings were pointless exercises of academic-turned activists helping each other to make an item of expense acceptable to an auditor of the grants received by them. Many of them are simple gatherings of self-appointed arms control ‘experts’ running on liberal funding by American NGOs. The author’s criteria for evaluating the ‘success’ of such meetings verge on the comical. His estimate of the utility of such conferences is represented in such remarks as ‘they were attended by unprecedented number of heads of states’, ‘the set of invitees was very inclusive’, ‘the proceedings were very cordial’ etc. He has also shared the response of the official Indian delegation upon meeting him on the sidelines of such global meets. The officials considered him only as a rabble-rouser and won’t even talk to him even if he made an initiative to walk over to their seats to make a self-introduction. Reports of two such incidents are recorded in the book. International NGOs usually rank India very low in their much-trumpeted-yet-totally-worthless global indices. One such scheme is the Nuclear Security Index where India’s position is just two slots from the bottom. Rajaraman admits that this is due to the prejudice of the adjudicating members who are resentful of India not joining the NPT and peeved at its getting away from the consequences of the 1998 tests with a nuclear deal from the US.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Battle for Sanskrit

Title: The Battle for Sanskrit – Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred? Oppressive or Liberating? Dead or Alive?
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2016 (First)
ISBN: 9789351775386
Pages: 468

Sanskrit has been the language that united India culturally and politically for millennia till the time of Islamic invasions. Though a thousand years of disuse since that episode had sapped some of its vitality in the political arena, Sanskrit continues as a link language for the spiritually minded. During British occupation, the whole genre of Orientalist studies was created to search India’s canons and texts in Sanskrit with a view to tweak the colonial regime to increase its efficiency. The ancient law books had to be translated into English which were then thought to act as the standard on which justice would be dispensed to Indians. However at no point in the growth of Orientalism was it concerned with the eventual replacement of English with Sanskrit. It co-opted some Indians trained in Western methods to translate Sanskrit works to English. With the fall of colonialism, scarcity of resources drove Orientalist research from Oxbridge to American universities, especially Harvard. Several American scholars gained a masterful grasp of Sanskrit and began to study the literature in detail. Most of the present-day Indians don’t know Sanskrit. Hence it fills them with immense pride with some gullibility to see a Westerner handling the ancient language pretty well even though it may be as short as reciting a couplet. Internal defences are lowered as an outcome and the Western scholar is poised to enjoy unlimited power in controlling the flow of patronage and resources from rich Indian businessmen and religious institutions. This book warns about the assault on our Vedic traditions coming from an American school of thought whose fundamental assumptions are dismissive of the sacred dimension of the language. We should not be naïve to hand over the keys to our institutions to outsiders to represent our legacy. The book also seeks to wake up traditional scholars of Sanskrit about an important Western school of Sanskrit studies whose scholars are intervening in modern Indian society with the explicitly stated view of detoxifying it of ‘poisons’ allegedly built into Sanskrit and to dismantle the ‘oppressive’ mindset against Dalits, women and Muslims. Rajiv Malhotra worked as a senior executive in the software and telecom industries before becoming a management consultant. He took early retirement in the 1990s at the age of 44 and established Infinity Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Most of the discussion is based on the work and activities of Sheldon Pollock of Harvard and the group of scholars under his guidance. The author defines two categories of Sanskrit researchers. The Outsiders refer to people from Western academies and the Insiders denote the traditional scholars of the language. He warns that the Outsiders are highly vocal and public in championing their view. At the same time, some of the Insiders are so naïve that they feel flattered when the Outsiders show interest on them which is really intended to dismantle the traditional world view. These Western scholars are accused to have gone too far in prescriptive study rather than descriptive and are more like political activists representing a foreign perspective seeking to topple and demolish Indian sanskriti in its present form. The Outsiders are so powerful that they control many of the important international conferences on Sanskrit, the prestigious chairs of research activity, the best-paid academic jobs and the availability of grants for research work. It is to be specified here that the categorization of Outsiders and Insiders does not in any way infer ethnic or racial divide. It’s only the worldview of the groups that make the difference. Indian scholars who do their research in India but subscribe to the Western precepts also deserve the epithet of ‘Outsiders’.

Malhotra explains how the nucleus of Sanskrit studies was shifted from Britain to the US after the fall of colonialism and the development of a new American Orientalism. This differed in one more aspect with the colonial variety in that it was shaped by the white society’s conflict with indigenous tribes of America at the frontier and African slaves within. This victor-vanquished aspect was later extended to India. It applied the image of the ‘savage’ to those deemed ‘idol worshippers’, ‘primitive’, ‘lacking in morals’ and ‘prone to violence’ etc. It often stereotyped ‘savage’ culture as being oppressive towards its women, children and lower social strata, described as subaltern groups. The modus operandi of this American group is also explained. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Indian Left was stranded without a patron. Just as the CIA recruited the former Soviet nuclear engineers to work for the US, agencies such as the Ford Foundation appropriated them to serve the American academics in the humanities. These scholars quickly learned that a sure path to rapid advancement in the field was to produce research demonstrating that exploitation was built into Indian society. The idea that Western colonialism was a thing of the past is implicit in the term ‘post-colonial’ which they widely circulated. At the same instant, the concept that Sanskrit was still exploiting was given wide currency. Besides, the Indian Left lacked adequate knowledge of Sanskrit. Even eminent historians who interpreted ancient inscriptions such as Romila Thapar or Irfan Habib are ignorant of Sanskrit. This made them vulnerable to ridicule over silly errors in their treatises. This proved a serious handicap for Indian leftists against traditionalists. This gap is now filled by a group of politically charged American Sanskrit scholars with Marxist commitments. This book is, in fact, a battle cry against them.

What is truly shocking in the book is the author’s expose of Sheldon Pollock’s strategies – both overt and covert. Even though he is widely acclaimed as a great Sanskrit scholar, this book argues and proves that Pollock has a clandestine agenda to revamp Sanskrit heritage on the mould of American ‘woke’ values. Pollock criticised scholars who romanticized the Sanskrit tradition. He believes in the ethical responsibility of scholars to expose the oppressiveness he sees within the tradition and to eliminate it by re-engineering the tradition. He rejected the Vedic roots of the heritage terming them primitive, superstitious and discriminatory. Pollock superimposed on to Hinduism the Western divide between Biblical theology/liturgy on the one hand and the performing arts on the other. This was a failure to comprehend the dichotomy of Western art with its established puritanical religion as the former had originated from its ancient paganism. This was not the case in India. He sets out to decouple kavyas from the Vedas as belonging to a secular viewpoint and transcendence respectively. Malhotra asserts this to be totally wrong. A truly outrageous finding of Pollock is that Sanskrit is the source of Nazi evil. He claims that Nazism and British Indology were merely building on the socio-political oppression that had always existed in Sanskrit language. In effect, Pollock argues that Sanskrit is at the root of all evil in the world. Is this the indicator of a scholar’s love for the language he had studied for a lifetime? He then goes on to deny the originality of the ancient composers of Sanskrit. Vedic Brahmins are alleged to have copied the new literary Sanskrit developed by Buddhists and created Ramayana. According to Pollock, Ramayana is plagiarized from a Jataka story. He then claims that Ramayana was used by the Brahmin-Kshatriya aristocracy to arouse Hindus and demonize Muslim invaders from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. In short, even resisting the fanatic Muslim conquerors – who erected towers of skulls of men they killed and took their women and children as sex slaves – is a sin the Indians had committed!

Malhotra successfully peels off the false arguments enveloping Pollock’s idea one by one and eventually reaches the core which is shockingly illogical and fallacious. Pollock refers to karma as a form of fatalism; but equating karma with the Western concept of mechanistic fate is a profound misunderstanding. Karma is the result of prior actions and its future can be altered by new ones. Pollock’s next attempt is to strike at the fault lines of Indian society and cleave it into many pieces. Pollock deconstructs kavya with a singular view to interpret it as an expression of the aestheticization of political power, which is only a ploy to make the power look glamorous to the subjects of the king and to keep them obedient. It was primarily produced in the royal courts by resident royal poets who were complicit in the socio-political stratification and oppression of Dalits and women. Hindu kings used Sanskrit grammar also as a tool of oppression is the next item in the charge sheet. Correct order and structure of language were thought to lead to correct order and structure in society. He brings in this argument in analogy with medieval Europe where laws were imposed on speakers of certain languages with the clear intention to oppress them. This European parable is not at all applicable to India as no Hindu king had banned any language.

A detailed analysis of the duplicitous nature of Pollock’s intellect is given in this book. In fact, he is widely regarded as a friend of India who has dedicated a lifetime of research to Sanskrit studies. The Indian government had conferred on him the prestigious Padma Shri in 2010. He is a close friend of the philanthropic billionaires in India and is the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India in the US which was set up with funds from the family of the Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murty. In fact, the author came into the foreground when the Sringeri Matha established by Adi Shankara was planning to finance a research effort by Pollock and his cronies which would have inflicted damage on the sacred tradition of Sanskrit. The author’s intervention was just in time to put a freeze on that decision. Malhotra alleges that in the mainstream media, Pollock projects great love for Sanskrit to impress traditional Indians and their government. Yet in his academic writings he claims that praising Sanskrit amounts to a ‘farcical repetition of myths of primevality’ (p.275). Pollock’s tirades even challenge the integrity of India. He claims that there was no Indian nation or even Indian civilization. He implored scholars to explore the historical contingencies that made nation-states of France and England but not of Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra (p.311). He seems to be troubled with the state of affairs that India did not disintegrate into multiple nationalities.

The book is excellently structured and brilliantly argued with logical pleas and descriptive examples. However, the author gets a bit carried away while dealing with traditional studies of Sanskrit and its oral tradition. It is claimed that mantras are understood as corresponding to vibrations ‘serving as keys to higher states of consciousness’. Hence writing them down and translating it defeats the whole purpose. This argument does not seem to be much rational. The author calls for new itihasas and smritis to be written in Sanskrit. He suggests the two long-lived traumatic events in the last millennium: the Islamic invasions which peaked with Aurangzeb’s rule and the British colonialism as subject matter of the proposed literary venture. What makes this volume priceless is its extra-sharp analytics of Pollock’s academic corpus. He takes great pains to explain and illustrate the theories of Pollock such as ‘aestheticization of power’ to make it understandable to general readers as well. Roping in the traditionalists to understand and respond to Pollock’s claims is another aim of this illustrative discourse. Criticism against Pollock made by other western scholars such as J. Hanneder is also included. 

Rajiv Malhotra is a true nationalist who is ever on the lookout for movements against the nation. One of his immensely prescient books is ‘Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault-lines’ which was reviewed earlier here.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

India Unbound

Title: India Unbound – From Independence to the Global Information Age
Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2000)
ISBN: 9780143419259
Pages: 419

A big contradiction lies at the heart of the perception of Indian society regarding the growth of its economy in the last three decades, especially after the great Liberalization of 1991 put forward by Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. It emancipated the economy and unleashed its animal spirit which was kept in bondage for four decades by the debilitating chains of Nehruvian socialism. Truly, 1991 can be designated as the year of India’s economic independence. But the irony is that most Indians still believe that the market makes ‘the rich richer and the poor poorer’ which would lead to corruption and crony-capitalism. The 1991 reforms and its aftereffects catapulted India to the position of the fifth largest economy in the world and lifted 415 million people out of poverty in the last fifteen years. Despite the market having generated widespread prosperity over two decades, people still distrust it and the nation continues to reform by stealth. This book is a jewel of sorts; you would find hundreds of books criticizing liberalization churned out by political and academic factories of the Left but rarely a book of this kind appears. It is in its core a biography of the author, but examines the Indian economy also in parallel. Das explains why the 1991 reforms was essential, how it progressed, what were the areas which needed accelerated reform and the changes it has wrought in Indian society. Gurcharan Das graduated in philosophy from Harvard and was CEO of Procter & Gamble India. He was instrumental in setting up the market for Vicks Vaporub, which is an American product. After taking early retirement at 50, he became a writer and consultant who give time only to young and promising companies.

This book is a must-read for those who want to understand how India failed to get its objectives correct. The leaders of the freedom struggle – Gandhi and Nehru – used their influence over the masses in a way harmful for them as well as for the nation. Fallacious arguments captivated the public mind such as ‘small companies are better than big ones’ (Gandhi), ‘public enterprises are better than private ones’ (Nehru) and ‘local companies are better than foreign ones’ (both). They so mesmerized India that the succeeding generation whose job was to jettison these foolish ideas, failed to do so and did us incalculable harm. And what did they achieve after half a century of mixed economy? After 50 years, the failure was staggering: 40 per cent of Indians were still illiterate, half were miserably poor earning less than a dollar a day, one-third of the people did not have access to safe drinking water, and only a sixth of the villages had modern medical facilities. In the end, this meant two generations who missed the opportunities. Instead of socialism, this path led to a corrupt, domineering state. Narasimha Rao was also forced by the IMF to bring in meaningful reforms. The 1991 Liberalization opened the economy to foreign investment and trade. It dismantled import controls, lowered customs duties, devalued the currency and virtually abolished the licensing controls on private investment. The reforms drastically cut down the tax rates and broke public sector monopolies. Growth immediately picked up to 7.5 per cent and foreign exchange reserves shot up from 1 billion to 20 billion USD. The author however notes that though the license raj was done away with, the inspector raj is still intact. The reforms are only half complete. This book was written in 1999, but the observed shortcomings still exist in the system.

The author remarks that the immediate post-independence years were a time of centre-left ideology in many countries and in fact Nehru was in sync with Fabian socialists of the UK. During his college days at Harvard, Das noted that students were left-of-centre in thought and were concerned with redistribution of wealth and ignored the whole subject of wealth creation. Many of India’s intellectuals and policy makers were trained in the West and suffered the same blind spot. Most of the teachers also had an anti-business bias which reinforced the student prejudices. Developmental economists thought that growth would provide jobs, raise incomes and pull up people from poverty. However, East Asia realized the futility of this policy after a decade or so of experimentation. They quickly changed track and went back to market-oriented reforms. But in India, the failed policies were consolidated under Indira Gandhi. She further tightened the rules which were already taut. It was the period in which the author completed his education and joined Richardson Hindustan which produced the ubiquitous balm of India – Vicks Vaporub.

Gurcharan Das provides an excellent survey of the misfortune that is euphemistically called Nehruvian socialism or the mixed economy. The 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution was a great blunder of Nehru and his planning advisor Mahalanobis. It reserved seventeen sectors exclusively for state enterprises. When G D Birla requested for permission to start a steel plant, consent was denied! The Tatas made 119 proposals between 1960 and 1989 to start new businesses or expand old ones and all of them ended in the bureaucratic files. Nehru in his naivety dampened the competitive spirit of India’s entrepreneurs when he innocently enquired of the need for having ‘nineteen brands of toothpaste’ (p.153). Another ‘gem’ of stupidity came later when Nehru declared in parliament that ‘public sector’s aim is not to make profit but to meet social objectives’. He nationalized a number of industries without adequately compensating the owners. His public sector was marked by low return on capital, lack of autonomy and accountability of senior managers. The supreme leader’s callous attitude did not instill in them a concern for profit and efficiency. In fact, this complacency to profits continued until recently till the government linked the employees’ wage revision to the company’s profitability.

If Nehru’s economic policy was unfortunate, Indira Gandhi’s trajectory was nothing short of a disaster. Since the author was personally at the receiving end of some of her bad policies, he argues with spirit and conviction. Under her tenure, India withdrew further from world trade, raised tariffs and taxes even higher and became one of the worst performing economies. He estimates that Indira’s follies cost about 1.3 per cent lower in terms of GDP per year. The stringency of laws was in direct proportion to corruption. It could also be that the rules were hardened to thoroughly milk the industry in terms of kickbacks. The MRTP act brought in to curb monopolistic and restrictive trade practices in 1969 was so draconian that it crippled private industry for a generation. Under this law, any business group with combined assets worth rupees 20 crores or above was declared a monopoly and effectively debarred from expanding its business and placed under strict anti-monopolistic supervision and control. Rajiv Gandhi ‘graciously’ raised the limit to rupees 100 crores, but Narasimha Rao entirely scrapped this ridiculous law. Pranab Mukherji, who was the finance minister of Indira and later the nation’s president, was totally closed to any new idea and embarrassingly arrogant when he answered questions (p.197). The Janata party which replaced Indira continued to hoist Gandhian socialism and sacrificed growth. They reserved 863 industries for the small sector. Only entrepreneurs who invested less than rupees 60 lakhs could enter one of these industries. Competition from large and medium enterprises vanished and the sector moved into paralysis. A great irony of this period was that some of the future champions of the 1991 Liberalization were part of the government and responsible for some of its stringent regulations. There were many outstanding economists in government and academia such as I G Patel and Manmohan Singh who didn’t blow the whistle. They kept serving a morally bankrupt system for years, providing it with intellectual respectability and support.

The author joined Vicks very early and has contributed a great deal in making the product widely acceptable and used. It is amusing to learn that people thought it to be an original Ayurvedic remedy while in fact it was researched and developed in the US. It was only in the 1980s that it was marketed as Ayurvedic after ascertaining that its constituents were described in Ayurvedic textbooks. Their efforts to ensure customer satisfaction at every level of the employees are enlightening. Having partnered and worked with foreign and Indian professionals for many decades, Das feels that Indians are not good at working as a team. He claims that the poor teamwork of Indians is a festering, chronic disease. This divisive character is a national competitive disadvantage. A recurring refrain in the book is that intellectuals have not been able to sell the 1991 Reforms to the common public as a beneficial thing. Most of the people who really understand it remain mute while the politically motivated gang continuously point to the mindless jargon of ‘growing inequality’ as something that is going to seriously affect the lives of the less well-off. This book provides several arguments to decimate such propaganda of naysayers. The author comments in this regard that greater benefits owned by a few could be justified if the inequality improved the situation of the poor. A CEO earns many times more salary than the ordinary workers, but they consent to it as long as it motivated him to earn more profit to the company and the workers get higher wages as a result.

The book includes biographical sketches of Aditya Birla, Dhirubhai Ambani and Sam Pitroda as a kind of motivational story for young entrepreneurs. The latter parts of the volume deals with a review of the 1991 reforms and the areas which have not improved in the year 1999 when this book was written. A drawback is that it includes long sermons to the government, politicians, businessmen and the people which can be a bit tiring for the readers. This edition of the book is published in 2015 and includes a fresh Introduction and Afterword which brims with claims of vindication of the author’s original arguments. His viewpoints are very bold and are excellent examples of out-of-the-box thinking. Das presents data to show that the British rule was not so damaging to India on the economic front, particularly after the last decades of the nineteenth century. Running the empire was definitely not a hugely profitable enterprise. Several grave blunders of Nehru’s economic policy are listed in the book which can supplement Rajnikant Puranik’s famous book, ‘Nehru’s 97 Major Blunders’ and would help him complete a century and a few more points. You can find my review of that book here.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Title: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
Author: Slavenka Drakulic
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2016 (First published 1992)
ISBN: 9780060975401
Pages: 197

There were times at the peak of the Cold War when the world was really nervous about the prospect of a false step from one of the rivals unintentionally setting in motion a nuclear holocaust. Fortunately, one of the contenders – the Communists – collapsed surprisingly quickly in the matter of around three years straddling 1990. The people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe found themselves standing exposed to the world one fine morning. The new world which they saw unfolding right in front of their eyes was full of challenges of the new capitalist system. How they coped with this ‘revolutionary’ change is a question that becomes relevant only after their life under the communist system is studied in detail. There are several books on this interesting topic and their perspectives also differ widely. This book provides a refreshingly new viewpoint and aspires to provide a snapshot of the lives and feelings of the unfortunate men and women – mostly women – who had had no option but to stay under the yoke of communism. The book is dedicated to all women of Eastern Europe, who too made possible the changes in 1989. It tells some anecdotes about how they lived a joyless existence where the seventy years of communism’s authoritarian rule could not provide them with their most basic needs. Slavenka Drakulic is a respected journalist and cultural commentator of Croatia. Her works had appeared in major world journals. She was one of the founders of the network of eastern European women’s groups. She has also produced three other books. This book covers the life in the former Yugoslavia of which Croatia was a part and is based on the author’s firsthand experiences and interviews with women in other communist regimes in the critical period of the dismantling of socialism.

Drakulic presents a fine view of how life was under the repressive Communist state and its never-ending status quo of ordinary life. One was trained to fear change, so that when change eventually began to take place, one was suspicious and afraid, because every change one has ever experienced was always for the worse. What Communism instilled in its victims was the sense of immobility, the absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining their lives differently. Everything in society or any abstract idea was first tested on the touchstone of ideological consistency with Marxist-Leninist thought. Growing up in a Communist country, one learns very young that politics is an abstract concept but a powerful force influencing people’s everyday lives. The state intruded into every minutiae of ordinary life. The political authority and the trivia of daily living were inseparably connected. The author then asserts that communism, more than a political ideology or a method of government, is a state of mind. Everyone watched their steps and felt the breath of the state’s censors behind their neck. The socialist state had also brought to perfection the social game called ‘reading between the lines’. The censoring was harsh and the punishment for even minor infractions matched it.

A good part of the book details how the people of a socialist state always lived with shortages of essential goods. All means and methods of production were under state control and a bunch of bureaucrats decided what to produce and how much of it. This created imbalances such that any item could go out of stock any time. People developed the precautionary habit of storing everything that went through their hands – whether useful or not because you never knew when it might become useful. The planned economy and industrialization drive didn’t care for small things in life. Consumer goods were of poor quality and unappealing. It is the superiority of the West in mass-producing cheap, good quality consumer goods that dazzled the people of socialist states and made them look at their system with inward contempt and suppressed anger. Aesthetics was considered superficial, bourgeois invention. Women were declared equal to men and the state saw no point in them trying to look beautiful! They were made to work everywhere proving that they were even physically equal. The communist ideal was a robust woman who didn’t look much different from a man. Without a choice of cosmetics or clothes, with bad food, hard work and no spare time, it wasn’t hard to create a uniformity that comes out of an equal distribution of poverty and the neglect of people’s real needs. As a result, women in Eastern Europe looked tired and older than they really were. People were instructed to be good workers and party members. To cultivate individualism, to perceive oneself as an individual in a mass society, was looked down upon. Communism liked the homogeneity of cattle a better role model than the fissiparousness of a free-thinking human society.

Continuing with the analogy to cattle, we read about instances where the state control over an individual’s life was suffocatingly tight. Life under communism lacked any kind of privacy. Everybody was comrade to everybody else and every member watched over the life of others because only when there is no privacy can there be total control. Besides, the thinking was that why one needs privacy if he has nothing to hide? In communist Yugoslavia, the state found a novel way to address shortage of housing which the author experienced and describes. The government divided big apartments into rooms, forcing complete strangers to live in a kind of commune. Socialism feared privacy in each of its manifestations. There was only one state-owned channel on television, broadcasting programs designed to brainwash people and bore them to death. However, the party/state functionaries were a class of its own and enjoyed a life fuller and richer than the ordinary comrades. It was hard for common folk even to peek into their houses, protected by high walls, watchmen and dogs and a general element of fear. Consequently, many people ran away from their homes and crossed the border to the West at great risk. They were so desperate and determined to escape the clutches of communism that they ignored the risk of guards shooting them dead if their movement was detected. The author talks about a museum in former East Germany where the devices people created to escape out of their dreary and worthless existence are displayed. This includes a home-made submarine which sailed under the Baltic Sea to reach Denmark. There’s a small aircraft with a car motor, a hot air balloon and a chair-lift with rope using which a whole family escaped.

The author was surprised to see several beggars going about the streets in US cities soliciting something from passersby. It was new to her. Whatever may be its shortcomings, the socialist state had ensured that nobody wandered the streets aimlessly except the gypsies who didn’t count. The cutthroat nationalism of the constituent provinces was also kept under check as long as communism reigned. The first thing people experienced in a state de-shackled from the communist yoke was the civil war that broke out between the different provinces. The warring nations had restarted their fight which was cut off after World War II when socialism had enveloped them. For 45 years, within the iron embrace of the communist party, the wounds of nationalism had not healed. Instead, they were simply ordered to disappear. Drakulic also identifies a deep trait of the socialist society regarding the passivity or detachment of the people in the administration of their social assets. Cities in Eastern Europe fell into decrepitude relatively fast. Low quality of paint, pollution, bad gasoline and bad cars were reasons of this but not the whole story. What caused this degeneration were the people themselves with decades of apathy behind them. Their conviction was that somebody else – the government, the party or those ‘above’ – was in charge of it. How could it be the people when they were not in charge even of their own lives?

The author declares at the outset that this is not a story of big heroes, political prisoners or dissidents, but of ordinary people – especially women – who were under the wheel of communism’s juggernaut who couldn’t stand it anymore. Since it came from the very foundations like a cataclysmic earthquake, the socialist regimes fell like dominoes one by one rather quickly. Readers can enjoy the biting sarcasm displayed in the book against the socialist state thinking big and omitting the mundane things useful in the daily lives of the people. The book is also noted for subtle humour and sarcasm. Political ones aside, she describes about a window-shopping trip in New York with a friend and remarks that ‘due to the fact that we had no money, we were enjoying the expensive clothes just as someone would enjoy an exhibition of modern art’. Most likely the book is a compilation of articles the author had written on journals as all chapters are of equal length. Unfortunately, the author has not examined much on the life of the nomenklatura – the top brass of the party and government – who enjoyed all luxuries of life while almost all others in the country languished in squalor.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star