I have been lurking on a mailing list for a few days watching this back and forth on the issue of violence whether state supported, vigilante type, in the interest of corporate investments or maoist ideology inspired or self inflicted violence in the form of suicides. What I say below is an attempt to see if we can ground this discussion in the dynamics of development rather than as discrete types of violence or even isolated incidents. Some of this violence in Chhattisgarh may have happened even if it were not a state by itself. It is just that now it gets framed as violence in Chhattisgarh rather than violence in Bastar or in Madhya Pradesh — which simply would have escaped most people’s attention.

But I think the formation of the state has actually given the context for a new and aggravated violence because it is now possible for a variety of social groups to aspire to a better life and to prosperity and these aspirations come into conflict with each other much more ferociously because there are new opportunities which must be captured at all costs. And then these are all framed in the new logic of development — measured almost exclusively in terms of scorching rates of economic growth that all states in India are desparately chasing.

It is instructive to draw parallels to the  situation in Andhra Pradesh. It is not exactly a parallel because Andhra Pradesh became a state in 1956 under the linguistic principle. The state definitely witnessed a significant amount of violence even until the 1980s. But after the early 80s, with the rise of the Telugu Desam Party, the nature and degree of violence and its trajectories became both quantitatively much higher and qualitatively different as it became possible for a number of social groups with some investible agri surpluses to not merely seek avenues but actually assert their power to do so. In the event, these groups formed powerful caste based alliances (and of course these castes are not empty socio-cultural identities but actually have an economic and material basis — as opposed to the congress alliances of reddy-brahmin- scheduled castes the new alliance was kamma-kshatriya- Backward Classes).

This dynamic of different social groups asserting their aspirations to a ‘good life’ through politics, through political movements, naxalite parties, reached a climactic point in the mid 90s when it was no longer possible to fight it out through ordinary means and was resolved through a virtual coup on the lawns of the governor’s residence — Chandrababu Naidu became the chief minister.

In the last 12 years, we have seen first a sharpening of the contradictions and then a gradual transformation of the political and economic turf where organized opposition to any of the things that we call ‘neoliberal’ seems quite impossible as on date. What we see instead is a gradual atrophying of politics into -NGO led single issue campaigns, identity based movements that arise with a lot of promise, throw up charismatic leaders and disappear and a tentative strugles that attempt to address these issues in a territorial form — separate Telangana. I write this potted history of struggles in Andhra Pradesh on this list because I feel that in Chhattisgarh what we are seeing is a very intense form of similar struggles telescoped into a short period of half a decade or so. It would be really useful to see if we can identify the socio-economic bases of Salwa Judum or any such campaigns or even farmers suicides rather than identify it with a single political party.

Although in the immediate context one party may have initiated it and claims credit for it, and the other may reject it (and we should definitely be attentive to these differences) , in the longer run, it will be useful to pin down what are the shifts in the aspirations and opportunities of different social groups that resulted in the emergence of Salwa Judum soon after the formation of Chhattisgarh as a state.

And relate these then to the restructuring of state institutions themselves both via their relationship to various donor-investor networks and via administrative reforms. There is my do paisa worth contribution to the discussion and if I am speaking out of turn – please indulge me as my acquaintance with Chhattisgarh is limited to visits to some places long before the state was formed and I have not bee on this list for very long either. But it is a region that fascinates and intrigues me and I have very fond memories of it and frankly I think the experience of Chhattisgarh can offer invaluable lessons to other places in India.

DF said she felt like Emily Dickinson because like Emily Dickinson she felt like she was under a fog. The phone line was not very clear, so I could not hear everything she said, but I remember the first words that came into my head — death dew and immortality. I could not recollect the words of the poem which I loved as I recited in school just for its strangeness.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Why the poem was included in our syllabus remains a mystery to me, it may have been the most extraordinary poem for Allen Tate, but for a class room of 15 year olds whose encounters with death and beyond, were noisy and scorching affairs under an unremitting sun? Immortality was not an option for any of them — they were all certain that they would return as monkeys or mynahs or frogs –in rare cases as men and women. One thing they were all certain of was that death was only a brief interruption like a visit to the headmaster’s office.Some worried as to whether they could retain their gender when they returned — but that was a very disturbing thought so nobody said it aloud. Returning with a cheek pouch or a pronounced beak or even a folded tongue from the HM’s office is one thing. Returning with ovaries was a different matter altogether.
I wonder if I am the only one in that class who remembers the poem. The thought of a quiet wedding in a horse carriage to a stranger and happiness in a place filled with dew soaked cobwebs and moss in a house that was no higher than a mound was so puzzling that my mind soaked all of it up like so many drops of brightly colored ink. The poem disappeared.
Reading it again was fun and made me homesick for Amherst where I have never lived but it is a place I will know anytime I pass through it. That is where Emily Dickinson saw the school children ’striving’ in the recess, that is where she saw the cattle grazing the ripe grass. She would have gone on forever had Mr. Immortality not come calling in a carriage driven by Mr. D and had there been no place in the world where the sun would not set. That is where she lives.

And someone is building an e archive for her here.

M has a job interview at Amherst, MA. I am happy for her. I think it will be good for everyone. It is a compact little town about which all I know is that during the 90s, the University had one of the most progressive Indian student population. Two of my best friends studied in the business school there. SK still teaches there. And it has at least two big names — one in geography and one in anthro. The town of less than 40000 people is celebrating the 250th anniversary in 2009. Dont ask me what is the significance of the year 1759 — counting backwards – cuz I dont know but if you want random information about the place it is here.

I will not be able to look through a lot of news for a few days but just to highlight an interesting signal: according to the statesman, CPIM state conference in Kolkata apparently “revived” the demand for “restructuring center-state relationship which had been a focal point for the marxists agitation in the early 80s”. It doesnt indicate whether this was a resolution or if it was just a point that was raised. This is interesting in light of the point I made on Jan 8, that Naidu is hoping to revive the 80s spirit of region against the center and my observation that the CPIM’s feet are in struggles for regional power vis a vis the center, and eyes on the national state.

This apparent return to a focus on restructuring center state relations has important implications for the future. First, I think it is pointless chiding the CPIM for not doing much in Gujarat. The only promise the CPIM can make is that by winning enough seats in the Lok Sabha i.e. in Bengal and Kerala, it will keep communalism at bay. If any one thinks that there is spade work to do on the ground in Gujarat, they are welcome to it.

But what is actually worrisome is that with further loosening of the center state relationships, the CPIM will simply not be able to monopolize power in Bengal. (It never did in Kerala) anyways. This is because there will be other legitimate contenders for some of the slogans that the CPIM can now claim as its own e.g. development, welfare of the poor and so on — afterall Modi won exactly on the same platform in Gujarat. What goes on behind that slogan is that particular winners and losers will get organized around sociopolitical identities rather than along class lines.

Under conditions of rapid restructuring leaders emerge and disappear pretty quickly as new coalitions keep emerging without any durable logic. This process is underway in Kerala too. The Pinarayi faction has been promising everyone that factionalism in the party will end with the state conference that is due shortly. But in preparation for the state conference, Vijayan faction has been systematically capturing all the district committees throwing out VS supporters. The promise of ending factionalism simply means, the current state of affairs where neither side is winning will be over when we win.

Once this win by BB-Pinarayi lineup is consolidated, the state-center contradiction will be revived. That is when things will hot up again and by the time that question is exhausted, we are going to be in a different world. I dont mean in an otherworldly sense. It will simply be a very different kind of India.

In my note on Jan 8th I suggested that the CPIM has basically put Naidu in quarrantine. At the national level, as Modi and Jayalalitha band together against the Congress and the CPIM, the CPIM will have a tough choice making up its mind whether to band with Naidu and Mulayam both of whom are anti Congress and played a critical role in the development of the demand for restructuring center state relations in the early 80s.

It can stick with the Congress and hope that the party will reform itself. But if it does then the same logic will also lead to a stronger Congress in Bengal. Already there are noises in the Congress that it should pay greater attention to developing stronger regional leadership — a process that the Congress studiously avoided all the way into the 90s when after Rajiv gandhi’s death, a dozen jacks in the box sprang up.

On the surface they settled for the old Brahmin PV but only as a stop gap arrangement. After his term was over — it was mayhem as the marathas, the rajputs the baniyas –all scrambled for power. With Rahul Gandhi getting ready to take the reigns of the party, and Sharad Pawar not being able to shake off his maratha politics which is both his strength and his weaknes — we are about to get on to an exciting decade 2010-2020.

PS 1. with many apologies for another mind reading TV poll pundit style post

PS 2. and no, the left hand side in the subject line is not a reference to the left front. It is a play on the left hand side of government files which is a kink in the Right to Information Act in India. When the act was passed somehow, nobody noticed that the act does not say anything about the file notings. This is surprising because many government officials involved in the drafting of the bill at different stages were actually quite apprehensive about having to reveal the left hand side notes and wanted a clause included in the bill to explicitly exclude them. the current situation is that in different places very different kinds of scenarios are emerging. Often, the  Commissioner of Information is at loggerheads with the actual deparments which refuse to reveal the notes. For quick updates on RTI go no further than this.

Ashis Nandy mentions Ali Shariati, Desmond Tutu and Dalai Lama in his TOI article Gujarat: Blame the middle class. Since this was the first time I came across the name Ali Shariati I googled it. It appears that Ali Shariati was an Iranian sociologist who translated Frantz Fanon’s wretched of the earth into Farsi. Back in Iran after training in Paris, Ali Shariati became a rallying point for young revolutionaries and was hounded by the Shah of Iran. He left the country in 1977 but was assassinated in England by the savak – the secret police of the Shah within three weeks. It is pertinent to note that Ali Shariati was becoming a counterpoint to Khomeini and the role of Khomeini supporters in shrouding Ali Shariati’s death seems to be a bit of mystery even today.It seems that Ali Shariati continues to have a following and it seems that there are different interpretations of Ali Shariati too. There is a fair amount of material on Ali Shariati online. Here is the wiki entry to get started. And here is a secular Iranian’s criticism of what he sees as shariati’s theological “blame it on the west” propositions. And here is an anti shariati rant and here an essay by shariati titled “our expectation of muslim woman“.

And here is an online english translation of a book by Shariati — Fatima is Fatima. I have not read the book — I have been curious about the figure of Fatima ever since I heard a speech writer for Benazir Bhutto said during a talk that in the early days of her first election campaign, the struggle was to find a theological/historical basis for woman leadership in an Islamic society. And the figure of Fatima was central to that effort. And then AM my friend told me once that Rahi Masoom Reza, the script writer for BR Chopra’s hugely popular Mahabharat TV serial may have drawn on memories of Karbala to shaping the female characaters and dialogue.

Now that I have given three hours of my morning to Ali Shariati in the vain hope that everything else i have to do will disappear, I am signing off for the next couple of days.
p.s. I am not advocating Ali Shariatism as an answer to the homegrown SS and to the Khomeinis. But I do think we should ask ourselves what we can learn from it. Because and here is a huge leap: one of the commentators on Nandy’s article posted on Countercurrents says the following.

IN my heart I know and in the hearts of those near to me knows that I am not a grain of fanatic – religious, racial, regional, etc. But I am for sure a Gujarati with pride. Have travelled and weathered all those abuse given to me a “Gujju” or “Bania” in all around India and in USA, I know what it means to be looked down.

This 2002 riots, which should not have happen, does not define the psyche of Gujarat or Gujarati. Yes they fight back when pushed to the corner but at heart they are very simple, very generous and very forgiving community.

By keeping the “flames” of hatred alive by brandishing them as some kind of fanatics and reminding those who suffered in 2002 about their sufferage, I don’t think you are doing any good to any one but yourself, for you would be able to congratulate yourself for your version of Secularism.

To me no religion, no region, no linguistic group, no political party should be above The Nation. Look at USA. Do we see that? And the BJP’s those nationalistic values are attracting Gujaratis and not its Hinuistic values, which BJP can have or can give that up.

There is no rational secular answer to this expression of “we fought back” sentiment that is being expressed. This guy is not fighting the Muslims. He is fighting the whole world from that Gujarati and Hindu identity.

PS1. I have just learnt that Ali Shariati was buried behind the Zainab shrine in Damascus. Here is a note on it by Brian Anthony. (This blog has not been active since Feb 2007, as Brian a teacher returned to the US after 7 years in Syria.)

Why would an Iranian who was killed in London be buried behind the Zainab Shrine in Damascus? I am not sure of the story; I can only speculate. Zainab was the sister of the martyred Imam Hussein. She was brought back to Damascus by the Caliph Yazid who had her brother killed. But far from shrinking back in feminine meekness or speechless grief, she boldly lambasted the Caliph before his own court. She spent the rest of her life condemning the tyrrany of the Umayyads and telling the tragic story of Hussein’s killing. Shariati loved Zainab and what she represents. He said of this famous saint, “Zainab bears witness to all of the defenseless prisoners in the system of executioners, and is the messenger left after martyrdom. She is the manifestation of the message of revolution.”

PS2 Okay, so just as there is one line of argument that the radical content of Ali Shariati’s work has been expurgated from it by the Khomeini regime, there is another line of argument exemplified by Ali Eteraz a New York based writer who accuses Ali Shariati of misanthropy and argues quite forcefully that nobody has done more to render death acceptable in the Muslim world than Ali Shariati. And he suggests that it has to do with the template of Hussein that was so readily available to him.

I remember mom whenever I think about Chattisgarh. I was six years old when she went to visit relatives in Bhilai. Actually it was a clandestine mission to check out a bride for her brother. When she returned, not so impressed by the potential bride but flush with the excitement of travel she told me in great detail how she got off the train at Nagpur and boarded the connecting train called Chattisgarh Express. It means the train to a place which has 36 forts, she explained. I asked her to tell me the names which she could not. Someday hopefully I will learn on my own. But regardless, Chattisgarh is a place in my mind. It is one of those places to which I made a promise that I will return through my writing. A promise that still remains unfulfilled.

I spent exactly 13 months and 12 days in a tiny railway junction town called A’pur in 1989-90. A’pur could easily have become part of Chattisgarh. But somehow perhaps that would have been toomuch to ask. The district of which it used to be an important town, Shahdol remained part of Madhya Pradesh. I dont know if that made life different for the people I knew then. It certainly seems to have made life more complicated for elephants. And then A’pur became the headquarters of a new district by itself. I visited Raipur some 9 years later again but did not make it to A’pur. I should ask D who spent the better part of his productive years there and still keeps in touch although the last time I met him, he sounded very tired and unwilling to talk about it. Perhaps this note will incite him into telling me more because he probably knew Ajit Jogi when he was collector of the district.

Amit Jogi is the son of Ajit Jogi the former Congress chief minister of Chattisgarh. Amit Jogi has a masters in international relations from JNU and seems quite well read. He has been an undertrial in a murder conspiracy and faces charges of faking a tribal certificate apart from caught in some weird citizenship issues because he was born in the US. Sigh! If somebody were to wrote an essay on this whole scheduled tribe, scheduled caste certificates business it would make an excellent ethnography of the Indian state. I will at some point. Reason I looked up Amit Jogi yesterday was K was all excited about Fatima Bhutto’s first public utterance against Bilawal takeover. I had written a few days ago that the person to watch in Pakistani politics is not Asif Ali Zardari but Mumtaz Bhutto the surviving patriarch of the Bhutto clan who will start making his moves soon first in the interest of patriliny contributing to a strange dynamic. Anyways, I have read all of Fatima Bhutto’s columns – out of sheer curiosity. Here is a young woman who is talking about modern democracy. Her utterances are inflected both by her own personal grief and encased in the Shaheed Bhutto legacy myth, yet they sound different from Bilawal Zardari’s soundbyte – My mom always said democracy is the best revenge.

But the family thing has been on my mind for a while. Abhijit Mazumdar, Darjeeling district secretary of CPIML was in December elected as a central committee member of the party and the TOI reports that the CPIML is projecting the son of Charu Mazumdar as its future leader. There is nothing in the news substantiate that the CPIML is indeed doing so. In the first place, between Charu’s custodial death in 1972, when Abhijit was 12 years old and 1986 when a 26 year old Abhijit with a masters in English literature came in contact with the CPIML again, the ML movement turned into a rhyzome in which it is impossible to make any categorical statements about direct lineages. Secondly, Abhijit was one of 47 members of the central committee. But the family is such a powerful trope for us to make sense of reality and so here we are.

So K’s excitement about Fatima Bhutto was an easy excuse for myself to put off my drudgery and go looking for sons and daughters of the high and mighty. And whew I was pleasantly surprised on finding a little club of sons and daughters of a muffassil high and mighty around Amit Jogi’s blog. And my eye fell on the case he makes for Why India needs Rahul Gandhi now. He may indeed be on to something here, although I do think his reading is shaped to an extent by the fact of his own being the son of a politician who owed his career to Rajeev Gandhi. And so it is not very difficult to imagine what the family needs and move from there to what the Congress needs and from there on to what the country needs.

Amit is clearly being the dutiful son. Afterall, he chose to stay back in India because his family needed him. I hope it does not take him a life time to overcome his filial indebtedness like mine did. And then I read his post on lessons from Gujarat for the Congress. Again it is a reading from within the Congress and so it must be taken with some caution. But the point he makes about regional satraps is very interesting.

The Congress needs to develop and empower regional leadership! he says. Absolutely correct. But I dont believe that the regional leadership that so emerges will be radically different in substance from the regional leadership that wins elections for the other parties. Further, any such regional leadership within the Congress will have to be accompanied by a powerful discourse of what the national ideal would be — else the contradictions will disintegrate the party immediately. And that seems to me an unlikely occurrence, simply because what does the Congress really have to erect the national canopy over ? A statistical fiction called the national growth rate? Hardly convincing.

It is not for nothing that Mrs. Gandhi introduced the fascist authoritarian centralism into the functioning of the Congress. She simply could not come up with anything to take the place of Nehru’s imagined India that melted away before her very own eyes. YSR’s seemingly successful innings in Andhra Pradesh is a case in point. He is a regional satrap not only vis a vis the national, but also vis a vis Andhra Pradesh. His rise to power cannot be separated from the aspirations of the cut-throat faction lord-contractor class of Rayalaseema. That is the best answer that the Congress could come up with to dethrone Chandrababu Naidu who represented the aspirations of the KG delta agrarian rich.

But of course neither of them could win elections on such narrow bases. Both of them had to stitch together alliances with other aspirants who identified themselves in caste and regional terms but had distinct socioeconomic histories. Both of them had pursued strategies of destroying each other’s sociopolitical bases through policy decisions. Both of them were animated by powerful transnational policy and funding networks. The old style regional leadership representing ’subnational’ aspirations encased in the ‘national ideal ‘ argument no longer serves any useful purpose whether for political strategy or for indifferent academic analysis.

Amit has been critical of the viciousness of salwa judem in Chattisgarh and records some very telling first hand observations. I wonder if he knows what those observations reveal. salwa judem is not a result of personal preferences of individual politicians. It is the outcome of a drive towards double digit growth rates by policymakers who pretend that only the measurable outcomes matter and by regional elites who have developed a taste for the fallouts of that growth. They are global actors in their own right. The nation is useful to the extent that it enables them to be more greedy. If leaders in Gujarat or Andhra Pradesh or West Bengal think they have to catch up with the west, make up for having missed the industrial revolution and so on, the leaders in Uttaranchal and Chattisgarh and Jharkhand think they have to go an extra mile because they were left behind in the previous edition of this race.

This imagination is febrile. Its manifestations are dramatic. Its violent consequences for the majority of people remain invisible simply because they are experienced at the household level. It took 300 instances of suicide by small and marginal cotton farmers in Warangal for it to be noticed and several years and thousands more deaths, it is now turned into a farmers’ problem. Er… is it possible that the crisis in agriculture is only the manifestation of a serious generalized crisis of reproduction that is flitting across the national space ?

The point anyhow is that the Congress cannot quite develop a regional leadership that would be qualitatively distinct from the regional leadership developed by the other parties. It would have to stitch together an alliance of social groups within the region, articulate the mounting resentments of different social groups in some coherent form to be able to win the elections. But even if it did so, to stay in power, it would have to continue largely within the same mould as the other parties. It cannot offer a new agenda. Not within the confines of these politics. Seriously what can it compete with BJP with ? Development ? More attractive and timely populist sops for those whom the state has to perforce abandon ? Cut into Hindu pride + Regional pride with some other well chosen pride ?

I have a cramp in my neck from toomuch head-shaking in sadness. I want to say that Fatima Bhutto, Amit Jogi and his eclectic friends are all distracting me from my promise to Chattisgarh. But I know that they are pursuing some unfulfilled promises of their own.

It never ceases to surprise me how easy it is for us to think of change as a function of time. September 17th, 1948 Momentous day for lovers of democracy and freedom writes Venkateswarlu of The Hindu. Indeed it was in many ways. Hyderabad acceded to India on that day. The picture above was taken days later at the Begumpet Airport. The bald man in shawl on the left is Sardar Patel, the first Home Minister of India. And the man on the right in sherwani and taupi with a walking stick under his arm bowing with a namaste is His Exalted Highness, Lt. Gen Muzaffar-ul Mulk Wal Mumalik Nizam- ul-Mulk, Nizam-ud-Dowla, Nawab Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan Bahadur, the Faithful Ally of the British, Nizam of Hyderabad, who according to the Time Magazine of February 22, 1937 was the richest man in the world. But what about the tarmac at the Begumpet airport where the picture was apparently taken ? Is it a momentous place ? Who was the photographer in suit in the background and what kind of plane was it that stood in the back ? This was days before Gandhiji was shot dead in Delhi. What was the oldman doing while Patel was speaking greeting the Nizam ? This was indeed a momentous meeting because this was the meeting between the Nizam and Patel at which crucial decisions about the Nizam’s properties were taken. Patel made a ‘generous’ offer to the Nizam — make a list of properties in Hyderabad that you want to keep as your private estate and it will all be yours. In the judgment of Hashmuddin Ahmed, son of the city police chief who held the power of attorney for the Nizam in the days to come, Patel was more honest than Nehru. He kept his promise.

Sudheer writes

Hyderabad’s air department was run by the Nizam’s Ministry of Railways. Historians say the clout of owning an airline gave the Nizam the power to resist merger with the Indian Union for 13 months after India attained independence.

“It was purely a business venture. But later on, politically in the late 1940s, when Hyderabad refused to join the Indian Union, it was seen more like an attitude as an Independent ruler,” said Md. Safiullah, Advisor, Nizam’s Trust.

Though the Nizam set up Deccan Airways in 1945 with 12 Dakota aircraft, he himself took to the skies only in 1952, shortly before Indian Airlines took over Deccan Airways. Post-March 16, when the new Hyderabad airport at Shamshabad will be opened, Begumpet airport will only live on nostalgia and in history.

And here is a Hindu report on Anuradha Reddy’s work on the aviation history of Hyderabad and six months later when her book Aviation in Hyderabad Dominions was released Hindu reports again. And here is an excerpt from an article India’s reclaimed B24 Liberators by Capt. Kapil Bhargava posted at Bharat Rakshak.

 Jimmy Munshi and his younger brother Rustam always had their gaze perpetually turned towards the sky. Their father had gifted them an aircraft of their own. The family lived in Hyderabad, where much of the pioneering flying in India had taken place, as chronicled by Mrs Anuradha Reddy in her excellent book, “Aviation in the Hyderabad Dominions”. Jimmy and Rustam lived up to this local tradition. They often flew to Bombay on the pretext of picking up fuel at a lower price. What they did take in was lunch and a movie, before flying back home. They soon built up the hours required to become professional commercial pilots. Unfortunately, Rustam was killed in a flying accident in Tatanagar. But Jimmy went on to join Deccan Airways and flew DC-3s for many years. Some HAL old-timers say that it was Mr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, then Minister for Commerce, who persuaded Jimmy to give up his lucrative airline job and join post-independence HAL as its first CTP. Apart from flight-testing various types of aircraft after overhaul, Jimmy now had the job of ferrying B-24s, temporarily patched-up by Yelappa’s men, from Kanpur to Bangalore.

And here again an excerpt from another story from a veteran K.S. Nair on Wg.Jimmy Munshi and his younger brother Rustam always had their gaze perpetually turned towards the sky. Their father had gifted them an aircraft of their own. The family lived in Hyderabad, where much of the pioneering flying in India had taken place, as chronicled by Mrs Anuradha Reddy in her excellent book, “Aviation in the Hyderabad Dominions”. Jimmy and Rustam lived up to this local tradition. They often flew to Bombay on the pretext of picking up fuel at a lower price. What they did take in was lunch and a movie, before flying back home. They soon built up the hours required to become professional commercial pilots. Unfortunately, Rustam was killed in a flying accident in Tatanagar. But Jimmy went on to join Deccan Airways and flew DC-3s for many years. Some HAL old-timers say that it was Mr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, then Minister for Commerce, who persuaded Jimmy to give up his lucrative airline job and join post-independence HAL as its first CTP. Apart from flight-testing various types of aircraft after overhaul, Jimmy now had the job of ferrying B-24s, temporarily patched-up by Yelappa’s men, from Kanpur to Bangalore. Commander Murkot Ramunny

7^th Course then went to Begumpet, in Secunderabad, for basic flying training. Ramunny recalls Begumpet as “small, nothing like it is now”; a sentiment borne out by contemporary photographs showing a windswept, isolated airfield, with no other construction in the vicinity; nothing remotely like the urban sprawl that surrounds NT Rama Rao International Airport now.

The instructors at Begumpet were mostly British RAF officers. However Pilot Officer Ramunny’s assigned instructor was Captain PM Reddy, one of a small number of Indian civilian instructors. Capt Reddy was later MD of Deccan Airways, a private-sector forerunner of Indian Airlines, and still later a GM of HAL. He was also the father-in-law of Mrs Anuradha Reddy, who prepared the invaluable compilation, Aviation in the Hyderabad Dominions. Ramunny clearly has the highest regard for Capt Reddy, whom he recalls as holding engineering, flying and instructor’s qualifications, all secured from the UK. His association with Capt Reddy was to extend throughout Capt Reddy’s life.

Basic training at Begumpet covered approx 30/40 hours on Tiger Moths. The next stage of training was at the Service Flying Training School, Ambala, on Hawker Harts and Hawker Audaxes. (These are closely related types, the Audax being substantially a development of the Hart.) The SFTS syllabus included cross-country and night flying.

Rivetting as all these anecdotes about aviation history in Hyderabad, none of them really tell us what that place Begumpet airport itself was made of. Who owned it ? Why did it become the airport ? And what did it mean for the Nizam to drive from his home in King Kothi to reach the airport and bow to Sardar Patel ? And why did Begumpet turn out to be what it is now ? It is one of the cheekiest places in Hyderabad now.  (To be contd… please come back on Jan 20th) 

The final assault has begun. The Good Governance India Foundation has filed a petition in the Supreme Court asking for deleting the word ‘Socialist’ from the Constitution of India.

The preamble to the Constitution of India as originally written by the Constituent Assembly and adopted on 26th November 1946 and made effective on January 26th 1950, reads:

“We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign democratic republic..”

The 42nd Amendment Act 1976, which had far reaching implications inserted two additional words into that text — socialist and secular to make it read:

“We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic..”

This insertion was not an isolated tampering with the constitution. It was part of a much bigger effort to preserve Mrs. Gandhi’s power. There were many other changes brought about by that Act. It was a desparate attempt by Mrs. Gandhi to hold together and advance the passive revolution (read Sudipta Kaviraj’s ‘critique of passive revolution’ in EPW 1988 annual number) launched by her father — pursuit of fascist personal power in lieu of political leadership. More about that later. More about the previous attempts to remove the word secular also later. Why is the word socialist — of all the fascist baggage of that period being targeted for offloading now ? By whom and what should we make of it ? I ask this question because it seems to me that we are caught in a time warp. The assault on the legacy of center left fascism has many strange allies both in the left and the right but its secret reservoirs of power are among the regional elites. I call this the final assault not in the sense that it is all over after this, but because this is the denouement in which a number of tentative alliances which have been forming over the last decade will crystallize into nugets of neoliberal commonsense.

The is is not a frivolous petition as someone as some commentators have been suggesting. This is the coming of age of Ardeshir Darbarshaw Shroff’s progeny. A D Shroff was a member of the famous “Bombay Plan” of 1938 under Nehru’s stewardship – a time when a small number of parsi and marwari families — the big bourgeoisie or the national bourgeoisie depending on which left party you sympathize with — dominated the finance and industrial capital in India. By 1955, AD Shroff who was clued into big time finance capital flows, was a guest at the Brettonwoods conference, and had many friends among Frederick Hayek’s supporter’s (the anti Keynes camp based in the London School of Economics) – was instrumental in launching the Forum for Free Enterprise in Bombay. He was highly critical of the way the Indian planning system was going. Incidentally he was also a founder of ICICI. Transnational networks of neoliberalism which have been dormant for five decades began reorganizing and finding institutional expression since 1995 in all the major cities in India. It is not at all surprising that Fali Sam Nariman whose bible of Indian liberalism — “We the people” should be the advocate. Here is the website of the fairly well concealed network of Good Governance India Foundation. You will find the who is who of finance capital and neoliberalism — which incidentally in India goes under the name of liberalism– the donor organizations, and corporate identities all on that website. And the organizatio, I have no doubt in mind follows the excellent strategy followed by the Forum of Free Enterprise.

And Nariman is no fool. He is going to make a brilliant pitch which will have far reaching implications. He is absolutely correct in pinpointing the word socialist in the preamble to constitution by the 42nd amendment as embedded in a history of fascism. There is none better than him to do this — he resigned from his office of three years as additional solicitor general of India the very day on which Mrs Gandhi declared Internal Emergency. And whatsmore, he is perhaps the only Indian jurist who knows the ins and outs of international finance capital thorougly having been on several international bodies for commercial arbitration. The final assault on the Idea of India has begun. This is trench war. And whether or not the words ‘Socialist’ and ‘Secularist’ would eventually be removed from the Constitution is hardly the issue. The time has come for a vigorous rethinking of all we know about left politics in India. This is AD Shroff’s revenge. And for an effective albeit temporary palliative, I suggest that whoever can lay their hands on it, should read the pamphlet by Wadia and Merchant written from a Marxist Leninist perspective. I read it from a library in the US a while ago. It is a beautifully written document. But I cannot access it anymore. It may be easier to access it in any good Indian University library.

The Bombay plan : a criticism / by Professor P.A. Wadia and Professor K.T. Merchant. published in 1946 in Bombay by The Popular Book Depot.

I believe there is another book by title fascist economics — also a critique of Bombay Plan. Possibly a manuscript of MN Roy published later. Here is the title mentioned on Amazon, but I cannot find it anywhere.

Charlie, my old friend who was crazy as a coot, in the middle of making music at midnight under an electric moon in our first floor hostel room looking onto the stinking stretch of the sabarmati taught me my first words in Gujarati. Tame nanu gadhedo cho! means you are a cute little ass he said. I thought he was mixing Greek with Gujarati. (Nano the greek word means dwarf). But he wasnt. Nanu in Gujarati indeed means small. Here is to Charlie my friend — the first really small car of India with a three liter fuel tank. You will have to click on the image to make it bigger. But what is really funny is that at the unveiling of the car, Ratan Tata ‘jokingly’ told the mediapersons that they first thought of calling the car either Buddho or Despite Mamata. But finally decided to take the safer route. Mamata Banarjee the Trinamul Congress chief who thanks to the CPIM became the icon of farmers’ and farmworkers’ opposition to the Tata mini car plant at Singur is fuming. And Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the CPIM chief minister of the Left Front Government in West Bengal who thanks to the opposition has become the icon of stalinist neoliberal depravity must be gloating. Brand Buddha score goes up with the car hungry young people congratulating Tata and Buddha. Charlie, you can be proud of me. I can now make sentences in Gujarati. Aa baddha motu gadhedu che.  All these are big donkeys!