Tradition of righteous reaction

Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting, Delhi Through my pre-teen and teenage years, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather. He was a medical practitioner, theosophist, Congress party activist and a compassionate human being — my ideal. One summer when my siblings and I were visiting his home in Surat, someone told him I had eaten meat. Grandfather wasn’t incensed or censorious; he simply said: “We don’t eat meat.” I was in awe of this man who attracted eminences like Rabindranath Tagore, Annie Besant, George Arundale, among others to his home. When he said something, I listened deferentially. However, on this occasion, his comment rankled. Grandfather seemed to be suggesting that because of caste and religious strictures, our family was vegetarian. Having eaten a mutton samosa at a friend’s house, I thought to myself that his reaction was over the top. I knew he was tolerant and liberal; his extensive library included books by Bertrand Russell and other free thinkers. Thanks to him, we were spared the worst traditions of caste and religion. The incident haunted me over the years. Since I admired him, I dismissed the episode as a one-off occurrence. Nevertheless, it came back to haunt me in the mid-1970s, when I was living in the US. Our high-profile India Forum in Chicago became a magnet for NGOs and activists of all types, looking at times for financial support but mostly to spread the gospel of the jholewala alternative. I termed it “the rise of righteous reaction”. The ascent of righteous activists posing alternative, mostly woolly and impractical development models, was like a riptide generated by the Navnirman wave. Led by Jayaprakash Narayan, a Congress party dissenter, the movement was against the perceived corruption and, in a phrase cherished and propagated by the jholewala, ‘anti-people’ development policies of the Indira Gandhi government of the time. Training his guns on prime minister Indira Gandhi, Narayan called for “total revolution,” a Maoist-style leap backward into anarchy which prompted the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975. Condemned worldwide as dictatorial regression, the Emergency destroyed the government’s credibility. The Congress Party was defeated in the general election of 1977. However, even before the first non-Congress government assumed office in Delhi, things had begun to go awry. During what he thought was a revolutionary war, Narayan had called on the armed forces to revolt against the government. That’s when the steady erosion of his vastly inflated stature began, helped in no small measure by the subsequent fumbling and ineptitude of the Janata government which came to power in 1977. Narayan’s movement had its roots in the margins of the Gandhian movement. The Mahatma’s success with the independence struggle allowed him to exhume and propagate an anti-Western, anti-modernity ideology drawn from his 1909 tract Hind Swaraj. Mohandas Gandhi challenged Jawaharlal Nehru’s modernisation agenda, recommending simplistic notions like village republics, self-sufficiency, nature cure and vegetarianism as national alternatives. Like many students who studied in the US after him, Narayan became a…