Krishnan, born
I don't carry any
pre-independence baggage with me. I don't know how bad it was then or how
good it is now. I want to know what difference it makes
whether I am looted by a gora sahib or a Gandhi kurta-clad brown bandicoot? It makes absolutely no difference to me and also to many like me. Looting is looting,
and that is what is going on even today.
In college I was an optimist; even when I started working I was one. I am no longer an optimist. But I will not
say this country is going to collapse. This country will
remain. India has always been there for three to four thousand years. But don't expect this country to
be an Asian Tiger, or to lead the world.
I remember
reading an interview by R K Narayan given way back in the
fifties. I read it much later. He said one couldn't compare
India with any other country. India has its own pace, maybe like
a tortoise. Don't expect the country to disintegrate. We will
survive, and it will be just survival and nothing more.
My first contact with an Indian leader was in 1956. I attended
a meeting addressed by Jawaharlal Nehru. As a young boy it felt good
amidst a big crowd, listening to the prime
minister of India.
We always had rituals on August 15 in school and college.
It meant nothing to me. In fact,
I hated that day because even though it was a holiday we had
to dress up early in the morning and go to school. But I attended
the function every year without fail, not because it was compulsory
but it gave me some freedom to go out on my own. I could be with my friends
and enjoy every moment of it. I preferred it to the tyrannicalatmosphere at home under my grandfather and grandmother.
The same speeches every year, how bad it was under
the British, how they looted our country and her wealth,
how fortunate we were, how fast we were going to prosper etc, etc.
I believed those words that we would become
prosperous soon.
I believed those words till I had a chance to visit the villages
of India. The villages of UP, Bihar,
Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Life is pretty bad over
there, even after fifty years of Independence.
Nothing really has
changed in those parts.
I have travelled all around the country and found things are not different. In Kerala, where I live, life is pretty bad despite the high literacy rate. You can't get a damn thing done
unless you pay a bribe. Things are so bad that even if
you want to pay the tax on your house or your land at
the village office, you have to grease palms.
Corruption has been a part of our life, but it has become a way
of life now. It has been institutionalised. Mrs Gandhi said
corruption is an international phenomenon. Of course, corruption
is there all over the world. The difference is that today we have
started accepting corruption as a part of life.
Take South Korea, for example. You could get the president and
prime minister indicted by the court. In India, will such
a thing happen? Yes, now people are being taken to court. It is not
because of the politicians but because of the judiciary.
But are they going to
be indicted? Are
we going to get back the money they have stolen from us? It is
not going to happen. The cases will drag on for some time. Then
a new crisis or a new scam will come and it will be forgotten.
In college,
I wanted to help people. To interact with people. That was
one of the reasons I joined the State Bank of India
as a probationary officer. Everybody called me a fool. But
I knew what I wanted. I later went to Anand and joined
the National Diary Development Board after studying economics.
In college, I wanted everybody in
this country to lead a prosperous, happy life. To
have at least a square meal a day, drinking water, clothing,
medical care, etc. I wasn't inclined towards Nehru's
industrial policy. I believed in Gandhiji's dream of Ramrajya
then, that every village should be self-sufficient.
I went to Anand because it was an organisation working
for rural people. What NDDB was trying to do was mobilise milk producers,
help them form their own co-operatives and market their products
so that middlemen were removed, and they got better returns.
But I felt the organisation itself was working as an intermediary, what
with the kind of salaries, perks and campus life enjoyed by us.
What I witnessed was against what I envisaged it to be. I left Anand a frustrated man.
After a short spell with the co-operative League of the United
States of America, the apex body of all American co-operatives.
I felt I had absolutely no work there and later joined the Central Bank of India
as an economist. I thought it
would be terribly exciting to work in a financial
institution. It was a terrible disappointment. Working in a bank
was like standing in quickand.
I began feeling disillusioned again.
I quit my job, went back to my village in Kerala and began farming. People thought I was a coward. I ran away because I couldn't bear the atmosphere, the work culture,
the corruption and the sycophancy any more.
There are very few people I admire in my life. Arun Singh is one such person. One of the most brilliant ministers in the Rajiv Gandhi government, he did exceedingly well as a corporate executive. After Bofors,
he threw away everything and went to a village where
there was no electricity. At that point
I too decided that was what I too wanted to do.
But I could do that only recently.
I regret not starting farming ten years earlier. I love every moment of it. I
do everything on my own. I even carry cowdung in a basket on
my head. I have decided I will not use anything incompatible with
nature. There are no fertilizers on my farm. Like Gandhiji's self sufficient
village, I want to grow everything on my farm, and make it self-sufficient.
After Independence, we still had some good leaders who took to
politics because of their commitment and dedication to the country
and the cause. They were all professionals, educated people who
gave up their career to take up the cause of Independence. It was
only later, may be in the sixties,
that the bandicoots started taking over the country. The
first bandicoot was Mrs Gandhi. The decline started
from her time onwards and things are getting from bad to worse.
Normally people in Kerala are leftists, especially in the early
stages of their life. But in my case, it was
exactly the opposite. I was an ardent supporter of
free enterprise. I religiously read Swarajya,
the mouthpiece of Rajaji's Swatantra Party. I was for private
enterprise and was against the public sector.
I have some leftwing sympathies though. Things are bad in the public sector, but there
are specific reasons for that. I believe the public sector
would be good if it is given managerial autonomy. Unfortunately,
it is not there at all. The public sector in our country is a disaster
due to political interference and due to obselete technology.
As an economist, I am for economic liberalisation. But I have
disputes with the present policy. Liberalisation in India
unfortunately means privatisation. What we
should remember is, in India we have a significantly large section
of people who cannot get involved in the market operations or
who fall outside the purview of the market -- that is the rural
poor.
The argument is that the fruits of liberalisation might percolate to the poor.
But after how long? After 400 or 500 years? People will not have
that kind of patience.
I admire the Chinese model of development. China went
in for liberalisation only after most of its people
got their basic requirements. In India, we started without that.
Ninetyfive per cent or maybe a hundred per cent of the Chinese
have these basic amenities. In India, 35 per cent to 40 per cent of the
people still do not have food, shelter and clothing. For them,
liberalisation doesn't mean a damn thing.
Liberalisation is important
for people who live in cities, who have white collared
jobs. We have admiration for liberalisation because it is a media-created
myth, because the media is controlled by the upper class and the middle
class.
Let me tell you something: the 'economists' do not support
liberalisation. In India, 90 per cent of the so-called economists and
the academic world are practicing intellectual prostitution. They
know only if they support the government view can they get a
fellowship, a grant, a trip abroad or an assignment to the United
Nations.
Anybody who talks against liberalisation is blackmailed.
During Manmohan Singh's time itself, after the Budget, for all
the panel discussions, only those who supported the government
policies were called. I don't remember a single Budget discussion
in which Prabhat Patnaik or Deepak Nayyar was invited.
There is nothing wrong with the system. Public sector is good.
Mixed economy is good. Instead it became a mixed up
economy. When the government spends money for
rural development, even by Rajiv Gandhi's admission, 85%
of it is eaten by my favourite 'bandicoots'. That
is where things are going wrong. The tragedy is, who will see
that this 85% is not eaten away?
Despite all my cynicism, I don't regret being born
in India. I have only wondered whether I would have liked living
in another country. I prefer suffering in my own country where I am a first class citizen.
I don't' want to be a second class citizen in
another country.
I am patriotic, but people question my patriotism because I am
realistic about many things. About Indo-China and Indo-Pakistan relations,
everybody portrays these countries as villains. Actually we are
equally bad and are equally responsible.
As told to Shobha Warrier. Photographs: Sanjay Ghosh
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