In 1992, it was rather too early for new entrants to the civil services to realise the enormity of the changes India was going through. But some standards were already pass?. Like Gandhian ideals. So it was a sort of anticlimax of sorts to listen to an avowed Gandhian on a summer afternoon (it?s always summer in Nagpur) in a sweltering conference hall.
Strangely, Lakshmi Chand Jain told us instead about the principles of management involved in running a refugee shelter at Kingsway Camp in Delhi in the equally sweltering summers of 1947 and 1948. By the time his speech ended, he had ensured there would be a long line of probationers asking him detailed questions about his work.
Much later, reading Jain?s Civil Disobedience, structured into a fine narrative by his son Sreenivasan Jain, I would learn that the camp had become a stand-out narrative for a city and a nation that was going through a pain that comes possibly once a millennium.
Told largely through LC Jain?s vivid memory, Civil Disobedience is a narrative of a nation being built. As the flyleaf says, his voice?sometimes civil, often disobedient to the current beliefs of the day?helped to create some of independent India?s finest institutions and plans. His success usually spelt trouble however as men with far less vision took over those projects and made them caricatures of his achievements, after he moved on, or often was forced to move on by the political leaders.
After Kingsway camp, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya put him in charge of developing Chattarpur as a refugee-run farming enclave. Jain recounts a fantastic experience here. As he and the hardy 600 families from Bawahalpur in West Punjab were moving to the vacant land straddling the 14 villages of Chattarpur near Delhi, they found the land had been allotted to themselves in princely parcels by the senior officers of the government. ?Kamaladevi contacted authorities in the central government and Delhi administration, but they were hostile to the idea of cancelling the allotments already made to these senior officials?, notes Jain in the book.
Political pressure, including a rebuke from Nehru, was needed before the settlement could come in. But what strikes one is the candour of the leaders. When Jain wanted to convert the farmers to the ideology of the socialist movement, his personal preference, the leader of the Congress Socialist Party Achyut Patwardhan told him to back off.
?Lakshmi, if you are going to work for the refugees, and settle them in the villages, forget the party?.If you have any such notion, tell Kamaladevi that you will not do it (helping the refugees).? It is a lesson that the marquee leaders of Indian politics could learn handsomely now.
It is these candid tales as well as those of the painstaking work to make what would turn out to be giant settlements later (like Faridabad) which makes the book a must-read.
While these were epic exercises, Jain is equally gripping in his narrative of the political history of modern India. He does it from a fantastic perch, as the confidant of a legion of Congress leaders through the best part of sixty years, and as a member of key government committees as well as the Planning Commission. So Kamaraj, Indira Gandhi, Inder Gujral, VP Singh and Rajiv Gandhi sail through the pages, not in the given order of a chronological history, but as characters when the situation demands.
Just for telling the incident of how a coldly manipulative Indira broke away from her father?s bier to accost Kamaraj with her challenge to become the leader of the party, all on the staircase of Teen Murti Bhavan, the book is worth the effort. The incident has to be read in LC Jain? first-hand account to realise how this nation?s history was changed by that one meeting.
As the present Congress leadership slips up in trying to convince the political class about the need for FDI in retail, they could profitably read why the now moribund Super Bazaar was set up by a set of committed Gandhians in the sixties of the last century. It was to break the back of an uncontrolled price rise that they and a sympathetic government realised was being fuelled by a cartel of kirana shops. The consumers responded to the new initiative?making Super Bazaar a runaway success where even Indira Gandhi had to walk in only after the crowd had already swarmed in.
Who would be pm after nehru?
After Nehru?s death, Indira saw her carefully crafted plan to capture the Prime Ministership suddenly slipping from her fingers. The powerful group of Congress leaders known as the Syndicate?which was led by Kamaraj, and which included state bosses like SK Patil (Bombay) S Nijalingappa (Mysore), Atulya Ghosh (West Bengal) and N Sanjeeva Reddy (Andhra Pradesh) moved fast. The group chose Lal Bahadur Shastri. She made a desperate bid to stall Shastri?s election. According to Malliah, Indira rushed a letter to Kamaraj before the Working Committee was to meet arguing that ?it would not be appropriate to engage in the selection of a successor to Nehru while the nation is in mourning?. The official mourning was for 13 days.
Kamaraj smelled a rat. Was ?mourning? the true reason or was it a ruse for her to gain time to be able to mobilise support in her favour?… He was going to Teen Murti House. The condolence was in the upper floors. With Indira?s letter in his pocket, he sat there with everybody else. Then after a while he got up to leave. After he came down one or two stairs, Indira came running behind him and asked, ?Did you get my letter?? He patted his pocket and said that he got it, and kept going down the stairs. Then she stopped him again and said, ?What are you going to do about it?? He turned to her and said, ?He was your father. So your sorrow cannot be surpassed. But we are all orphans, he was our father also. We share the sentiments. But as a party we have a duty that his successor is chosen swiftly otherwise there will be speculation within the country and abroad as to what is happening to India. And we cannot allow that. Therefore, we are going to go ahead with our decision.?
She was completely flummoxed. (Pages 176-177)
