To debate values is good, particularly if you are a civilisation. This is happening a lot in India today. To use power equations to settle the argument is bad. That is also happening a lot in India today. Many decades ago, Karl Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish ayatollah of growth, wrote a slim book on value and social theory. He debunked traditional economics and social sciences which said they were not based on ideology and showed with some excellent, logical arguments that the so-called non-ideological economists were only thinly hiding their prejudices. Mine are very clear. I am a child of Nehru?s India. The generation which belongs to Gandhiji and Nehru?s India is now unfashionable but is not afraid of saying that it is democratic, secular and socialist. Also, it doesn?t consist of cowards. The Mumbai journalist Jyotirmoy Dey was in this tradition and paid for it with his life, to the diesel and hawala mafia on whose criminality I had written not that long ago.

As an 18 year old, I attended an election meeting in Jaipur?s Ram Nivas Garden. The crowd numbered above a lakh, because the speaker was Chacha Nehru. The environment was breathing history and he was at his best on the Rajputs, the Mughals and the syncretic Rajasthani culture. The crowd loved it, for an hour and a half. And he then said the imperialists said we can?t make a pin but the Tatas made steel. Rajasthan has to modernise based on science. He took off his watch and said it was an HMT watch made in India. It was the only watch he wore. The crowd roared in applause and I also got hooked in. Half a century later, the HMT I wear has an ISRO rocket and satellite on it?an Isro Hmt, quite a dino! But he wasn?t going to leave it at that. He said you know we all like temples and held forth on some lovely temples. But he said he had been told the crowd liked marble, which Sethjis put in temples. In some countries, he said marble is used in bathrooms. I remember that, for nowhere in the world could a leader say something like that and get away. The argumentative Indian in a feudal, deeply religious town probably didn?t like it but listened to him. At that point, the chief minister of Rajasthan (I think it was Mohan Lal Sukhadia) reminded him that it was an election meeting. Chacha said now the chief minister wanted him to tell everyone who to vote for: What can I say, Gayatri Deviji is like a daughter to me, but this is no longer the time of Maharajas and Maharanis; you should vote for the Congress. If there were in the audience a few souls not voting for the Maharani, they changed their mind for she was Nehru?s daughter and I think the hapless Congressman lost his deposit.

We are no longer standing up for our right to be heard. You are heard only if you are a part of a roaring crowd?the more fanatical it is, the better you are heard. Babas who can muster thousands of starry-eyed chelas are favourites. A friendly lady told me to take a particular traditional medical tonic good for 70-year-old men. When I said I wouldn?t, she was quite offended. I told her that that particular preparation had been banned abroad because it had cortisone in it. She abused me for being a chamcha of American MNCs and said that the cortisone I was referring to was beneficial because it was of vegetable origin. When I remonstrated that cortisone was cortisone whether of vegetable or chemical origin and that many medicines earlier of natural origin (like insulin) were now manufactured through chemical processes, she said I was an obstinate, American-trained ignoramus. She refused to be mollified when I said that I was anti-colonial and had nothing against Dabur medicines because they had agreed to get their compounds tested when I was chairman of the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices. She was unimpressed with mere facts.

When MF Hussain died, a leader of a major political party said that his problem was that he was obstinate. In other words, Hussain did not have a right to live in India if he had beliefs different from that great leader. And so it goes on. In the decade of the eighties, we were developing newer models of watershed projects. Working with SV Giri and VB Easwaran, we actually built up the main contours of the present schemes by actually finding out the experiments working in the field. The plan documents had a now well-known table that I produced, giving the outcomes in terms of farmer incomes, drinking water, trees, fodder and animals surviving from the great experiments known then. These were the pioneers, Naigaon, Sukhomajri, Samithed, Tejpura, Mittemari, Sikanderpura and of course Anna Saheb?s great work in Ralegaon Sidhi. With Bunker Roy?s help, we got a task force set up with the NGO founders. There were great debates and learnings. Anna Saheb was very clear that he was right in every detail and the others could lump it. In the Sardar Sarovar Project, the rehabilitation plan was built up, pushed through and monitored in civil space by a great critic of the planners there, Dr Anil Patel of ARCH Vahini at Rajpipla.

The real question in civil society in India is not who is effective but how does an age-old culture which developed a freedom movement and a great tradition of permanent rebellion for the best part of a century come to terms with non-normal behaviour in societal space, when such behavior is the norm in a politics built on a saintly idiom as H Morris-Jones very aptly put it. The social psychologist Erik Erikson analysed the autobiographies of persons who changed the world. They were not normal.

If the sun would never set on the British Empire and he said you have to go because we are right and you are wrong, then he was not normal in the conventional sense of the term. But he built up a mighty machine of a non-violent phalanx and they had to go. But when you are normal, not that practical and behave non-normally in saying you are civil society, that is another matter. Politics is now avowedly non-ideological. I am on the council of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and I was genuinely tickled pink when I read that a Nehru Fellowship has been awarded to V Krishna Ananth for researching ?the shift in the early 1990s from an overt socialist agenda to that of market capitalism not merely in the political arena but also in the social and judicial systems?. He calls it, ?The Retreat of the Nehruvian Socialist Project.? Not to be outdone, Lord Meghnad Desai, a year my senior at the University of Pennsylvania and honoured by a grateful government with a Padma Award, has declared that secularism is irrelevant. So far so good, for it is legitimate to belittle the values of the past. The trouble with those who are doing this seems to be that a politics without values neither knows what hit it, nor how to cope up with it.

The author is a former Union minister