Veteran parliamentarian speaks his mind

The volume covers Era Sezhiyan's 22-year period in Parliament that witnessed major political transformations

Parliament for People:
Speeches by Era Sezhiyan
 Institute of Social Sciences,
Rs 1450

This collection of speeches by an eminent parliamentarian deserves notice not just because Parliament hits the headlines frequently these days, although mostly for wrong reasons. There are at least two other reasons why it should interest keen observers of the polity and politics of argumentative Indians.

The volume covers a 22-year period that witnessed major political transformations. Sezhiyan entered Parliament when the government was headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, a strong defender of the dignity of the institution. He served as an effective parliamentarian during the Prime Ministership of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, and Morarji Desai. He stepped into Parliament House in the year of the Sino-Indian conflict and made his exit just months before Indira Gandhi's assassination. And he was witness to the formation of the first non-Congress government in New Delhi and its ignominious, mid-term fall as well. The long years he spent in Parliament and the rich experience he gained make Sezhiyan, who is in his late 80s, eminently qualified to do what he has attempted: to produce a ‘biography' of sorts of the bicameral Parliament in the form of his recorded role as a remarkably articulate and rule-abiding member. He made his presence felt in both the Lok Sabha (1962-77) and the Rajya Sabha (1978-84), as a representative of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhgam and the Janata Party respectively.

Full report here Hindu

At book fair, China confronts Nehru's sensitive legacy

“Nehru gave China Panchsheel,” remarked Li Changchun, one of China's most powerful leaders, on Tuesday, August 31, morning, as he found himself standing, somewhat surprised, in front of a bust of India's first Prime Minister in the heart of Beijing.

A Chinese visitor poses in front of a replica of Jawaharlal Nehru's
desk, at the India Pavilion at the ongoing Beijing Book Fair 

“In fact,” Mr. Li added, referring to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence which India and China signed in 1954, “we're still using this to solve our problems with many countries.”

Mr. Li, China's propaganda and media chief and fifth highest ranking leader in the Communist Party, was speaking during a visit to the Indian pavilion at the ongoing Beijing International Book Fair.

India, which is the country of honour at the fair, has brought 26 publishers and is showcasing three main themes — Buddhism, given its close resonance with China, and the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and Nehru. Tagore, who visited China in the 1920s, is widely popular here. He was — and continues to be — a hit with the intellectuals, and is still read in colleges. So, for the Indian organisers, Buddha and Tagore were easy choices.

Full report here Hindu

India exporting English to China

Beijing's publishers are lining up to check if books by Indian authors could teach Chinese students and call-centre employees better English than American textbooks. At a time when bilateral ties are strained, the neighbours are finding common ground over a foreign language. India is the country of honour at the 58-nation Beijing International Book Fair that opened on Monday with 27 Indian publishers showcasing 3,500 titles.

“The Chinese are greatly interested in copyright and translation rights for books to learn call-centre English," Sanjiv Chawla, manager of exports at the Delhi-based Orient BlackSwan told HT at the fair. “The Chinese have a fixed idea that English is best taught by the Americans and British, so we have to explain that English is like a second-language for Indians.’’

Books on Buddhism, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru are the centrepiece of India’s pavilion so that past cultural linkages strike a bond with China. But the Chinese publishers are mainly interested in India’s legacy of English education, to see if the books could be adapted to modernise Chinese teaching.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Indian focus at Beijing book fair

India, the country of honor at the Beijing International Book Fair 2010 (BIBF), which kicks off Monday, August 30, is focusing on publications on Buddha and Buddhism, works by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and those on and by the country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru to mark 60 years of Sino-Indian diplomatic ties.

India's 27 major English language publishers also have a special exhibition of recent books centering on areas such as science and technology, children's literature, medical and social sciences and English language learning books and aids. In total, nearly 3,500 titles are on display at the India pavilion named A Courtyard of Possibilities.

The organizer said that they hope to deepen ties between Indian and Chinese publishers and intellectuals.

"The slogan of the presentation is Exploring the Middle Path, which not only connects it with the Buddhist tradition shared by India and China but also finds a connect with and echoes India's contemporary endeavors to find a common platform of social, economic, cultural and political dialogue with China," said Satish Kumar, director of India's National Book Trust (NBT), organizer of BIBF's Indian programs.

Full report here Global Times

India showcases literary works at China book fair

India, which participated as the ''Country of Honour'' at the Beijing International Book Fair, today showcased its literary works with focus on the great Indian philosophers like Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru.

India has been accorded the ''Country of Honour'' status by China to commemorate the establishment of 60th year of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Twenty seven noted Indian publishing houses displayed a variety of books in areas such as science and technology, information technology, children''s literature, social sciences, education, books for general reader, English language learning books and aids.

In total, nearly 3500 Indian books are on display at the special pavilion built at the fair to house the Indian books.

The focus of India at the week long book fair is Lord Buddha''s "middle path", Rabindranath Tagore''s travels to China making a lasting impression on a generation of Chinese, Jawaharlal Nehru''s endeavours to promote Sino-Indian ties and India''s growing influence in English publishing.

Full report here MSN

The game of life, translated

Wiping away tears, I’m thinking in amazement: “This really shouldn’t work.” But it does. I’ve just finished reading the death of the hero in Premchand’s novel Rangbhumi. The blind beggar Surdas dies like a saint, with forgiveness for those who once beset him and with humility. Almost his last words are “Ram-Ram”. His village mourns him, and when his body is mounted on its funeral pyre every man, woman and child is there. His estranged son comes weeping to light the fire. It’s significant that just a few days earlier the entire village had burned to the ground, after a terrible conflict that had very humble origins, as a struggle over a piece of land.

This is surely too heavy-handed. It sounds like Gandhi and the independence movement, even perhaps Partition. There are other familiar characters: Kunwar Bharat Singh and his son Vinay surely approximate Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal. But Premchand died in 1936, aged just 56, and Rangbhumi was written in the early 1920s, the time of non-cooperation and Chauri Chaura. Call it prescience, or call it pattern-recognition; even the lives of saints and rich men of conscience follow a set of rules.

 Whatever it is, the emotional force of this piece of narrative is surprising — especially for a reader who is, like me, so little acquainted with Hindi-Urdu literature. Somewhere within the Indian reader must be buried the necessary raw material, the understanding of Indian archetypes of character and motivation, and Premchand is able to mine that seam more effectively than Western or Western-inspired contemporary Indian writers. In Western literature this subject would make a tragedy. In India, opposed imperatives never grow monstrous — think of Oedipus confronting his irreconcilable duties as son, king and husband, or Macbeth’s terrible crisis of loyalty and ambition — and altogether consume the individual. Somehow, dharma provides the answer and the solution. From anger comes peace. The universe is what it is. And so on.

Full report here Business Standard

The reading life - Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar

As another August 15 passes by, here’s a thought: what would our country have been like if the leaders of the freedom movement had not been readers?

It’s easier to see them as writers. Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiographies, letters and other work have provided gainful occupation for thousands of scholars. Pandit Nehru, incarcerated in jail, bereft of reference books, set pen to paper and produced The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and Letters From A Father To His Daughter. B R Ambedkar’s Who Were The Shudras, Castes in India and the autobiographical Waiting For A Visa still hold the attention of readers.

And it is their progression as writers that historians and thinkers like Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani have written about. But to study the libraries of India’s leaders is to realise how relentlessly, and sometimes restlessly, all of them, from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to Sarojini Naidu, read as a way of understanding the values by which India would be formed.

Gandhi came to English uneasily; the alien tongue made him a virtual prisoner of silence on his shipboard journey to England. In South Africa, as a lawyer who had got over his initial fear of speaking in public, he put together a formidable and eclectic library.

Full report here Sify

A scholar among bureaucrats

Once in the late 1950s, the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was to address the students of Delhi School of Economics.

On such formal occasions, the head of the Delhi School, V K R V Rao, expected students to wear silver-grey, buttoned- up coats with the institution's crest.

On the appointed day, the students found one of their compatriots looking rather uncomfortable in the formal outfit. There was something conspicuous about this uncomfortable looking student. His identity was revealed when he stooped a little while climbing stairs—and a pistol fell out of his pocket.

Ashis Bose, a student at the function, later asked Nehru if he could address about 100 students at Gwyer Hall, a Delhi University hostel. "No luck, young man," said the prime minister much to the disappointment of Bose who was to become one of the country's pioneer demographers. His memoirs are suffused with admiration for Nehru.

Full report here Down To Earth

Book with rare Indira pics, Nehru's letters

The Visva-Bharati University is coming out with a book containing unpublished letters written by Jawaharlal Nehru to Rabindranath Tagore besides rare photographs of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The coffee table book, titled 'Three Chancellors', will depict the relationship between the Nehru-Gandhi family and the Tagores.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi personally came to the aid of Nilanjan Banerjee, the editor of the book, and mailed him some rare photographs of her late mother-in-law Indira Gandhi.

"Responding to our request, Mrs Gandhi has recently sent us 18 rare and personal photographs featuring Indira Gandhi during her student days in the Visva-Bharati," Banerjee, who works as a curator of Tagore's museum at Santiniketan, told PTI.

Full report here Times of India

‘Nothing but a poet’

On the Mount Rushmore of Indian nationalist iconography, we can expect to see, as we pass by in an aeroplane, Gandhi’s and Nehru’s faces carved into the stone. The third face is a blur — but the myopic likeness is of course Ambedkar’s. The fourth visage just may be Tagore’s.

And this, you feel, is largely the company Tagore will keep in the days leading to his 150th birth anniversary: Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar. I repeat this litany verbatim from an article by Ramachandra Guha, who, reassessing Tagore, considers him eligible for a place in the constellation of India’s founding fathers. “If Tagore had merely been a ‘creative artist’,” Guha says, “perhaps one would not have found him fit to rank alongside those other builders of modern India.” Of course, Tagore was much more, as famous poets of colonised nations were especially doomed to be. WB Yeats, in ‘Among School Children’, describes his public role thus: “The children learn to cipher and to sing,/ To study reading — books and histories,/ To cut and sew, be neat in everything/ In the best modern way — the children’s eyes/ In momentary wonder stare upon/ A sixty-year-old smiling public man.” The children are learning to be citizens; they are perhaps also being civilised “in the best modern way”. (If anything, the Irish, as a subject race, had worse opprobrium heaped upon them by the English than the Indians did.) But Yeats’s sparse diction and his unobtrusive line-endings hint that, in the midst of the citizen-making, the intruder has been identified as both a diversion and a fake; the children, with their staring eyes and ‘momentary wonder’, have found him out: and we, like Yeats himself, are estranged from the public persona. Later in the poem, Yeats lets on that he knows perfectly what he is at 60: “a comfortable kind of old scarecrow” and “old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird”. Outside of the “momentary wonder” and the stares, to be an ageing poet, a mere “creative artist”, is to be nothing at all.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Santiniketan, Tagore's dream, breathing its last?

In the twilight years of his life, Rabindranath Tagore was an extremely worried man. The future of Visva Bharati — the most precious of his creative pursuits — was at stake.

The three men to whom he revealed his thoughts — Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose — assured him that his dream would be realized. On the poet's 150th birth anniversary, however, Santiniketan has lost sight of its founder's original ideals.

Sixty-nine years after his death, Visva Bharati has neither proved to be a pathmaker in educational experimentation nor does it remain a centre of excellence and achievement. A university that can boast of Indira Gandhi, Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen among its illustrious alumni, Visva Bharati is nothing more than a "glorified Bolpur college" today, its universal flavour being a thing of the past. The university, which once attracted litterateurs, thinkers, philosophers, economists and artists from far and wide now rarely draws brilliant teachers, even as visiting faculty.

Full report here Times of India 

Review: War and Peace in Modern India

REVIEW
War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years
Srinath Raghavan,
Permanent Black
Rs 750
Pp 385
ISBN: 8178242575
Hardcover

Blurb
War and Peace in Modern India challenges and revises our received understanding of Nehru's handling of international affairs. General readers as well as students of Indian history and politics will find its balanced consideration of Nehru's Foreign Policy essential to gauge his achievements, his failures, and his enduring legacy.

Srinath Raghavan draws on a rich vein of untapped documents to illuminate Nehru's approach to war and his efforts for peace. Vividly recreating the intellectual and political milieu of the Indian Foreign Policy establishment, he explains the response of Nehru and his top advisors to the tensions with Junagadh, Hyderabad, Pakistan, and China. He gives individual attention to every conflict and shows how strategic decisions for each crisis came to be defined in the light of the preceding ones. The book follows Nehru as he wrestles with a string of major conflicts -- assessing the utility of force, weighing risks of war, exploring diplomatic options for peace, and forming strategic judgements that would define his reputation, both in his lifetime and after.

New and rewarding The Telegraph
Srinath Raghavan has written an important book on a much-neglected subject. In most accounts of Jawaharlal Nehru’s years as prime minister, his foreign policy is seen as a reflection of his grand vision or it is seen through the prism of the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 and the military disaster this entailed. Raghavan avoids both these approaches and tries to locate Nehru’s strategic thinking in terms of how he managed the crises that his government faced in Junagadh, in Hyderabad, and in Kashmir in the immediate aftermath of Independence; in Bengal in 1950 following the refugee influx; and the border dispute with China in Ladakh and the Northeast.

In all these episodes of India’s contemporary history, Nehru was forced to think about the use of force — how much of it to use, when to use it, and how to match it with the use of diplomacy. During the Nehru years, India never went into a full-scale war but on a few occasions was on the brink of it, what the author calls a “twilight zone between peace and war’’.

Underlying the analysis in the book are two intellectual positions. One concerns the notion of strategy. According to the author, strategy “is the use of available military means to achieve desired political ends’’. This definition somewhat narrows the concept of strategy by tying it down in the last instance to available military means. It is possible to think of uses of strategy where the use of military means is not a factor. Such situations can be thought of in the exercise of foreign policy. The Indo-US nuclear deal, which involved an enormous amount of strategic thinking on both sides, comes readily to mind. Raghavan categorizes strategy into consensual, controlling and coercive. In most of the episodes discussed in this book it was the coercive element that came into play since they involved the threat of force or limited use of it to influence the opponents’ choices.

Nehru, Sinosceptic Outlook
For far too long, Jawaharlal Nehru has been condemned as a woolly-eyed idealist, whose worldview is held responsible for the festering Indo-Pak dispute and the unresolved boundary issue with China. While traditionalist historians have found him guilty of sacrificing India’s core interests in the pursuit of his ideals, revisionist scholars have viewed him as arrogant and blamed him for his propensity to use force at the slightest provocation to get his way.

Challenging these two schools is Srinath Raghavan’s book, War and Peace in Modern India, which presents the thesis that Nehru was an out-and-out realist. For instance, about India’s defeat in the 1962 war with China, for which Nehru continues to draw flak, Raghavan writes, “Contrary to received wisdom, the problem with Nehru’s China policy was not his idealism but his realism”.

It was Nehru’s belief, Raghavan shows, that the ussr wouldn’t allow China to attack India as that could compel India to move closer to the Americans. Subsequent events showed Nehru had miscalculated. The realist in him had correctly read the situation, but he failed to grasp the role of nationalist ideology in Communist China’s foreign policy—that it would not refrain from military action to reinforce its territorial claims.

Raghavan says Nehru’s failure on China shouldn’t make one oblivious to the sophistication of his approach to strategy and crisis management. Though he “initiated military measures (forward deployment), without risking a full-scale war”, he continued to “pursue diplomatic settlements to the extent possible” to contain domestic opposition.

Love, longing & politics!

Tuhin A. Sinha delves into the eternal Nehru-Edwina romance, the political impact of which will always remain a matter of intense conjecture 

That India’s first Prime Minister and the wife of the last British Viceroy had something going between them is no secret. The book, India Remembered, written by Edwina Mountbatten’s daughter, Pamela Mountbatten only corroborates this love story, besides providing us with some rare insights. Pamela writes that the ‘reported romance’ between Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, blossomed during a 1947 trip to Mashobra, a hill station, as part of a joint outing of family and friends.

Nehru wrote a letter to Edwina a decade later, wherein he described that trip to Mashobra as the defining moment in their relationship, a moment when he realised, “that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another.”

Full report here Times of India

REVIEW: War and Peace in Modern India

REVIEW   
War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years
Srinath Raghavan
Permanent Black
ISBN:  81-7824-257-5

Blurb
During his seventeen years as prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru led India through one of its most difficult and potentially explosive periods in international affairs. As the leader of a new state created amidst the bloodiest partition in history, saddled with new and outstanding problems, Nehru was confronted with a range of disputes which threatened to boil over.

Srinath Raghavan draws on a rich vein of untapped documents to illuminate Nehru’s approach to war and his efforts for peace. Vividly recreating the intellectual and political milieu of the Indian foreign policy establishment, he explains the response of Nehru and his top advisors to the tensions with Junagadh, Hyderabad, Pakistan, and China. He gives individual attention to every conflict and shows how strategic decisions for each crisis came to be defined in the light of the preceding ones. The book follows Nehru as he wrestles with a string of major conflicts—assessing the utility of force, weighing risks of war, exploring diplomatic options for peace, and forming strategic judgements that would define his reputation, both within his lifetime and after.

War and Peace in Modern India challenges and revises our received understanding of Nehru’s handling of international affairs. General readers as well as students of Indian history and politics will find its balanced consideration of Nehru’s foreign policy essential to gauge his achievements, his failures, and his enduring legacy.

Reviews
A new look at Indian history National 
In 1964, my father Kailash Vajpeyi, a Hindi poet, then just about 30 years old, published his first collection of poems, Sankrant (Crisis). He belonged to a rising generation of angry and highly politicised poets; one of his poems, a scathing commentary on the last days of Jawaharlal Nehru’s administration, was banned from broadcast on All India Radio; another was the subject of a heated debate in the Indian parliament. When Nehru, the ageing prime minister, met the rebellious poet at a literary gathering, he bemusedly asked: “Why so upset, young man?”

In poem after poem, India’s capital New Delhi became a symbol of political decay, rampant corruption and institutional failure. A New National Anthem, a caustic “celebration” of 20 years of Indian democracy published in 1967, memorably painted an unflattering picture of India’s circular Parliament House:
Each morning
There rises in my sky
A great big shoe.
It clambers down
From the roof of the Round Building
And starts walking
And keeps on walking
Into public life…
Until by evening
It arrives in the courthouse
And vanishes at last
Into a newly printed
Rupee note.

Tamils distancing themselves from India

In the Asian region, hardly any people have had such close cordiality as the Tamils of Sri Lanka with the people of Tamil Nadu and by extension with India.Ethnic affinity, linguistic homogeneity, cultural identity and physical proximity, all conduced to a remarkable harmony if not solidarity. Today all what remains is an edifice in ruins. Friends have turned foes. Admirers have become detractors. Where a bridge stood, there is now a chasm. Never the twain shall meet is the verdict of the percipient. Forget the North, turn East to China is the voice of those who dare.

Intellectual nourishment of the Tamils when they are young, commences with Tamil literature. Poets of high intellect spanning two millennia nurtured us. Judged by any standard, Thiruvalluvar of the first century and Bharathy of the twentieth were of world calibre. In between them were poets and scholars of great renown. The independence movement in India brought forth a galaxy that dazzled us with their brilliance. Gandhi and Nehru, Patel and Bose, Tagore and Aurobindo were scholars and leaders who commanded our admiration. We coveted their aura and lived in a world of make belief.

Full report here Guardian

The Yew effect

A large Hindustan Times cartoon from 1966 formed the backdrop to the event  in Kolkata. Oxford Bookstore, the venue of the launch of Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India, by Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, was chock-a-block on Thursday with the city’s literati and glitterati.

The cartoon showed a gargantuan Nehru sleeping with a minuscule Yew perched on top, yelling “Wake up!” It is this cartoon that encapsulates what the redoubtable SKDR wanted to say in his 388-page volume on India-Singapore relations. For governor M.K. Narayanan, who unveiled the book, it was a “double pleasure” to be at the event for he was an admirer of Datta-Ray and also had the pleasure to know the Singaporean minister-mentor Lee Kuan Yew.

“Though I am not a historian, I am part of contemporary history and from that perspective I can claim that bilateral relations between India and Singapore have been most purposeful and warm,” said Narayanan. Despite neglect on India’s part, the relation with Singapore remained stable largely due to the leadership of Yew, he said.

Full report here Telegraph