The rise of righteous reaction

Mahatmas with a small m

Through my pre-teen and teenage years, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather. He was a medical doctor, a theosophist, a Congress party activist and a compassionate human being. He was 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 worst traditions of caste and religion.

This 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 group 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 the righteous activist posing alternative, mostly woolly and impractical 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 a 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 modernization 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 Karl Marx admirer. However, when he returned to India he found his position pre-empted by Nehruvian economic policies that emphasized central planning and nationalization of core industries. For him and his acolytes, it was a short step to the vituperative and impractical edicts of Hind Swaraj.

The Navnirman movement was confused at birth. It combined the anti-Western, anti-modern strains of Gandhian utopianism and the anti-market, anti-constitutional Marxist dogma. This weird and unsustainable campaign fell apart as casually as it was formed.

After the failure of Narayan’s movement, the role of righteous reaction became marginal. The protest against the Narmada Dam project led by a global coalition of NGOs gave it a second wind. Through the 1980s, the Indian jholewala brigade became involved with relatively benign campaigns against child labor, deforestation, and for employment generation, education, healthcare, among others.  

In 2004, the newly-elected UPA government, recognizing their contribution to social welfare and poverty alleviation, sought to co-opt the jholewala brigade into the National Advisory Council (NAC). The NAC’s deliberations focused on welfare and (Citizen’s) rights rather than the legitimacy of the government and the political system. But a more virulent strain of Jholewala activism surfaced with the appearance on the national stage of Anna Hazare and his disciples.

The Hazare protest went further than Narayan in challenging the legitimacy of the Constitution and the credibility of the political system. Sophisticated in the use of propaganda, the rural chieftain and his jholewala acolytes cleverly projected their protest as being against corruption when actually it is a political assault on the UPA government and its leading party, the Congress. Like Narayan, Hazare over-reached and today, his protest has degenerated into a media relations effort.

Is the tradition of smug righteousness so deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche that it can only be contained, never eradicated? Who will be the next mahatma (with a small m)?

This Article appeared in the Education World magazine in August 2012 issue.

www.educationworldonline.net

Paid Media Lacks Credibility

In an exclusive interview with Image Management, Rajiv Desai, Chairman and Chief Executive of Comma Consulting, discusses how the PR industry can grow in India, and how it needs to change.

Q. Some industry experts suggest that over 80% of the PR business is split between Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. How can the industry fuel pan India growth?

To fuel the PR industry’s pan- India growth, we need more business. The next big markets are away from the metros. For example, with Bharti, we worked in teeny- tiny rural areas, because that was their rural push. The next big thrust has actually been in telecom; there are now telecom related businesses in hinterland area. When you have businesses, then you have jobs, and the growth of business fuels the need for PR.  I think that is what can really help – more expansive businesses as opposed to centralized ones. It s not that  India didn’t have a very enlightened policy  because even during the Nehruvian era we had these public sectors mines, steel plants and chemical plants  in remote areas like Chattisgarh. That was enlightenment, but also a sort of forced migration into the hinterland. And without the appropriate the connectivity’s, they became white elephants.

With these modern businesses like telecom, and to some extent insurance and banking, they first built the linkages and then they locate. Whereas, in the earlier one’s you were sort of pushed into it because of the policy decision. That’s the kind of thing that will help. If for example if they stop hindering retail FDI and actually let it happen – this will create a huge rural pan-India growth.

Q. What is the biggest challenge facing the Indian PR industry?

Q. Do you see paid media as a tool or threat to the PR Industry?

If you think that the be-all –and-end- all of PR is to be in the media, then you might find this to be a factor. But it’s not for us. We are in the media because it serves a different purpose. Not just to have someone’s mug in there and make them feel great. So, if the be all and end of your PR campaign is media coverage, we get more coverage. We are a small company but no one generates the kind of coverage we do.

If it doesn’t serve the client’s purpose, then media coverage may not be the thing. If it doesn’t serve the media’s purpose, then you influence the media. Any paid media lacks creditability.

Q. How does Comma Consulting set themselves apart from the other PR agencies in India?

This article appeared on Image Management India Website on July 24, 2012.

Rajiv Desai, Comma Consulting: Paid Media Lacks Credibility