Banned Books

Many would place a price on Rushdie’s head for writing Satanic verses- not for blasphemy but for writing tough-to-comprehend English. Just as a Mallu male, clad in a tucked up Dhoti would place a price on Lola Kutty’s head, for her jabs at us in Channel V. I am tempting fate by writing about books banned in India. I had heard so much about banned books on India’s China War- one by Neville Maxwell and another by John P Dalvi. It is not difficult to find and read banned books in India. We never tried it because it didn’t carry the excitement of reading pornography with rapid heartbeats and fluttering eyelids of 15 year olds. Nine hours to Rama by Stanley Wolpert (on the assassination of Gandhi) is difficult to find. It had bombed in the Box Office when made into a movie- it certainly was not a popular book either. The Polyester Prince is easily downloadable from the net and doesn’t tell us anymore than what we already know. But the easy availability here at libraries in Australia of the handful of books banned in India, made me curious to read them.

The China war took place around my birth in October 1962 and was considered to have dealt a blow to Nehru’s health and leadership. He didn’t last long after that. No matter how much modern India criticizes him for his mixed model of economy, economic planning and political naiveté on Kashmir, the man had a vision of where he wanted to take India. If our IITs and IIMs have brand equity and if we have an evolving secular democracy over the years, we owe much to him. Even the huge investments in public sector in those days were probably the only way to push the economy and it is arguably the control-freak Babus who failed the system. You could have a hundred grassroots politicians to win elections, rub the noses of opponents in mud and cultivate political foot soldiers from the back of beyond. But it takes dreamers to set out a vision and the rules of engagement for a nation recently freed from colonial rule.

I read Maxwell’s India’s China War. Neville Maxwell was the Times correspondent in Delhi those days. I read the relevant portions again and again. It is indeed unfair to India. It fails to consider how any other country would have dealt with the borders bequeathed on it by a colonial power. India had no choice but to hang on to the territory it inherited from the British in spite of the ambiguity that supposedly surrounded the rough terrain. Not for us to go into the legality of it. But Maxwell says it was Nehru’s proximity to and reliance on Lt Gen Kaul, a Kashmiri Brahmin which drove him into an unwinnable position which professional soldiers advised him against. It is unfair to suggest that Nehru, endowed with a western education and Fabian values, was susceptible to regional/caste considerations. I can’t imagine a Lieutenant General (below the rank of Chief of Army Staff) gaining the ear of the Prime Minister directly. Doesn’t happen today- I can say with fair amount of certainty. Maxwell is also less harsh on Krishna Menon, who supposedly stood against the forward policy which led to war. He came under harsh attack from opposition. With his left leaning ideological predilections, he was accused of being soft on Chinese. Menon was eventually swayed by his own rhetoric and had to prove that he was no less patriotic when it came to dealing with China. I was disappointed by the lack of historical information of the role of communist parties, which later led to the split in 1964. The book dwells extensively on the tactical blunders in the military campaign, which I shall refrain from commenting upon. Let me adhere to the conduct rules for serving Public Officials.

But what dawned on me as I read the book was the hidden but unintentional theme that was laced around it. Those were early days of parliamentary democracy. Most of the MPs were not privileged with an education; leave alone a Cambridge education as Nehru had. A far cry from today when industrialist MPs with false teeth, gold bracelets, clipped nose-hair and Armani suits straddle the Parliament Central hall. Nehru consulted the Parliament at almost every step, influencing the course of subsequent events; sometimes at great peril to swift decision making by the executive. There are reasons to surmise that the seeds of a noisy democracy that we have inherited were sown carefully by Nehru. He used the Parliament as a sounding board, as a vehicle for popular expression and to evolve national consensus. He believed that such matters of state need to pass through the process of rigorous consultations with elected representatives for transparency and acceptance. Despite his colossal status in Indian politics, it is a tribute to the man that he chose the path he did. I have seen senior officials setting norms to institutions to suit their own narrow interests, with brazen disregard to what others might see it as.

Maxwell labours the point that Chinese claim to borders on Eastern and Western sectors challenging the colonial status ought to have been negotiated by India instead of rejecting it outright. But he himself has admittedly benefitted from the open society that India is, in writing the book. That is something that the Chinese can’t lay claim to after so many years of existence. On the contrary, things behind the bamboo curtain in China were shrouded in secrecy. According to Maxwell, the Chinese approach and strategy were cohesive. It certainly wasn’t as well articulated as the Indian position was. And it certainly didn’t have to go through the scrutinizing gaze of elected representatives, nor did it have to be subjected to unkind analysis by noisy media and editorials as in India. I am sure Indians are not going to throng the bookstores if the ban on this 40 year old book is lifted. It helps us see ourselves from another side of the prism. This is certainly no Tiananmen that we need to erase from collective memory…