Reflections on India
Dr. Amartya Kumar Bhattacharya
BCE (Hons.) ( Jadavpur ), MTech ( Civil ) ( IIT Kharagpur ), PhD ( Civil ) ( IIT Kharagpur ), Cert.MTERM ( AIT Bangkok ), CEng(I), FIE, FACCE(I), FISH, FIWRS, FIPHE, FIAH, FAE, MIGS,MIGS – Kolkata Chapter, MIGS – Chennai Chapter, MISTE, MAHI, MISCA, MIAHS, MISTAM, MNSFMFP, MIIBE, MICI, MIEES, MCITP, MISRS, MISRMTT, MAGGS, MCSI, MMBSI
Chairman and Managing Director,
MultiSpectra Consultants,
23, Biplabi Ambika Chakraborty Sarani, Kolkata – 700029, West Bengal, INDIA.
E-mail: dramartyakumar@gmail.com
"Of all the dangers facing India today, by far the severest is the presence of criminals in Government service. One does not have to look very far. Salil Haldar, Sujay Kumar Mukherjea, Basudeb Bhattacharyya and Koustuv Debnath, all of whom are employed as teachers at Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, West Bengal, have criminal records."
Dr. Amartya Kumar Bhattacharya
Some time back, Dr Sudhir Jain, who is the Director of Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, requested me to write something about the true state of India at this moment bereft and devoid of the hype that certain misguided and misinformed Indians continually indulge in. After writing to Dr. Jain, wherein I placed India in the context of the broader community of modern nations, I decided to make some unpalatable facts regarding India today available to the public. It is a virtue to be a straight-talker and to clearly say that India’s track record since independence has been dismal, to say the least, and that India has turned out to be a banana republic.
I belong to a Buddhist family having my ancestry in the Chittagong region of East Bengal, now Bangladesh. My family has been ( unwelcome? ) guests of the Government of India since 1947.
To put matters in perspective, the Pala dynasty of Bengal was the last Buddhist Dynasty in India. Neither the Arab invasion of Sind nor the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni had any effect on Bengal and the Pala dynasty ruled uninterruptedly until 1162 AD when they were overthrown by the Hindu Sena dynasty. Muhammad Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan in 1192 AD. A few years later, one of Muhammad Ghori's generals swept across the plains of northern India and Lakshmana Sena, the last ruler of the Sena dynasty, fled without giving a fight on hearing the Muslim forces approaching. Bengal came under Muslim rule and remained so until the victory of the British at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 AD. By the time Muslim rule ended in Bengal in 1757 AD, most Bengalis had converted to Islam due to various reasons. Under Muslim rule, an influx of Arabic and Persian words into the Bengali language took place but, crucially, Bengali Muslims and Bengali non-Muslims continued to speak and write in a common Bengali language with an Indo-Aryan script except for a few words which are still different for Bengali Muslims and Bengali non-Muslims. The local dialect of Bengali in East Bengal is different from the local dialect of Bengali in West Bengal, but again this is not based on religious lines. For centuries, Bengali Muslims and Bengali non-Muslims lived side by side and in harmony, everyone practising his own religion. It is to be noted that my ancestors lived for centuries under Muslim rule.
My family has its ancestry in the Chittagong area of East Bengal and has been practising Buddhism since ancient times, probably from even before the birth of Jesus Christ. Since my family was in the extreme South-east of Bengal, near the border with Burma ( now Myanmar ), they have retained their Buddhist religion up to this day. My great great-grandfather Rai Bahadur Kumar Chandra Bhattacharya was a noted Buddhist scholar. He divided his time between Chittagong and Rangpur. He was renowned for his erudition of Pali and Sanskrit and also for his refinement and nobility. He wrote a commentary on the Dhammachakkappavattana Sutta. His speciality was the study of the Pali Tipitaka, the Sutta Pitaka, the Vinaya Pitaka and the Abhidhamma Pitaka. He was conservative to the core, reticent, ascetic, austere and puritan ( like everyone in my family including myself he too was a non-smoker and non-drinker ). He once cautioned my great-grandfather saying 'It is my conviction that Hindus can never be your friends. I have tried all my life and failed. How can you trust people who will not allow you into their temples? There is no place for you in their society.'
My great-grandfather was Diwan Bahadur Banga Chandra Bhattacharya. He was the Diwan of Tripura when Tripura was a princely state and was a close friend of Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore called him 'Diwan Bahadur ji' as a mark of respect. My great-grandfather was the inspiration behind Rabindranath Tagore's writing the atmospheric novel 'Rajarshi' in which Rabindranath Tagore condemned the practice of many Hindus of sacrificing animals before wrathful deities. My great-grandfather was fluent in Sanskrit, Pali and Arabic, among other languages A very erudite person, he wrote and published several books on Buddhism. Among his books, 'Buddhist Civilisation in Asia' stands out. One of his pioneering thesis was that the Caspian Sea was named after Mahakashyapa, a direct disciple of Lord Buddha. Apart from the similarity in names, he based his thesis on the presence of Kalmyk Buddhists in Kalmykia, a part of Russia to the north-west of the Caspian Sea. After retiring from the Tripura Court, he settled in Chittagong where he built a huge Zamindari house. My great-grandfather wrote 'The India of today is hard to define. It is not historical India. Being multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-linguistic, unlike France or Germany for instance, it is not a nation state in the Western sense. From ancient times, there have been two terms, 'Bharatiya' ( Indian ) and 'Bharatvasi' ( people who live in India ), implicitly implying that not all people who live in India are Indians. For almost all of its history, India has been a geographical entity rather than a political one. Perhaps the best definition is that the India of today is a union of a number of Indian states on the continent of Asia.'
My great-grandfather was an orthodox and puritan Buddhist. He was uncompromisingly opposed to idolatry. He believed that since the majority of Bengalis were Muslims, Bengali non-Muslims had their only future in living in harmony with Bengali Muslims. However, he was acutely aware of an abnormality in Hindu psychology. He used to say 'Hindus are afraid of Muslims and Hindus suffer from an inferiority complex. They constantly remember that Muslims defeated them. They say that one Muslim equals three Hindus.' He also believed that Hindu icon Swami Vivekananda lacked the intellectual ability to grasp Lord Buddha's teachings. He dismissed outright Swami Vivekananda's thesis that Buddhists introduced idolatry and the tantras. He wrote 'Vivekananda was totally wrong. Hinduism introduced idolatry and the tantras. Mantras can be found even in the Vedas.' It may be mentioned that my great-grandfather was vehemently opposed to the tantras which he dismissed as a degenerate cult.
The attitude of my great-grandfather towards Hinduism bordered on the hostile. He famously refused to eat from the hands of any Hindu and employed a Muslim cook to cook his meals. He asked a Muslim gentleman to teach Arabic and Urdu to my grandfather and his siblings. As a result, my grandfather also became fluent in Arabic and Urdu.
Unfortunately for our family, he passed away before 1947. Were he alive, he would not have taken a decision to migrate to Kolkata on the spur of the moment. He was not a man to take rash decisions. Gifted with penetrating insight, an acute sense of justice, level-headedness and possessing an optimistic and inclusive outlook about the future of humanity, my great-grandfather could have foreseen that East Pakistan would last for only 24 years.
My grandfather, Jitendra Chandra Bhattacharya, was a freedom fighter who was imprisoned by the British before his Matriculation Examination. He wrote his examination in prison. He was tortured by the British every time he was imprisoned by them. Educated under Rabindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan, he came under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi whom he met several times. He took my father, a young boy at that time, to meet Mahatma Gandhi at Barrackpore in the northern suburbs of Kolkata when Mahatma Gandhi was residing there. My father recalled that when he bent down to pay his respects to Mahatma Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi put his hand on my father's head and said in Hindi 'Beta, sachcha patriot bano' which means 'Son, be a true patriot.'
However, my grandfather was deeply dismayed by the acrimony between Mahatma Gandhi and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. He agreed with Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose that India, in its illiterate state, could not function as a true democracy and a period of benevolent dictatorship was needed after freedom from the British to uplift India after which India could transition to a democracy. He proposed to Mahatma Gandhi that there should be a social revolution to accompany the attainment of freedom from the British. My grandfather was greatly influenced by the French Revolution. Mahatma Gandhi told my grandfather that the social revolution would take place after India had obtained its freedom from the British. He said that he had already started the social revolution in a small way by calling untouchable Hindus 'Harijans' ( at present Harijans are called 'Scheduled Castes' ). As things transpired, after India became free from British colonial rule, the 1950 Constitution was promulgated and the social revolution never took place.
My grandfather founded the House of Labour in East Bengal to encourage youths towards business and enterprise. Being a businessman, my grandfather travelled extensively to all parts of undivided India on business. He stayed at Lahore for two years. He also visited Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta, Sialkot, Karachi and Hyderabad in Sind. My father recalled that, as a young boy, my grandfather took him to Jammu via Sialkot, the normal route in those times. It could not have escaped my grandfather's notice that the language divide between Bengali Muslims and non-Bengali Muslims was too great to be bridged as Bengali Muslims considered Bengali to be their mother tongue and non-Bengali Muslims considered Urdu to be their mother tongue. This very fact would lead to the break-up of Pakistan, with an Indian victory, in 1971.
Surprisingly, my grandfather failed to factor the language difference between Bengali Muslims and non-Bengali Muslims in his prediction of the future of the Indian sub-continent. He failed to realise that any alliance between Bengali Muslims and non-Bengali Muslims was bound to be temporary in nature and that a split was inevitable sooner or later. For a man to travel all over India and not to develop an incisive judgement of the situation was truly extraordinary. Acting impulsively, in 1947 he took a decision to abandon East Bengal and come to Kolkata leaving all his property in East Bengal behind. He came to Kolkata as a refugee and as a pauper. This caused my family great hardship at the time. Surely, the ephemeral nature of East Pakistan should have been obvious to any discerning observer.
Soon after defecting to Kolkata in 1947, my grandfather realised that he had been chasing a mirage. Strongly disillusioned, he severed all ties with politics and with the Indian National Congress. Dissatisfied with the way independent India was going, he used to repeatedly say 'I committed a historic blunder by defecting from East Bengal. This is not the independence I fought for.' My grandfather was deeply disillusioned with Nehru and his policies and with India's deteriorating relations with China. He said 'India must not forget that Chinese monks Faxian, Xuanxang and Yijing are considered to be great Acharyas by us. India must cultivate good relations with China. Otherwise, it will be defeated in war.' In 1962, India was trounced in a war by China who won a decisive victory.
In 1953, my grandfather could garner enough money to build a house in south Kolkata but his money was exhausted before he could finish the building. It was left to me to finish the construction of our home, my father and paternal uncles having added nothing to what my grandfather had done. Realising and recognising that Independence was a pyrrhic victory for him, he developed an ailment of the heart. He passed away in 1959 deeply regretting his hasty decision to migrate to Kolkata. East Pakistan would last for just 12 more years after his death giving birth to Bangladesh.
In hindsight, it is abundantly clear that it was not a correct decision for my grandfather to migrate to Kolkata. He not only discarded the material inheritance of his property in Chittagong but also the intellectual inheritance of the legacy of my great-grandfather.
My father, Arun Chandra Bhattacharya, now deceased, had much the same kind of career as I am having. Possessing several degrees, professional memberships, and a connoisseur of fine arts and literature, he travelled extensively throughout the world. Amongst his several achievements, the development of a management institute stands out. A Rotarian till his demise, he promoted fine arts by making several donations to deserving organisations. Though my father fully shared my grandfather's views as regards the state of India, it was too late for him to reverse my grandfather's mistake.
My father was in Times Square in New York when news broke out that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. He recalls the dazed appearance on the faces of New Yorkers on receiving the news. ‘A successful democracy needs a literate society – illiterate people cannot make informed and considered choices while voting’ said my father later. ‘Eradicating illiteracy should be India’s prime concern. Side by side, corruption, bribery, criminality and malpractices, particularly in government offices, should be rooted out. Why should one have to pay bribes to multiple people in order to get a new electricity connection for his newly-constructed house? There is enough for man’s needs but not enough for man’s greed. What matters is not what one has but what one is.’ Though my father was a staunch Buddhist, he had to pay extortion money during Hindu festivals to slum-dwellers who still live near our house. Though my house is a posh area of south Kolkata, there is a big slum close to it. It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs that Kolkata is littered with similar slums everywhere. The slum-dwellers are mostly illiterate and unemployed and are, naturally, full of vices. The government has failed to uplift these people and eradicate the slums even though decades have passed since independence.
Uncle Aziz was a very close friend of my father. He and my father met in the United States. He had his ancestry in Comilla. He settled in Dhaka where he built a house in the Bonani area. He visited our home in Kolkata several times. He used to visit India often for professional purposes and never failed to drop in on us. I also visited Dhaka to present a paper at an International Conference and visited his home. On that occasion, I travelled throughout the length and breadth of Dhaka and saw everything that Dhaka has to offer. The friendship between my father and Uncle Aziz percolated to our extended families. My grandmother, Premlata Bhattacharya, looked upon Uncle Aziz as her own son. My paternal uncles and their families also became close friends of Uncle Aziz and his family and extended family, particularly one of Uncle Aziz's brothers, who was a doctor of international repute. Uncle Aziz's brother and his family also visited our house in Kolkata.
On one particular occasion, during dinner at our home, Uncle Aziz told my father and my paternal uncles 'Why did your father come to Kolkata in 1947? Our country is poorer because of your leaving it. Many of us in Bangladesh feel this way.'
My father took great care to see that I had exposure to all religions. When I was five years old, he got me admitted to Don Bosco School in Kolkata run by Roman Catholic missionaries where I got to study the Bible. During the twelve years that I studied in that school, certain aspects of Christianity like its monotheism and its opposition to idolatry left a deep, vivid, lasting and permanent impression on my mind. When I was nine years of age, my father took me to Murshidabad, an event that is engraved in my mind. At Murshidabad, he took me to a mosque built hundreds of years ago. He showed me all the details; the minarets, the calligraphy and so on. It was a memorable visit for me.
At Don Bosco School and during my higher education, I was following in the footsteps of my ancestors, picking up an excellent education and all the other things needed to be a complete man.
Later on, in my professional career, in the midst of my travels in various countries of the world spanning almost the entire globe, I have seen the unity of man. Memories stand out, sometimes instilling a sense of déjà vu in me; the view of the Pacific in Singapore and of the mountains and moraines from the top of Mount Säntis in Switzerland, the flight over Iran slicing between Tehran to the north and Qom to the south and over Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Bangkok’s wats, Ahsan Manzil in Dhaka, Dubai, Jordan’s northwest, sunset at Hardwar, Bremen and Berlin in Germany, Dilli Haat in Delhi and the Marina Beach in Chennai.
It is an inconvenient truth that independent India has let down its own freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and my grandfather. Most people in India now seem to have a perverted view of being avant-garde. Sacrificing the values and traditions held dear by our ancestors, our glorious inheritance is thrown to the winds. Parvenus cannot be expected to appreciate the truism of Ich Dien. Ersatz culture proliferates with the concept of life avec plaisir. The scramble for lebensraum degenerates people to fall prey to rampant greed. Having achieved its independence way back in 1947, India has failed to become a developed country. India is still a developing country and an emerging market. India is rampant with idolatry, corruption, bribery, criminality and malpractices. In India, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The government has failed to give even the basic necessities to all Indians. If the dictum, 'justice delayed is justice denied' is to be held as valid, my mother, Sheila Bhattacharya, who is a retired Head of the Department of English of a college affiliated to the University of Calcutta, was denied justice as she received her retirement dues four years after she had retired. Of the many countries that I have visited in the world, India is the only country I know of where a government employee has been threatened with death by a colleague ( who is also a government employee ) and has been forced to resign and the government has not done anything whatsoever for the victim. Steeped in bribery, the immediate bosses of the victim ( all of whom are government employees ) have supported and are continuing to support the criminal who happens to have considerable money-power. The victim is yet to receive a single paisa of even his own money kept in the custody of the government during his years in government service. This very recent incident presents a shameful picture of India in front of the civilised world.
I have founded the Bhattacharya Buddhist Foundation for uplifting street-children and slum-children of Kolkata.
The Government of India has to do the following cleaning-up on a war-footing. The Government of India has to
1. Root out government servants having a criminal record. To start with, the government should dismiss and try Salil Haldar, Sujay Kumar Mukherjea, Basudeb Bhattacharyya and Koustuv Debnath, all of whom are employed as teachers at Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, West Bengal, and all of whom have criminal records.
2. Root out bribery and corruption in government offices. Only a very small fraction of government servants are honest.
3. Demolish the conception, prevalent among most Indians, that government service implies the right to take bribes. While punishing the guilty, the government should laud the very small minority of government servants who are honest.
4. Make an earnest effort to uplift the suffering villagers of India.
5. Make sincere efforts to remove slums and ghettos in Indian cities and towns.
6. Build a government based on trust, not suspicion. At least four identity documents are prevalent in India today - Passport, Aadhaar Card, PAN Card and Voter's Identity Card. Since, excepting a Passport, an Indian does not really need the rest, the government should abolish the unnecessary documents. Different sets of government servants are currently issuing different identity documents and taking bribes for issuing the same.
7. Recognise that widespread rigging takes place in Indian elections and make sincere efforts to root-out the same. In view of the widespread rigging prevalent now with local toughs ruling polling booths, Indian election results are devoid of any relation to the will of the people.
8. Ensure that a son inherits his father's property. This usually does not happen now unless the son pays hefty bribes to government servants. The government must do some soul-searching and feel ashamed that a son currently finds great difficulty in inheriting his father's shares and electricity connection - just to cite two examples.
9. Eradicate the current habit of government servants taking bribes to, for example, sanction a building plan, mutate a landed property and provide an electricity connection.
10. Simplify the procedure for getting Indian Passports. The government servants at the Regional Passport Offices must be courteous and helpful and not harass citizens as is the case today.
11. Ensure that retirement benefits are released immediately after retirement and not after four or five years. Many people get their retirement benefits between four and six years after retirement. My mother received her retirement benefits four years after her retirement. The government must punish government servants who withhold retirement benefits of retired citizens.
12. Eliminate feudalism. Corrupt government servants have taken the place of erstwhile zamindars in rural areas.
13. Eliminate the current 'trickle-down' economy. The government must ensure that the lower strata of Indian society is also a beneficiary of economic progress and is not left behind.
14. Remove the criminal-government servant-politician nexus. This is extremely important if India is to progress.
15. Remove the difference between 'the rulers' and 'the ruled'. The government must ensure that democracy does not remain a sham and that government is truly 'of the people, for the people and by the people'.
16. Place a greater value on human life. The government must not think that, simply because India is a populous country, a few lives lost in an accident, for example, a bridge collapse - such as the one that happened in Howrah some time back - does not matter. The government must acknowledge that every single human life is valuable.
17. Eliminate tokenism.
18. Eliminate window-dressing before a politician visits an area. The government must be sincere in its development efforts and ensure that not a single development project announced turns out to be an eyewash designed to fool the population.
19. Ensure internet access and continuous power supply in rural areas. Internet access outside of the metropolises is pitiful and power outages are common. Yesterday evening, there was a power outage at my office in Kolkata.
20. Be sensitive to the suffering of the people. The length and breadth of Kolkata is flooded during the monsoon season and no regime has done anything about it.
21. Understand that slogans like 'Bekari hatao' and 'Roti, kapra aur makaan' are useless if they remain mere slogans without any attempt to implement them. The government must ensure that the fundamental needs of the people are fulfilled.
