Ram, roti, romance

That was then. Now, Ms Patkar and Mr Advani, two of India8217;s most iconic public figures, are romancing their past. The goalposts have moved in the fields of environment movement and right wing politics. But Ms Patkar would still only talk of government rehabilitation of those displaced by the Narmada project and Advani, look for emotive political mobilisation.

In a finely objective analysis in these columns see the March 27 edition in indianexpress.com archives, Y.K. Alagh had pointed out how yet another review of the Narmada project would be farcical. 8220;It does not take any review to show there are no free lunches,8221; he said. How true. And how crucial to understanding what Ms Patkar is refusing to see.

Development makes displacement inevitable. Arundhati Roy had famously said dams are like bombs; they both destroy. That was hopelessly romantic. Agriculture destroys, too. There8217;s nothing natural about settled agriculture, which manipulates nature and displaces people, for example, forest dwellers. Yet after raising the absolutely valid point about official callousness and, sometimes, brutality towards Narmada oustees, Ms Patkar8217;s movement got increasingly lost in rhetoric about protecting 8220;natural means8221; to earning livelihood. This, when it is inarguable that, first, there isn8217;t enough fertile land in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra or elsewhere in India to redistribute among Narmada oustees and, second, there are far too many Indians working on land anyway.

By now, Ms Patkar should have moved on 8212; industry factory employment is the only means to absorb those displaced from agriculture. Madhya Pradesh, a major focus of the rehabilitation agitation, has only 2.34 per cent of India8217;s factories and employs a bare 2.54 per cent of India8217;s industrial workers CMIE data. If she had seen what larger industrial employment in MP could do for Narmada oustees, she could have questioned certain comfortable metropolitan assumptions.

For factory to become the great Indian workplace, we need to amend the Industrial Disputes Act, which makes hiring and firing difficult. But that alone won8217;t do the trick. Much of the new manufacturing activity needs to be labour intensive and much attention needs to be paid, at the initial stages, to local hiring.

To take just one example, between the mid-eighties and late nineties the number of employees in the Bhilai Steel Plant fell from nearly 100,000 to less than 40,000. The proportion of locally born employees fell even more drastically. In mining enterprises in central India, governments, entrepreneurs and labour contractors have all made local employment promises and failed to keep them. The pattern of industriaisation is, therefore, critical. How wonderful it would have been had Ms Patkar reinvented herself as a critique of insufficient industrialisation. But agitating for the perennial right to bake rotis from grains cultivated by one8217;s own hands is much more romantic.

As romantic as searching for subterranean Hindu angst. My personal conviction is that BJP leaders like Mr Advani should have known how complex the 8220;Hindu political matrix8221; is after the Kanchi Shankaracharya was arrested 8212; to great Hindu indifference almost everywhere. If your politics has to be about looking at Hindus as a community, you have to accept certain facts about Hinduism. This is a religion that revels in the multiplicity of its deities, in innumerable regional and sub-regional variations in its customs, in an almost total lack of a proselytising tradition and a central text. It cannot be an easy instrument for political mobilisation.

As a rule, there8217;s really no Hindu vote in Indian politics. Rationally speaking, appeasing the minorities as Mr Advani alleged, with some substance, the Congress is doing is a more paying political strategy than appealing to the majority. Invoking the former won8217;t make the latter easier to achieve. But Mr Advani8217;s romanticism goes far beyond appearing to journey out for an elusive political commodity. He should have by now reinvented himself as the leader who wants the BJP to be a conservative, pro-market, unapologetically nationalist as well as secular party of the right.

Some of the makings of this transformation were there, some germinated during the NDA rule. Sure, an election that the BJP clearly lost and the ridiculous fuss in the party and the parivar about the Jinnah remarks were unsettling. But no one said Indian politics was easy.

But Mr Advani didn8217;t even try the relatively easy things. He agreed when the BJP opposed VAT, when it opposed the patent bill which was passed with Left support! and when it was incredibly ambiguous about the Indo-US nuclear deal. Did you hear the BJP strongly condemning union action against airport modernisation? Did you hear Mr Advani?

Why should he? Being a political yatri, remembering when Ram got them out on the streets is much more romantic.

Perhaps, Ms Patkar and Mr Advani should meet. They can talk about the past that never was, the future they are trying to ensure will never be.