Coming four years after the demise of Mahendra Singh Tikait, the powerful farmers’ leader in North India, the demise in Pune on December 12 of Sharad Joshi, a champion of farmers’ rights and founder-president of the Nashik-based Shetkari Sanghatana, has left the country’s long-neglected and continuously short-changed 700 million farmers leaderless. Joshi, who quit a cushy UN job with the Universal Postal Union in 1977 and bought himself a 40-acre farm in Chakan near Nashik to experience first hand the trials and tribulations of peasant farmers, burst into the national limelight in the 1980s, when he spearheaded several national agitations demanding remunerative prices for onions (of which Nashik district is a hub) and farm produce in general.

Joshi’s clarion call for higher prices for agriculture/horticulture produce and a better deal for farmers resonated with your correspondent — at that time editor of Businessworld. The outcome was a 12-page cover story in Businessworld (‘Bharat vs. India — Sharad Joshi’s Epic Quest’) which exposed the cruel neglect of the country’s rural majority and the iniquity of the Nehruvian socialist economic development model.

Alas, to no avail. The idealistic Joshi was out-manoeuvred by the country’s wily politicians, and paid a heavy price for taking on the establishment with his wife committing suicide and himself reduced to penury. In the end he was co-opted into the establishment with Rajiv Gandhi appointing him chairman of a powerless Commission of Agriculture Costs and Prices based in Delhi, far away from his power base.

Subsequently after an aborted attempt to revive the Swatantra Party in the 1990s, this defeated and defanged farmers’ leader was gradually seduced by the comforts of Lutyens Delhi and accepted a nomination to the Rajya Sabha where he served two undistinguished terms. The cunning of the lumpen bourgeoisie, which has converted India’s democracy to its own use in perpetuity, quite overwhelmed this idealistic farmers’ champion, RIP.

Strange priorities  

It’s a typical modus operandi of the country’s 18 million-strong bureaucracy which has run the economy into the ground. In the housing construction sector, they permit whole buildings and often entire residential colonies, to be completed under their noses, after which they suddenly serve a notice upon unsuspecting buyers that the land title is faulty and construction unauthorised. This common practice opens up vast opportunities for extortion and blackmail. 

Evidently this modus operandi has impressed Prof. Ved Prakash, chairman of the Delhi-based University Grants Commission, the country’s apex higher education regulatory authority established in 1956. Out of the blue on November 6, UGC issued notices to some of India’s top private (‘deemed’) universities including BITS-Pilani and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research to forthwith shut down their satellite campuses. According to UGC spokepersons, these universities have committed the cardinal sin of violating clause 6 of the UGC guidelines and Article 12(5) of the Deemed Universities Regulation Act, 2010, which require prior permission of the HRD ministry to establish satellite campuses. It’s pertinent to note that the list of violators includes BITS-Pilani, ranked the country’s #1 private university by several publications including EducationWorld (May 2015).

Unsurprisingly, BITS-Pilani, whose satellite campuses in Goa and Hyderabad were established in 2004 and 2008 respectively, before the Deemed Universities Regulation Act was enacted, has engaged top counsel Harish Salve to challenge the UGC notice in the Delhi high court.

But even as the court’s judgement on this issue is awaited, some larger questions arise. (1) Why didn’t the commission, which claims that its guidelines were issued in 2000, prevent the construction of BITS’ Goa and Hyderabad campuses? (2) Is adherence to UGC guidelines more important than the future of thousands of fees-paying students enrolled in the satellite campuses of this top-ranked university? A telling indication of the strange priorities of the HRD ministry.

Unpersoning practice

The great love affair of independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (aka Master Joe) with the communist Soviet Union, has burdened the Indian Republic with several legacies without which this country would have been much better off.

Among them: Central planning, unaffordable defence expenditure, official corruption, and routine KGB-style torture in police stations. To this death-wish list add the art of writing people out of history. In the Soviet Union it was routine practice to write former dictators and disgraced communists out of history books and airbrush them out of official photographs.

Currently the English television news channel CNN-IBN is celebrating its tenth anniversary with an orgy of self-congratulation beamed daily to hapless viewers.  Curiously, there’s not a single mention of founder-editor and news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai who broke away from the pioneer NDTV news channel and together with entrepreneur Raghav Bahl built CNN-IBN from ground up into a formidable rival of NDTV. Only the identifiable cabbage ear of Sardesai is shown in a 30-minute tenth anniversary celebratory newsreel. Quite obviously, Sardesai has been written out of the history of CNN-IBN, Soviet style.

Your editor is familiar with the eagerness with which Nehru’s children have embraced this Soviet practice. When anniversaries of Business India and Businessworld — India’s first two business magazines which played a major role in the liberalisation of Indian industry in 1991 — are celebrated, there’s no mention of your editor who built them from ground up. Worse, according to Ashok Advani, the publisher of BI, this writer was a mere manager of the magazine, and on the 20th anniversary of BW, the overweening publisher Aveek Sarkar read out my entire inaugural edit without attribution. Unpersoning individuals and writing them out of history is a Soviet legacy practised enthusiastically in contemporary India.