Party roots in social fault lines
by G.V.Gupta

Democracy without Associations —Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India by Pradeep K Chhibber. Vistaar Publications, New Delhi. Pages 187. Rs 450.

BASING his study on Indian experience, Chhibber takes forward the theory of party system. This is a bold undertaking and the author is aware of the many pitfalls on his way. Yet he has opened new areas of investigation. He emphasises the crucial role of the electoral system, state policies and associations in the development of party structures and strategies.

In the initial formulation of his theory, he touches on the links between the party system and social cleavages in the wake of national liberation and industrial revolutions. The social structure that emerged was supposed to have automatically resulted in the party system which we are familiar with. A closer look revealed these cleavages to be mainly social in character which can thus be organised. This emphasised the role of independent organisations.

Why do organisations arise around some characteristics and not others? This underscores the role of the state. Chhibber’s point is that these theories were built against the background of developed societies where associations were well developed. In other societies, state policies and electoral laws play a crucial role. Parties tend to get organised around the more sharply defined cleavages where states play an active role in social life.

Similarly, Chhibber argues, the simple majority, single plurality (SMSP) electoral system, as is in vogue in India, will force coalitions at the local levels compared to, say, the proportional representation system which will give rise to larger formations. A federal structure creates its own compulsions in the design of party structures and policies. The absence of associations puts a greater premium on parties. Only the induction of these elements can explain a phenomenon like the breaking up of umbrella organisations such as the Congress in India. The experience of Algeria and Spain, he thinks, has the potential for global application. The detailed case study is of India.

Cleavages can run along class, religion, caste, region, language or any other factor. Associations spring to reflect these cleavages and are necessarily run on democratic lines. Trade unions, voluntary organisations such as the RSS, business associations or clubs are examples of associations. Few Indians are members of associations. This increases their dependence on state action.

Chhibber thinks that the Congress has been a catch-all organisation, a sort of federation of state parties with a weak organisational structure. Since local governments are very weak in India, and since the SMSP factor forces coalitions at the local constituency level, the state becomes the basic unit of political activity. With the state pursuing a more active role, cleavages got sharpened and political parties projecting sharper cleavages grew with voters shifting from the Congress.

The BJP, for Chhibber, is not a religion-based party but an alliance of the middle classes and traders who have moved away from the Congress, perceiving it to be a party of capitalists and big landowners. He does not say much about the way the Muslims have reacted to the religious cleavage. He also does not say anything about the Marxists and Marxism and the role of ideology in creating new cleavages or removing old ones. He rates the Congress organisation as weak compared to the BJP or the Communist parties, but does not pinpoint their cadre base, which will naturally raise the question why only some parties are cadre based.

On independence the socialists left the Congress to occupy the opposition space on the democratic Left. It was essentially an ideological stance with a major section of the proletariat remaining with the Congress and the Communist parties. The development ultimately made the Congress pledge to build a socialist pattern of society, an ideological plank for a state-led growth model narrowing the cleavages of caste, language, religion or region. The decline of the Congress began in 1967, which Chhibber attributes entirely to famines and a weakened organisation. Since then the opposition space has been occupied by rightist parties. This aspect is ignored by Chhibber.

The 1967 election reverses marked the failure of the Mahalanobis model of development forcing the Congress to go in for Plan holidays and combining it with a major shift of investment in agriculture in place of heavy industry. Indira Gandhi delinked the national elections from the state polls, raised the slogan of “garibi hatao” and in 1971 roundly defeated an all-embracing opposition alliance with the vote of the have-nots. The Congress, which Chhibber calls a party of capitalists and landlords, won because the poor perceived it as their own. This is the issue of image and perception, an essential part of the political game.

It will require diligent investigation with a microscope to locate the differences in the social base of the Congress and the BJP after the rise of the BSP and the demolition of the Babri masjid. There is also no significant difference in their economic policies. The difference essentially is in the pitch of nationalistic rhetoric and the perception by the people. The BJP is perceived to be better placed to protect the national interest. Hence its ascendancy. This is a competition in reliability and not a mirror of cleavages.

The Congress now wants to regain its Muslim base. This is reflected in its emphasis on secularism in the company of the Left. This then is a major political cleavage in India. The image of a foreign-born Christian leading the Congress projects a good secular image but can it blunt the BJP’s nationalistic rhetoric? If not, will secularism survive as an entrenched political cleavage? In politics, cleavage disappears as a determinant once it stops paying dividends.

At one time it seemed that Mulayam Singh Yadav would have to pay dearly for his failure to support the Congress to protect secularism. It was feared that he was left with only a diminished Yadav support base with the Muslims abandoning him. The recent Lok Sabha elections proved that the Congress resurgence is stunted and there is room for the Samajwadi Party. A minority community spread all over the country needs a national coalition to feel a sense of safety. Hence the minorities back a national party and not a federation of regional units belonging to different coalitions in different states, as Chhibber will have us believe.

Chhibber feels that the catalyst for the steady decline of the Congress is the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. This is contestable. First, the BSP has a better pedigree than the Mandal report. Second, the proponents of the report are today in the company of “kamandal”. The Mandal report was implemented by the leader of a combine of bourgeois parties who rode to power on the popular issue of corruption, again not a cleavage, and announced its acceptance without the approval of his Council of Ministers. This put at disadvantage another backward caste which was getting benefits due to generous reservation for ex-army men, which had to be abolished. The forward castes by and large neither gained nor lost. If it did not affect the poll prospects of the BJP, how could it in the case of the Congress?

By emphasising solely on the disintegration of the Congress as a factor for the growth of other parties, Chhibber discounts the importance of accretion of voter strength, particularly after the lowering of the voting age. A desegregation of the BJP support reveals that it is more popular among the younger and educated voters. Obviously it is the influence of the education system which encourages national fervour, not challenged by any political or cultural formation.

Chhibber’s contention that Indians do not join associations is correct but he does not explore the reasons for it. An inquiry will reveal that this depends on the level of development. This is a characteristic not subject to cleavage. Our political philosophers are also not able to divine the reason for abject dependence of Indians on the government for even the most common civic amenity. We never demand self-governance at the local level. Maybe it is a legacy of the caste system and a strong sense of ritual purity. Maybe the dominant discourse which treats the village as a cesspool of dirt, disease and oppression is responsible for the underdevelopment of local government. This is again a matter of cultural hegemony and not of cleavage.

Chhibber also does not look into the role of the bureaucracy in shaping the interplay of political parties as mediators between the people and the state. In developing societies the state in some ways is not much more significant than its bureaucracy. The officialdom is not interest-neutral and is a strong agent. Among many things, it significantly influences the tenor of nationalistic rhetoric and is a strong centralising force, asking for greater state intervention for its own expansion and growth. It seems that the level of intervention by the state is determined more by the concept of nation-state than by cleavages. This is another reason why associations do not develop in developing nation-states; there is a strong tendency among the bureaucracy to dominate these associations.

This extension of the theory of Lipset and Rokkan has an implicit political ideology even if Chhibber is not aware of it. The clear message here is that an active state accentuates social cleavages which lead to a more active intervention by the state. This creates a never-ending spiral.

This can be broken by an autonomous international action and the starting point has to be to put a limit on state action. Chhibber should have spelt it out clearly.

The problem with Chhibber is that he does not go into the dynamics behind cleavages and associations and is unable to link up with the issues of material conditions, ideologies, hegemony, conscientisation and nation-state. He is right when he says that the simple theory of cleavages is applicable to stable developed societies. But his attempt to extend it to developing societies, particularly the emerging nation-states, is problematic.

Cities plus crowds = creativity
by M.L. Raina

The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History by Richard Lehan. University of California Press, Berkley & Los Angeles. pages xvi+330. $ 27.95.

CONSIDER the following passages in two different languages: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself....What a lark! what a plunge”! “Apne joode mein safed gulab ka phool tikaye jab Lotika Sen ghar se nikli to Munne ne us se kaha, mujhe baja le do.” What is common between these Virginia Woolf and Krishen Chander passages except perhaps the mention of flowers in both? Nothing, really, but one significant fact that both are city stories located in London and Calcutta, and both their protagonists plunge themselves into the noise and bustle of the Big City. Mrs Dalloway returns home after floating up and down the stream of London traffic and Lotika Sen is caught up in a worker’s demonstrtion. Mrs Dalloway “dies” out of her social self and Lotika Sen dies literally. The ending in both is problematic.

Neither of these stories is mentioned in Lehan’s book, but they realise the city as what he calls “a state of mind”, just as Mahfouz’s Cairo, Baudelaire’s Paris and Eliot’s London do. Plato and St Augustine allegorise the city for political and theological purposes, accepting it as a community of the elite. Later, Auden would see the city as a “civitas of sound”. The dissenting voices, however, outnumber those that greet the city as a place of civilisation. The much wiser and older Auden would equate the city with “the external disorder/extravagant lies, the baroque frontiers, the surreal police” echoing similar feelings of Faiz in his memorable poem on Lahore, “the city of lights”.

Richard Lehan’s book invites comparison with Marshall Berman’s much more intensely felt Marxist study, “All that is solid melts into air” (Verso). Its title comes from the Communist manifesto of 1848 and establishes a direct link between the city and the “experience of modernity”. Both books trace the growth of the city as a megalopolis, in which solid relationships and structures of feeling, available in less impersonal human societies like the rural communities, melt away to be replaced by the market and the cash nexus.

Berman and Lehan undertake from different perspectives an exploration of modernisation that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and snapped the communitarian bonds of the feudal age. Whereas Berman primarily concentrates on European writers, Lehan draws upon the tradition of Anglo-American poets and novelists to make his point.

Both believe that certain kinds of responses are evident in city living. While Ezra Pound described the city consciousness as non-narrative, Lehman and Berman concentrate on more sinister manifestations of that consciousness. Of these responses the terror of the crowd is the most conspicuous.

Crowds abound in city literature and become potent actors in the ecology of human relationships in urban living. Although it is in film that the crowds acquire more menacing dimensions — one automatically thinks of Eienstein’s “Battleship Ptomekin” and Griffith’s “Birth of a nation”, many novels see crowds as destabilising forces of the city.

“Multitudes on the march”, as Elias Canetti describes crowds, form the rhythm and dynamic of Zola’s “Germinal” and “The Drunkard”. The revolutionary movements create the pulsations that destroy the intimacies of a stable social life. Similarly, in Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” the revolutionary crowds shake the monarchical order literally from the bottom up. They embrace the stench of the city’s sewers and hurl their defiance at the order as they become more extensive and take on the nervous quality of the city itself. As Javert, the symbol of monarchical order, hunts them under the city’s sewers, the crowds overwhelm him with frenatic momentum and pace.

In many Victorian novels (Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell), crowds threaten the very existence of society. Andrei Biely’s “Petersburg” develops an independently urban mob amidst the continued chaos, promise and mystery of life on the streets of the Czarist capital. Eugene Sue’s “Mysteries of Paris” (noticed by Marx) combines revolutionary doctrine, soft pornography and gothic horror in a city setting. But once again it is a film, pudovkin’s “The end of Petersburg”, that shows the xenophobic hysterical street mobs as a throwback to primitivism, letting loose destructive impulses that Shakespeare himself abhorred in “Coriolanus”. The crowds create a new myth of the city as an arena for class warfare and imperial horror.

As Lehan shows with graphic detail, the city is a place of crime, of absolute disregard for human values. Behind its elegant facade lurk monsters like Fagin and Magwitch, Vautrin and Rastignac, and a whole host of shady characters in Dostoevesky and Gogol.

Lehan’s book is primarily a history and begins with the founding of cities in the Bible and other ancient texts. He delves into philosophy, literature and urban history to untangle the contradictory images and meanings of the urban experience. He reads the European city against the decline of feudalism and the rise of empire. He locates the American city against the great wilderness and the Frontier.

He explores disciplines as diverse as architecture, urban studies, economics and philosophy to establish a connection between the development of the city with all its poverty, filth and deprivation, and the development of literary genres such as gothic, detective and fantasy fiction. In tracing these connections, Lehan goes beyond Berman’s brief, and manages to build the view of the city as both a socio-economic fact and a literary/mythical construct.

Even as Berman focusses on the canonical texts of European literature, notably “The bronze horseman” of Pushkin, “Nevsky prospect” of Gogol, Baudelaire’s “Flowers of evil” and Dostoevesky’s “Crime and punishment”, Lehan takes a more sympathetic view of popular genres such as the detective novel, the empire novel and the more accessible forms of writing, to argue his thesis about the ubiquitousness of the city in the consciousness of “modernity” and industrialisation.

His analysis of Kipling’s stories is a good instance of his method. While not discussing any well-known “popular” novels in any great length (his chapter on Joyce is not particularly ground-breaking), he designates sufficient pointers to make us feel the pervasiveness of popular genres in the canonical writers.

Speaking of T.S. Eliot, he remarks: “Eliot imposes the vegetative myth upon a description of the modern city because he realises the unbreakable connection between the two”. Even though vegetative myths are embedded as forms of popular unconscious, they do to an extent determine of structure of a great modern poem. Similarly, the boulevard novel, the penny-dreadful and the detective tale — all of them staples of the best-seller and low-brow imagination — are to be found in the conception and execution of some of the better known canonical texts. The insecurities and uncertainties of empire building are equally reflected, even in pure lyrical novels like Woolf’s “The waves” and “Mrs Dalloway”.

Essentially a synthesiser and builder of the overview, Lehan is not a particularly illuminating critic and interpreter of city literature. His book comes nowhere near Raymond Williams’s classic “The country and the city” in the nature and depth of its insights. It also lacks a firm ideological stand to ground his argument in the kind of stand Berman finds in Marxism.

Nevertheless, the skill with which he provides connections between literary and socio-economic contexts stands him in good stead. Given the scope of his ambition as a literary historian, he manages to say sensible things, if not brilliant ones.

For the most part he sticks to historical detail. On Mark Twain Lehan remarks that Twain dealt with two poles of the 19th century American life: “Europe from which the immigrants came and the West towards which their descendants were moving.” Though not a new interpretation, it helps us to grasp Twain’s distrust of imperialism and his belief that “America was becoming too controlling”. Similarly, while connecting Upton Sinclair to Chicago and Melville to New York, Lehan makes more perceptible the link between a social fact and a literary event.

That the city has traditionally been seen as the antithesis of the country need not be overstressed, as literary pastoralists always do. Lehan’s suggestion that urban alienation is exacerbated by the exploitation of labour ignores the sordidness of life in pastoral surroundings, intimated by Shakespeare in “As you like it” and brilliantly explained by Raymond Williams in the above-mentioned book.

I am not impressed by Lehan’s enthusiasm to see the city as a site of entropy and spiritual decline. He does not convince me when he attributes all modern ills to capitalism, as in his analysis of Thomas Pynchon. He is totally unaware of what Stanislaw Lem, a Marxist writer from Poland, saw as a grim reality in his “The futurological congress”. Lem was projecting a nightmare vision of the socialist paradise in the year 2089. Lem saw it as an icy hell after Dante.

Finally, I detect in Lehan’s book a lack of appreciation for the city as a spur to creative imagination in Gogol, Lorca and others. The city may be a hell, it can still release the tremors of creativity in writers as diverse as Gogol, Mayakovsky and Saul Bellow.

Pin a medal on this heroic effort
by Bimal Bhatia

Medal Gallery Patiala edited and coordinated by P.P.S. Bhandari. Published by Western Command, Chandimandir. Produced and Designed by Highlanders Communications, New Delhi. Pages 221. Rs 700.

ASK a soldier about the medal on his chest and he puffs up with pride. Every medal has a story to tell — of undaunted courage, the clash of steel and flesh, the trickle of blood on earth and of the taut sinews hoisting the victory flag. Gallantry and valour of brave airmen and sailors also contribute to making martial tradition and history of a people and indeed of a nation.Shaped in a smelter’s forge and finished in a smithy, a medal remains just a piece of metal. Until on its edge is stamped the name of a man — living or dead — and it instantly takes you to a battle with guns booming, desperate war cries, the acrid smell of gunpowder and cordite, and yes, the taste of victory.In earlier times military achievements were recognised by grant of land and sharing of war booty. Since land allocation became difficult, kings introduced a series of orders, decorations and medals to recognise the brave deeds of their subjects and distinguish them from their peers.This coffee-table book transports you to the Medal Gallery at the Sheesh Mahal, Patiala, where on display is one of the largest collections of orders, decorations and medals. Unmatched in the world for its richness and variety, this priceless collection is the single-handed effort of Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, himself a colourful personality who lived life to the full.During his seven visits to England and other European countries between 1911 and 1935, he shopped extensively and got back expensive jewellery from Cartier, custom-made Rolex watches, silver from Garrads, cars, carpets, dogs, horses, paintings and wines. From Spink & Son in London, medallists to the British Crown, came the many orders, decorations and medals over a period of time.There are about 1,500 medals and 700 orders and decorations, besides 1,000 odd artefacts. Included in these are some very rare and priceless orders, in particular the Order of the Garter, instituted in 1348 by Kink Edward III. The Orders of Saint Benedict of Aviz and of Christ date back to the 12th century Portugal. Other important displays are the Order of the Thistle, Indian Order of Merit and the Auspicious Star of Punjab. The medals range from those instituted during the civil war in England to World War I. Only a few medals were added after Maharaja Bhupinder Singh died in 1938. The rarest among the decorations is the priceless collection of five Victoria Crosses, the highest decoration for valour in the Commonwealth.Medals instituted by the East India Company, which were given to both native and British soldiers form part of this collection. An interesting medal is that of the famous Battle of Seringapatnam in 1799, where the East India Company defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Also in the collection are medals cut by erstwhile princely states, mainly Bhawalpur, Indore, Gwalior and, of course, Patiala. While most medals were designed and made by London-based Spink & Son and Garrad & Co., Janardhan Singh & Bros., in Moga, Punjab, designed and made medals for the princely states.Also included is a series of regimental medals of much antiquity, which were generally presented by officers of the regiment at their own expense to their men for bravery, long service, marksmanship, etc.Significant among the numerous artefacts and relics in the gallery is the sword of General Sir Thomas Picton who fell mortally wounded at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The inscription on the sword reads: “From the inhabitants of Trinidad to Governor Picton for a colony preserved.”Maharaja Yadvindra Singh presented his father’s entire collection to the Punjab Government in 1962 on the condition that it should be displayed in Patiala town and not taken out under any circumstances. Captain Amarinder Singh at that time was at the National Defence Academy and wrote to his father suggesting that the collection be given to the Indian Army for display at the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun. But by then the maharaja had already offered the collection to the Punjab Government.This largest collection in the world, being second only to that of the Queen of England, is not easily accessible and deserves to be opened to the public. Surely better security arrangements can be worked out for the public viewing of the medallic art of such magnificence.When Lieut-Gen H.B. Kala, former GOC-in-C of Western Command, visited the Medal Gallery in 1998 he saw the priceless nature of this collection, and in it he saw the potential of yorking Punjab to the world tourism map. Thus was born the idea of this book to “release the medals from the captivity of their display cases and bring forth the sagas of bravery and valour from the vaulted gates of the Sheesh Mahal.” This book details the origin and evolution of orders, decorations and medals and gives a run-down on the collector, the lineage of the House of Patiala and the Sheesh Mahal.For Major-Gen Bhandari and his research team it has been an exciting task to piece together the blocks spanning seven centuries of warfare and governance, across seven continents. The end result is over 200 pages of glossy text and sharp, colourful pictures that give you and instant feel of the human endeavour to excel.As you settle down with some hot coffee to browse through the Medal Gallery, your mind races back into history. A hidden truth strikes you. Medals are foreover, just as feats of valour which also remain eternal to transcend borders of enmity.

That is IT in Silicon Valley
by Chandra Mohan

The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley by P.O. Bronson. Random House. Pages 248.

BRONSON has indeed picked up the juices and the aroma of the iconic village party which Silicon Valley is, a party of the brainiest of the world in the gold rush of the information revolution.

It is a stew pot of high achievers, of independent wills, of movers and shakers. They gather because they find steady careers, even fancy job titles of large companies unexciting. They come because they are competitive by instinct and cannot see others succeed more than they do. They come to make enough money so that they never have to think about money again.

This is the new breed of super fertile venture trippers off on a dizzying adventure. Their motivation lies in the thrill of competition and the danger of losing and every year the success bar is raised, shortening time scales, higher margins, more amazing sums. The tally of the arrived has already risen to 1.5 million in the first year, five million in the second and 20 million in the third.

The party was launched in the eighties with Bill Gates’ innocent introduction of pricing for software. Till then, hardware alone had a price; software was for free. This unfolded a new vista of opportunity and propelled individual creativity to the forefront.

Software development requires neither large fixed assets nor large teams. The possibility of infinite market for one’s click is the great magnet. Endless opportunity created by Internet in the nineties and the images of Hotmail and Amazon have turned Silicon Valley into a global icon.

The seekers realise that for joining the party, “You do not have to be a genius/ You don’t have to be a super-human/You don’t even have to be a techie/Just have an idea.” and “The best ideas are under your nose/the big thing is to get first-mover advantage, but dream large.”

A pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is the all-consuming lure. Entrepreneurs, programmers, venture capitalists, sales people, head-hunters and futurists flock there. And, even undertakers.

Firms invariably begin with twos and threes on shoe-string savings. Survival is stretched through starvation salaries. What hooks them together is equity partnership and the promise of millions in tomorrow’s IPO. Their effort to market their embryonic idea to a first-stage backer is desperate.

Without these venture capitalists, (VCs), their house of cards would barely last a few months. The VCs again know their power. Out of every 1000 propositions, only 10 get their support. A crash of entrepreneurial dreams is a common scene. But then job opportunities for these bright knowledge workers also keep opening in the endless stream of the valley.

Bronson illustrates the valley’s culture with the case of Sabeer Bhatia and his Hotmail. To succeed required clever and painstaking promotion, net-working savvy, even a decoy to protect it from being stolen. Some VCs are not beyond stealing. It require guts to beat the VCs down in their demand for a share of equity percentage. The final sale to Microsoft and price negotiation for $ 400 million required shrewd confidence to withstand the browbeating of the power house.

IT and Silicon Valley have become buzz words today. Every state is scrambling to climb on the band wagon. Earth stations, IT parks, optical fibre links. It eminently suits our culture of isolation of the educated from the dirt and grime of reality which our world is. Replicating the valley requires much more than creation of physical assets. It requires creation of entrepreneurs who apply knowledge to the felt need and an environment which enables them to take the risks involved.

With IT taking the shape of a national cult and salvation mantra for all our ills, Bronson’s insight carries useful lessons for the managers and venture capitalists who are propelling the movement. It is much more than computers, Internet and E-mail; it is a total culture created by social need.

* * *

How the Web was won: Microsoft from Windows to Web by Paul Andrews. Broadway Books, New York. Pages 352.

What triggers slumbering giants into action? How do they play the catch-up game? What mistakes do they make on the way? How do they awaken to mistaken paths? How do they correct en route?

And yet, they see that there are no stops till the leadership gold is won. All this also happens at a breakneck speed in today’s world where time is measured in nano-seconds.

Andrews’s is a fascinating ball-by-ball story of the demands which today’s IT competition places on companies and the speed, flexibility and commitment with which their teams must react.

It begins with Ballmer’s (Gates’ longtime friend and classmate, inception associate and Microsoft’s No. 2) accidental discovery of the missing of the Internet bus by Microsoft in its preoccupation with Windows. He had chanced to hear of this new opportunity at a seminar at Harvard and his frantic midnight E-mail to colleagues on return speaks out both the vagueness of his understanding and the urgency of his call to action (reproduced verbatim, mistakes, errors and all): “I donot really understand what I am saying or asking for, but I sense an opportunity could/should some one look into this. I was at harbard talking to students Mon theya ll have a view of what would be cool Iw ant to sell mail and chicago (code name for Windows 95) somehow this way what think”.

By 9.12 a.m. next morning the reaction process had begun and Bill Gates himself had chipped in with his views. Not that Internet found many super-enthusiastic champions, but action had been triggered. Half-hearted groping had begun. To reduce the risk of failure because of a wrong route selection, two competing teams pursuing two alternatives were set up in the typical style of fast track R&D, but unfortunately, both were under-resourced.

In the meantime, as Microsoft lumbered along, Netscape had vaulted to super success with its Net browser. Its Net surfing and E-mail had mesmerised the world and its customer list had exploded into millions. Netscape had rocketed into the billion dollar league overnight.

But then Microsoft was no soft ball team and Gates no ordinary leader. They analysed the existing technology, combined the strengths of fundamental fields, and then improved them all with their own unique blend of features and ease of use enhancements to make customer-use easier. Their innovativeness, creativity and ingenuity lay in raising existing technology far beyond what the original inventors were capable of.

The book also gives some insights into the culture and practices which have led Microsoft to become the collossus that it is. “Learn about what not to do, how not to act, how not to treat new ideas and innovative suggestions and fellow workers. Trust your instincts and beliefs even if they run against the grain of accepted practice.”

“Challenge every new idea and suggestion. Test ability to defend it and the commitment to follow it through. In case it is backed up do not stand in the way... See that benefits are to the macro and not micro... Pay flat fees instead of royalties. If a programme hits big, you would be much farther ahead in profits.”

It is this culture which has brought outleaders like Silverberg and Ludwig who know how to provoke new ideas and innovative suggestions, and enable those around them to make right choice and learn from mistakes. They tolerate miscues which neither of them would have ever commited, but which were necessary as lessons learned.

Silverberg also loved contact with the average user and made him the reality check of all his software, and not the usual techies. For him, software had to possess an emotional content which made the user smile with pleasure.

The end user always remained his boss. If you failed to meet his needs, some competitor would always come along and snatch him away. His driving was hard and relentless.

From the time the dream was set in motion by Ballmer’s E-mail, in four years of hard-driven pedal-to-metal development, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer blazed to join the Wondows juggernaut.

The book holds excellent lessons for leaders in today’s world of brutal competition. How is talent collected? How is its creativity nurtured? How is it made to deliver? What blistering speed is demanded by today’s competition?

A different kind of attack on dalits
by Rajiv Lochan

Dalits in Modern India: Vision And Values edited by S M Michael. Vistaar, New Delhi. Pages 353. Rs 425.

THERE is this traditional story of the elephant and six blind men, each of whom touched a particular part and came to conclusions about the animal on that basis. Scholars are often like that, even when they claim to be engaged with the hurly-burly of normal life and concerned with changing society.

Little wonder then that only the unscholarly rise to the challenge of actually doing something to change society while the rest move around in considerable confusion over their chosen areas of interest, trying to understand whatever little they can of reality. The book under review is an excellent example of such scholarly confusion. Or, is it a reflection of disinterest in the dalits while claiming the contrary?

Even when a book is not able to be particularly scholarly, it needs to be consistent. That is what distinguishes it from a student paper which is not up for publication. In this book that is not the case. BAMCEF, the organisation which first brought dalit employees into the forefront of democratic politics in India and from which organisations like the BSP emerged, is variously referred to in the book as “All India Backward SC, ST, OBC and Minority Communities Employees Federation” (p 30), which is close to its actual name, and “Backward, Adivasi and Muslim Caste Federation” (p 143).

Then, in a book devoted to analysing the vision and values of the dalits, BAMCEF is criticised by one of the contributors (Gopal Guru) for not at all being interested in the “growing privatisation of the state economy”. For a political scientist specialising in dalit politics this is an amazing observation considering that BAMCEF has been considerably articulate in critiquing the so-called liberalisation and consequent privatisation of the economy.

In fact one of the major themes of discussions in the journal Bahujan Voice and other fora where the concerned dalits express themselves publicly is that in the garb of privatisation the state in India wants to further bring down its expenditure on the social sector concerned with the dalits (which already is less than 1 per cent of the budget) while not doing anything to curb corruption and mismanagement which is actually responsible for much of the losses that government and quasi-government organisations incur.

The absence in this book of major figures of contemporary dalit movement like D. S. Khaparde, Kanshi Ram, T. S. Jhalli as also the controversies between them and their followers is glaring since they constitute an important part of the vision of the educated dalits today.

Also, while one does appreciate the desire of the writers to phrase-making, it still is disconcerting to have references in this book to “the Phule-Ambedkarian discourse” when the usual term is “Phule-Ambedkarite discourse”.

As we all know, appearances are seldom commensurate with reality. In fact thinkers, leaders and scientists of various sorts have made it their profession to tell others of the disjunctions and conjunctions that exist between appearance and reality. But most of the contributors to this rather tedious volume are not interested in such a task. Their chosen area of interest is pontification, telling others how sociology and anthropology should be done. These essays we ignore in the present review.

This rather uninteresting book on the vision and values of the dalits in modern India is divided into four parts. In his 22-page introduction the editor summarises the 16 essays. He uses the opportunity to give the reader his own version of the caste system. Those who have read the work on caste brought out by the Oxford University Press some years ago will not find anything new here except the bromide ridden recounting of the politics and ideas of Babasaheb Ambedkar. In fact Ambedkar and Phule form a considerable part of most of the other essays in the book.

It might have added to the value of the book had the editor commissioned a comprehensive essay on these two thinkers with the express request that the essays try to go beyond the widely available literature on these two and then requested the rest to desist from providing us with potted versions of the Phule-Ambedkarite vision.

In fact the most interesting essays in this book are the four based on empirical information. Arjun Patel’s essay on the hinduisation of Adivasis in South Gujarat, Shyam Lal’s on “Dalitisation”, Pillai-Vetschera’s on Mahar women from Ahmednagar district and Deliege’s on “Demonic possession in Catholic South India” form the most informative portion of the book. Here they look at some of the questions which have troubled scholars and political activists alike and provide caste studies illustrating the social process.

It is here that we find new insights into the mode in which the dalits relate to their social surroundings. Deliege tells us how possession becomes one of the mechanisms by which the dalits show their rejection of the caste system. Pillai-Vetschera comes out with a scathing critique of the domination of the dalit movement by intellectuals who have used the movement for their own benefit while introducing strands of oppression into their own community’s women. Shyam Lal moves between textual analysis and anthropological information to highlight the processes that force people into lower castes.

It is such empirical studies that are the need of the day if we wish to further the cause of the dalit movement. For, the dalit movement in India today is not merely political (though that is its most visible strand) but also social, reformist and concerned with educating the dalit masses about strategies through which they can regain their dignity in our iniquitous society.