Excerpts:

Q: How do you interpret the outcome of the polls in four states.

A: We feel that the outcome of the just concluded assembly polls is a reflection of the receptivity of the good work done by the Vajpayee Government. Another important aspect these elections have proved is that the popularity of Mr Vajpayee is going up in contrast to Congress President Sonia Gandhi. So, we have to further accelerate development and intensify the campaign to educate the masses about the good work done by the Vajpayee Government.

Q: What factors helped the BJP wrest power in three of the four states?

A: In a nutshell I can say that the biggest factor was the total support given by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister. Whatever we had asked for we were given:

Deferring implementation of CAS, VAT and restructuring of Telecom rates, resolution of problems faced by powerlooms, etc. Mr Advani was regularly attending the meetings of the core group as well as the General Secretaries which helped us share our ideas and take his guidance. The number of programmes we asked for the campaign, they (PM and DPM) had granted. Secondly, it was long-term planning. Thirdly, team work — the entire group worked as a team encompassing sharing of information and pooling of ideas. Fourthly, we decided to focus our attention totally on development because we thought that we are on a strong wicket in that aspect compared to the Congress governments in these states. Fifthly, the support of the Sangh. Moreover, our workers also understood the challenge as we had dubbed this set of elections as the “Semi Final”. “Operation 2003” and “Mission 2004” have gone down well with our workers who made it possible for the BJP to enter the finals with a bang. Programmes like “Gram Chalo Abhiyan”, “Gaon Chalo Ghar Ghar Chalo Abhiyan”, “Vijay Vikas Parva” and “Sahyog” programme, involving central ministers helped us to motivate the cadres on the one hand and make the people aware of the good work done by the Vajpayee Government.

Q: How is it that for the first time BJP’s leaders seemed to be working in perfect unity.

A: The earlier setbacks were in mind and the elections were nearer. So there was motivation that we should fight back and win. Everyone was taken into confidence. Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, myself and other top leaders sat together and worked systematically to achieve our goal. We decided well in advance about the leadership in the election-bound states and had devised a four-point programme — to tell the people about the good work done, preparation of chargesheets against the Congress Governments, issue-based attacks on the Congress Governments and reached out to the people by way of Parivartan yatras. Specific responsibility was also given to leaders like Pramod Mahajan (Rajasthan), Arun Jaitley (Madhya Pradesh), Sanjay Joshi (Chhattisgarh) and M A Naqvi (Delhi). So there was a combination of clarity in leadership as well as coordination. Of course, in Chhattisgarh we had a different strategy and preferred not to project anyone as the chief ministerial candidate to keep former Chief Minister Ajit Jogi guessing.

Q: Did the Judeo episode result in Raman Singh getting the chief ministership of Chhattisgarh?

A: In Chhattisgarh we decided to bank on the collective leadership and as part of our strategy did not project any leader as a chief ministerial candidate. Mr Raman Singh was a natural choice because he had resigned from central ministership and took over as Chhattisgarh BJP Unit President and worked relentlessly for the success of the party there. Having him as a Chief Minister is an advantage.

Q: Did you really expect such a massive victory?

A: From day one we were sure about the results. You had seen the results of the three by-elections held earlier in Rajasthan. All went in BJP’s favour. We were pretty confident though we knew that it will be a tough fight in Chhattisgarh and Delhi. Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan we were very sure. In Chhattisgarh, due to the machination of Mr Jogi and the demoralisation of our party as Mr Jogi broke our party, broke one of our MPs and had got our leaders beaten up and then the conspiracy against Mr Judeo, we were not that confident. Despite that we were able to turn the tables. But for the conspiracy against Judeo the margin of victory would have been even wider.

Q: But as BJP President what do you feel about Judeo who has been filmed accepting money?

A: According to me, ministers are not expected to go to hotels for drinking. But what exactly happened and whether the film was doctored...the truth will come out in the probe. I am yet to talk to Judeo in detail. But as far the people of Chhattisgarh are concerned, the outcome clearly reflects that they appreciated the prompt action initiated by the Prime Minister. Judeo resigned as minister and the Prime Minister immediately ordered a CBI probe.

Q: You talked about political realignment after the assembly polls?

A: Yes. There will be realignment of political forces. The decline of the Congress has started and there is going to be conflict within that party. We are seeing what is happening to the Congress in Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab and Uttaranchal. There is universal acceptance of the leadership of Mr Vajpayee, on the other hand, there is a big question mark on Congress President Sonia Gandhi leading the country. Look at Meghalaya, West Bengal, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, the Congress has been pushed to third position. Now they have lost in Mizoram too. The Congress is not in a proper state and there are no takers for its call for alliances. Even the Samajwadi party has expressed its reservation over Mrs Gandhi leading a coalition.

Q: What about the BJP’s core Hindutva issues?

Let us look at this last issue first. The attempts by the Government of India to reduce the number of admission tests for all professional courses are indeed to be lauded. One could only pity the poor student who was rushing from one examination hall to another in the past while appearing for entrance exams for engineering, medicine, MBA and MCA. Today these have been reduced considerably and in the case of MBA we now have five main exams, namely MAT (conducted by AIMA), CAT (of IIMs), XAT (by XLRI), JMET (by IITs) and ATMA (of AIMS). The attempt perhaps is to reduce even these and force the IIMs to give up their exam and opt for one of the standard exams. It is this direction that I have my reservations on. IIMs are providing the best management education in the country. Their graduates are not only respected and command a premium within but outside the country as well. To be able to pick up the best one thousand out of more than 150000 striving for the IIMs, it is important to set the tests at a standard where it is possible to pick up the best. IIMs over their long existence have gained considerable experience in conducting the entrance exam and not to use that experience for the sake of reducing the number of exams will indeed be a pity. Better would be to continue with CAT and two or three more entrance tests with the top institutes opting for CAT. This would achieve the objective of reducing the tests as also not diluting the standards that the IIMs have built into their admission tests over this long period.

The second issue relates to doing away with the interview and group discussions in the admission tests. In the early 70s and 80s management education in the country was imparted by the three IIMs and a few other reputed institutes, including a few universities. This has now spread and management schools have mushroomed all over the country. Today a student with 55 per cent marks in graduation is also able to stake a claim in a management school which was a distant dream in the past. The number of students applying to management institutions in some cases is either equal to or even less than the number of seats in that institution. In such cases interviews and group discussions have become another way of making money by these institutions wherein they charge each student separately for these. Further, in some cases interviews and group discussions could also be used as a means of back door entry for the not so bright students. Another argument against the interviews and GD is that persons conducting these interviews and group discussions are changed during the course of the interviews and thus there is a lack of consistency. All the above are very cogent arguments indeed and the decision to do away with the interviews and group discussions in this respect seems to be a very logical one. But when the spectrum of management education in our country is as wide as from a two-room management school in a distant town to the IIMs and other very reputed institutes like XLRI and FMS, to deal with all of them with a uniform regulation will only give us less than optimal solutions. The first lesson of regulation is that if one tries to regulate the whole spectrum with a uniform regulation it may result in a uniform and easily understood and implementable decision but then such a regulation will lead to the standards of the lowest common denominator of the set that we are trying to regulate. Thus we will have the same set of regulation for the two-room management school as we will have for the IIMs. Therefore, while the decision to do away with the interviews and group discussions may seem to be a sound one but to force it on the IIMs and other reputed institutes may after all not be that wise. IIMs have had a long experience of these instruments as a means to differentiating the best from the very good and to disband it just because the lowest common denominator in the set cannot carry it with poise will be unfortunate.

The above arguments also need to be seen in the context of the competition that management education in India is facing from American and European management schools. In this context the decision to restrict the corpus of IIMs to Rs 25 crore becomes important. The financial strength of these institutions will go a long way in providing them the academic and functional autonomy. Perhaps the attempt of restricting the corpus comes from the belief that exorbitant fees is being charged from the students. Today in an era of free market and especially in management education where an IIM graduate lands up with an average salary of Rs 7 lakh per annum upwards, a fee of Rs 1.5 lakh per annum should not be resented. Even the not so well-off students who are unable to get a scholarship can today rely on easy loans. This should also be seen in the perspective that the fund-starved governments should spend their scarce resources on primary education and health rather than on higher education.

The need of the hour is to provide the IIMs the freedom to manage themselves. It is only then that they will be able to attract the best international talent and continue to maintain their quality which has given them name and fame across the world. If the IIM director needs to seek permission from the Government of India to travel abroad as is prevalent today (according to Prof Raghunathan in an article in the ET) it would only be natural for most of them to leave for greener pastures (both in terms of autonomy and money) in the industry or educational institutions in America. To say that such control will prevent extravagance is a bit far-fetched argument. It would, instead, be wise to rely upon the wisdom and integrity of stalwarts in whom we bestow the control of our premium institutions and the boards that manage them.

Victor Kiernan’s life took a particular turn when, between 1931 and 1938 in Cambridge, he mixed in with a lot of students from the Indian subcontinent and south Asia. The most articulate and active among them were Communists and Kiernan too turned firmly Communist. A brilliant student, with a string of Firsts and Fellowships, his association with Marx, Socialism and Communism was lifelong (he joined the party in 1934) and it deeply shaped his scholarship. But his was a superfine brain and his interests scampered far beyond history and politics and into art, literature, poetics and Urdu poetry.

Urdu poetry came up because Kiernan chose to spend the first of a four-year Cambridge college fellowship in India. Once here in 1938, World War II began and so he was, in a sense, trapped till 1946. He taught in Lahore — first at Sikh National College and then at the Aitchison College. He kept in close touch with his Indian Communist friends and this took him often to the Communist Party of India’s commune in Bombay and to Delhi besides, of course, Lahore. Calcutta also figured sometimes in his travels and also places like Quetta, Sitamau in Rajasthan, Jaipur, Indore and Srinagar in Kashmir. All these bob up in a stylish but restrained 16-page of Reminescenes written specially for the book which is called “Across Time and Continents” (Leftward Books, 2003, Rs. 450). While the memories of many of us become hazy with time, his are sharp. He has a great gift of friendship and his travels and experiences are much linked to his friends. Coming with secret messages from the Communist Party of Great Britain, he was taken into the inner meetings of the Indian Communists.

He is what can be genuinely described as a ‘don’ with his knowledge of Latin and Greek, French, and Spanish. Lahore brought him to Urdu. He studied Iqbal’s philosophy and translated the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz who became a good friend. His associations shaped his scholarship because he became one of the foremost writers on Western Imperialism in non-Western regions — China, India, of course, Latin America and even Africa.

Imperialism alone didn’t bottle up his scholarship and reading which took in poetry, tobacco, Shakespeare and Duelling. In scholarship proper he belonged to the highly reputed British Communist Party Historians Group of the nineteen forties of whom the ones known best in India are Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson. These brilliant historians sparked each other off to examine many aspects of what began to be called “bottom up” history, seeing history from the perspective of people at the base.

Wanting to review the book at length for a periodical I don’t aim to give away much more than some hors d’oeuvre inviting a dig into its contents, which contain long essays on Marx and India; Marx, Engels and the Indian Mutiny; and Iqbal as Prophet of Change. Outside this volume there are: America, the New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony; Imperialism and its contradictions and so on. At least as interesting are some other titles: Poets, Politics and the People; Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, a Marxist Study; Tobacco: A History; The Duel in European History; Horace: Poetics and Politics. If one figured these books they would show, from the notes, that he was no dilettante reader but a thoroughgoing one.

What is terribly important for us is to see ourselves as a thoroughly sympathetic but not uncritical person like Victor Kiernan does. And to look coldly at our politicians most of whom nothing but party politics know. Like his friend and contemporary Eric Hobsbawm, Victor’s English is clear and flexed with style. One doesn’t have to put away his writing after a while, with an exhaust sigh as is the fate of so many Marxist tracts. He was not a slave of dogma and several times in his life he was critical of the Marxist view of Communist parties. He wrote as late as in 1968, that “Marxism needs a spring-cleaning”. One hopes that he was able to imbue his students, of whom Prakash Karat was one, with the same thoughtful specticism.

His Indian friends in the Communist movement turned several somersaults, spoke against one another, split in the manner of all Indian political parties often for personality reasons. Many of the Cambridge Historians group left the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Soviet Invasion of Hungary. Victor did not leave it till 1959.

His long articles taught me, at least, a lot about Marx that I did not know. It is peppered with insightful comments about Marx on India which, of course, he never visited but studied a great deal about. The Indian Mutiny, Victor shows, was, for Marx, a nodal point in the development of imperialism in India and also, of course of Indian nationalism. He quotes an epigram of Marx’s which I made a note of: “To be free at home, John Bull must enslave abroad”! Oddly, Marx had no clue about the Bengal Renaissance and also, according to Victor, he badly misjudged the importance of religion in India. He and Engels both failed to see the significance of the resistance to the British in Oudh.

Readers of The Tribune who are old Lahore hands will recognise with pleasure parts of the city where Victor lived and worked and will probably also recall some of his contemporaries and colleagues. They might also like to taste his views on Iqbal and Faiz.