Gandhi, Gorakhpur and development

Many moons ago, as a graduate student at Emory University in the US, I taught an undergraduate course titled “From Gandhi to Google: Technology and Nationalism in India.”  The goal of the course was to examine how technology, associated with a superior Western modernity, figured in the Indian anticolonial imagination and in the postcolonial project of nation-building. One of the key texts we read in the class was Gandhi’s brilliant but exasperating Hind Swaraj, originally written in 1909 in Gujarati and translated into English shortly thereafter.  Expressed as a conversation between two figures named Reader and Editor, the brief book is a searing critique of Western modernity, in which Gandhi repudiates Western civilisation as inimical to the very essence of humanity. Eschewing Western political forms as inadequate for India, the text offers us a vision of India as a decentralised republic of villages, in which individual and social life are forged together by an overarching ethical imperative.

Some of the more regressive and seemingly bizarre claims in Hind Swaraj — at least to the average 21st century resident in a developed nation — concern Gandhi’s unequivocal rejection of lawyers, doctors and Western medicine, the railways, and machinery, the last synonymous with Western technology. These views of Gandhi were met by puzzlement by my students. For Indian-origin students, many of whom happened to be planning careers as doctors, lawyers, and engineers, that bewilderment was often compounded by deep dismay, as if the Gandhi they had been brought up to revere by their parents was personally mocking their ambitions.

But, as we discussed in class, Gandhi’s words must frequently be taken with a pinch or two of Dandi salt. For Gandhi, as the historian Gyan Prakash, has argued, was no neo-Luddite. While Gandhi may justly be critiqued for romanticising the Indian village, the ideal Gandhian village, Prakash points out, was one that would make ample use of the benefits of science and technology. It would be free from disease and flush with clean drinking water. Gandhi’s attack on the railways, Western medicine, and Western technology in Hind Swaraj, then, can be read as a critique of an instrumentalist vision of scientific reason, in which science and technology, divorced from the context in which they are implemented and the ends for which they will be used, are considered unequivocal agents of the social good.

Ironically, Gandhi’s disciple Nehru was arguably guilty of the very kind of thinking that Gandhi questioned in Hind Swaraj.  The idea of science and technology as autonomous forces for social good are encapsulated in the Nehruvian obsession with ‘planning’ — a broad term subsuming scientific, economic, and social development — which every Indian government since Independence has dutifully perpetuated. Partha Chatterjee has suggested that in the post-Independence view of scientific ‘planning’, the Indian state becomes a means to development as an end, rather than the other way around.

Along with rank callousness and unforgivable incompetence, it is the failure of this limited kind of thinking about technology and development that we have witnessed in the past week in the tragedy that resulted in 70 children dying at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College hospital in Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. The children suffered what one assumes are unimaginably horrible deaths, because their supply of oxygen ran out. The accounts of parents gathered in this story in Scroll that recounts the events as they unfolded, reveal that they were asked to make do with manual resuscitators to maintain a supply of oxygen to the children’s lungs. The UP government, however, has maintained that the lack of oxygen supply was not the only or chief cause of the children’s death. The government’s position is that there is a longstanding health crisis in the region that is the cause of large numbers of children’s deaths each year in the hospital and area, a fact that data seems to bear out.

There is no question that the particular responsibility for the deaths lies with the UP government, which had not paid the hospital’s oxygen supplier for months. And Yogi Adityanath, the current Chief Minister of the state, who happens to have represented Gorakhpur as an MP for 5 terms, also bears responsibility for the abject condition in which vast numbers of his constituents live. In a weak and shameful defence of his government’s failings, Adityanath blamed the deaths on the common practice of open defecation, apparently unaware that he was merely admitting to his own ineffectuality as an elected representative.

Beyond this incident, though, lies a deeper failure of the post-colonial state, one in which an obsession with development has increasingly been separated from any discussion of how development relates to social realities in the Indian context. In the realms of politics and policy, we have gone from Indira Gandhi’s ‘Garibi Hatao’ to Rajiv Gandhi’s childlike enthusiasm about computers and wild national cheering about the numbers of STD booths Sam Pitroda made available in India in the 1980s. We have traded one cliché for another: after parroting hopes about the Indian tiger roaring loudly following economic liberalisation in 1991, we now recite the relentless mantra of India as an ‘emerging superpower.’ In the educational sphere, the fixation with development and the fetishisation of technology has translated into an obsession with engineering and medicine, the mushrooming of large numbers of utterly sub-standard private and capitation-fee colleges which mostly produce unemployable graduates (or, in the case of Madhya Pradesh, total frauds). Meanwhile, the savvy operators on the development-poverty alleviation INGO global conference circuit mouth the latest platitudes about ‘capacity-building’, ‘human capital’, social entrepreneurship or randomised control trials as the latest miracle pill for India.

At the risk of some overgeneralisation, one can say that the generations of the 1950s, 1960s, and, to an extent, the 1970s, were far more sophisticated in their understanding of the complex relationships between technology, development, and society in the Indian setting. They were also, I posit, more genuinely patriotic while being less jingoistic in their commitment to nation-building. For all the naivete of the vision of the Nehruvian state, with its simplistic and cringe-inducing rhetoric of dams being the temples of India and the like, there was some attempt to ground development initiatives in the specific realities of India. Nehru, with his utopianism and romantic expectations of science and technology, had hoped that Indian elites would work for the benefit of their fellow Indians — one reason why he did not care much for diasporic Indians the way the BJP always has.

In the post-Nehruvian era and especially since economic liberalisation, however, Indian elites seem largely to have interpreted the India state’s constant exhortations about development in self-serving terms. A degree in engineering or medicine, often heavily subsidised by the Indian government, is considered an achievement and an end in itself, a mark of status, and a ticket to the United States. In swathes of India, it is also, like an IAS qualification, the magic doorway to a sweet dowry or, if one lands the right government post, a healthy illegal income. In what may be called the post-outsourcing era, the achievements of Indians in Silicon Valley serve as a compensatory feel-good substitute for the slow progress made with regard to daunting challenges at home. The fact that Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s father-in-law’s second marriage at the age of 70 made headline news in India shows how deeply rooted this trait is among us. The ‘development,’ expected of Dr. Manmohan Singh and boldly promised by Modi, seems to have been left to some mysterious others or sublimated into photo-ops for Swachch Bharat and occasional crackdowns on men urinating in public. And in the last few years in particular, the mainstream media seems to have abandoned any commitment to social responsibility in favour of partisan screaming at all things they consider anti-national. Perhaps it is the awareness of these contradictions and shortcomings that make us Indians bristle with a little too much defensiveness when the CEO of Snapchat or a basketball player reminds us of being a poor and, in many ways, a wretched country.

The Gandhi of Hind Swaraj claims to have no faith in modern, Western-style medicine. Characteristic of the work, the claims are hyperbolic (“Sometimes I think that quacks are better than highly qualified doctors”) and, indeed, outrageous. Modern doctors don’t punish patients for vices, just cure them so people indulge in the vices again. These doctors don’t care for the religious sensitivities of patients, using animal fats in medicine. Beneath the irrational and regressive moralising in these words, which one finds very hard to agree with, Gandhi’s point is that this model of medicine does not see the whole person but simply a body, an object to be treated. It is a mode of treatment that is separated from the ethical consideration of what makes up an individual person, of what gives him or her a distinctive selfhood. Perhaps what we saw in the manner in which the most vulnerable of Gorakhpur’s residents — children from relatively poor families in the Indian context — was the most extreme manifestation of this perspective. The representatives of the state, either out of apathy or to seek a cut or give the contract for oxygen to another supplier, deliberately let 70 children die in a hospital that sees too many deaths at this time of year anyway because of a lack of resources.

Seventy years after Independence, the dream of development has not been fulfilled, yet, as indicated by the success of Modi’s last election campaign premised on that very idea, it continues to hold us in thrall. Gandhi has much more to teach us than Modi, his corporate cheerleaders, real estate developers, and Indian elites. But is anyone willing to listen?

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