In the eye of the storm

TJS George is eminently qualified to tell the India story as one of the most perceptive observers of the country. Age has not withered his rigour and he makes his case with conviction.

Well-known journalist TJS George’s ‘Dismantling of India’ tells the story of India through the individual chronicles of 35 personalities. He has selected these personalities to construct an India which is live and real for him, but what he fleshes out with their lives is an idea of India which is under stress now. That India was discovered during the freedom struggle, though it has always existed, and the Constitution gave shape to it. George is concerned that it is being dismantled. The theme running through the book is the building of that India and the prospect of its dismantling.

It is not easy to trace the history of a country, or to describe it, with the lives of individuals, especially a country as diverse and complex as India. The idea of the individual as a distinctive entity in society may have only emerged in India after its contact with the West. George quotes Karl Marx approvingly to say that men make their own history but they do it under circumstances existing already, and that just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, they conjure up the spirits of the past to their service — to present new scenes in history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.

Range and diversity

Here is India in its great range and diversity, and the personalities are from all walks of life. Mahatma Gandhi and Nathuram Godse are there, and CN Annadurai and Jayalalithaa, Vilayat Khan and MF Husain, and Veerappan and Harshad Mehta. Devangana Kalita, Natasha Nerwal and Disha Ravi, who pushed back against a marauding state and were sought to be punished for that, also make that India. They made themselves special by working for the common good, though, as George says, their idea of the common good varied and sometimes wasn’t good at all. But it is a representational India and we get an idea of it with the play of many ideas and different ideologies.

If the building of India could be seen as the work of individuals, its destruction can also be seen as the work of an individual. The first piece in the book is appropriately about JRD Tata who is a builder of modern India and the last one is about Narendra Modi whom George would consider the dismantler-in-chief of that India. Amit Shah’s profile comes just before Modi’s. Modi figures in many other profiles also as the person who did most to demolish the idea of India that was real before and immediately after independence. In the piece about Godse, George says: “Why did the politics of the Gandhi-Nehru era change when Vajpayee and LK Advani had their innings? Why did politics change again under Narendra Modi and become an arena for the glorification of individual eminence?”

Power of the individual

That is the crux of the book’s argument: if the power of the individual is a determining factor in the politics of power, Narendra Modi used it more effectively than any BJP leader before him. Although the Nehrus and the Vajpayees were bigger than the party, they acted as if the party was bigger than them. Modi not only saw himself as bigger than the party but also ensured that the party agreed with his vision. While others belonged to a culture that put the country first, the culture changed radically under Modi. George elaborates on this idea in the article on Modi in which he sees Modi’s showmanship and drama, his belief that he was the quintessence of the country, and his self-centred and autocratic notion of power as signs of the degradation of the idea of the inclusive and democratic nation. A nation built by many individuals would reflect and represent all of them, as much their contradictions and diversities as their commonalities. But when the nation is identified with one person and one idea, it crumbles and fails. At the centre of that story is an individual who cuts himself off from the past, reimagines and misrepresents it, and then claims to embody it. That underlines a truth of history: Rulers who have tried to communicate with and relate to people, short-circuiting the institutions of state and society, have always undermined the systems that threw them up.

George is eminently qualified to tell this story as he is among the keenest and most perceptive observers of this India for decades. His professional life is coterminous with independent India. He reached Bombay in 1947 to join a newspaper and has stayed a journalist all his life. He made an unbroken running commentary on the world and its people, places and events through a column, and the disparate points of view on a moving world have crystallised into a wider view in this book. At 94, age has not withered his keenness and rigour; there is no sense of resignation and cynicism, and George makes his case with clarity and conviction. The profiles in this volume are not the usual journalistic profiles of people who pop up in the news and disappear.

Much research has gone into every piece. There are known facts about the personalities, less known details about their lives, anecdotes and others’ views about them. There are insights into their character, evaluation of their role and a readiness to take an unconventional view about some of them. There is intelligence at work to understand people and things, imagination in play to connect them and some vision and a lot of effort behind this book. There is the rare spelling error and an occasional wilting of the elegant style, but the book should be read both for its content and for its prose.