Kafr al-Hanadwa

Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph share their notes from India in 1975-76, shortly after Indira Gandhi had imposed a state of emergency, and it’s surprising how familiar it all sounds.

The level of outrage with what is happening in India has diminished along the way. Outrage was highest in London, muted in Jaipur. We met with W.H. Morris-Jones, the most respected of the English political scientists working on India, and with a philosophically inclined set around Amartya Sen, who is a professor of economics at the London School of Economics. Sen and Morris-Jones had signed an English press advertisement in the London Times condemning the new political arrangements. Amartya had heard that 250 Delhi faculty had been arrested and their pensions and benefits and salaries affected. (One hundred and twenty-five were arrested, for four days or so, which considerably shook the Delhi academic community; their friends here say the story about benefits is not true.) Both Sen and Morris-Jones were sharply critical; Morris-Jones remarked on the deafening silence from scholars of India in the US and England.

At Amartya’s house, we had a brisk discussion with Eric Hobsbawm and W.G. Runciman from Cambridge, and Richard Jeffrey, a philosopher from Princeton. We took the position that India was likely to be a Louis Napoleon state, with middle-class notions of efficiency and effectiveness, and a happy civil service able to accomplish what had been much harder to accomplish under the populist conditions of the last few years. Whether the state would also succeed in its distributional intentions had yet to be seen. Sen confirmed this image, saying that it was his impression that the business community, at least the haute bourgeoisie, was not discontented, red tape having been reduced. Hobsbawm took the position that Louis Napoleon states are rather useful; on the other hand, liberalism had its good sides, since without public access to information, closed states are likely not to work very well.

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Over the seminar hung a certain palpable atmospherics of the kind that has plagued public events since the Emergency was declared. Whispering participants were trying to figure out whether the “Delhi observer” had come-a silent man of ominous connections to the Delhi establishment, who appears at important functions, and to whom we refer as “the Gauleiter”. One of the participants gave a strong paper, “Freedom of Expression in Danger; the Case of Africa”.

Kothari has taken some courageous positions in recent months. The January issue of Seminar carried an article by him, among other critical offerings, which led to talk in Delhi of the end of Seminar and led Kothari’s friends to worry about his future. (Seminar was closed down in the autumn and Kothari left the country.)

The content of the debate between him and Lloyd is of some interest, in view of the headline that appeared the next day, after we had left for Calcutta, in the Rajasthan Patrika-”American Professor Makes Anti-Indian Propaganda”-and of the resolution passed by a quickly created Student Council of the University of Rajasthan (there is none; it was dissolved), to the effect that American forces, in the forms of films and of an anti-Indian lecture by Professor Lloyd Rudolph, were penetrating the university; and furthermore 19 professors at the university (almost every respectable intellectual figure was on the list, including Varma and Daya Krishna) were cia agents and ought to be fired.