Interview

Dhirubhai Sheth, Honorary Senior Fellow, CSDS, in conversation with Madhu Kishwar, CSDS, Delhi

Dhirubhai, you knew Rajni from Baroda and then you also joined the CSDS faculty. How was the idea of CSDS conceived, and the circumstances in which it was founded?

The idea of CSDS was incipiently there when Rajni was teaching in Baroda University. In Baroda, there was a small, informal discussion group of some teachers of the Baroda University. Rajni taught in the political science department and I was a research associate in the sociology department. I am talking of 1960-61. The group was formed at the initiative of Professor R.C. Patel. The people who frequently met included R.C. Patel, I.S. Gulati (economics), Rajni Kothari (political science), I.P. Desai (sociology), B.G. Shah (commerce), Satish Mishra (history) and occasionally, Suresh Joshi (literature), myself and Tarun Sheth (sociology). This was different from another group, also founded by R.C. Patel, called the Renaissance Club though some members overlapped.

The discussions were generally about the state of higher education in India and, more specifically, on issues pertaining to Baroda University. One question that persistently cropped up was why the kind of social science produced in Indian universities did not match, or even come near to the kind created in some western universities, especially in terms of its contemporary relevance and quality; why the work of most Indian academics made little sense for understanding the problems of the Indian society.

There was deep dissatisfaction about the universities having become teaching shops and there being little scope for research. Those among us who were engaged in research narrated stories, some hilarious and some not so funny, about the kind of administrative ‘requirements’ they were asked to meet in the course of carrying out a project. It was during such discussions that the idea of an independent research centre, outside the university system, often surfaced but was not seriously discussed. Among all of us, Rajni was most keen on the idea. He had just come from LSE, appointed directly by the V.C., Hansa Mehta. This did not go down well with the Head of the Department who did not assign him any teaching for the honours and MA courses in political science. Instead, he was asked to teach civics and public administration courses in the technology and commerce faculties. Rajni once made a presentation to the group on the state of political science and humanities in the universities, emphasizing how little empirical research was done and a lot of empty theorization was the name of the game.

Around this time, a letter was received from Romesh Thapar, either by Rajni or Gulati. I do not remember who, but it was brought to the group. It was about writing a poser for a forthcoming issue of Seminar. About the same time or little later, Sachin Chowdhry of Economic Weekly contacted Rajni and they hit it off well, after which it became a regular practice: Sachin asking Rajni to contribute to the Weekly and Rajni delivering unfailingly. The point is that an initiative like CSDS was taking shape in the mind of Rajni Kothari during his Baroda days and Seminar and Economic Weekly (later Economic and Political Weekly) became crucial elements in Rajni’s long term institutional vision. After CSDS was established, the bonds became enduring. Some important academic and intellectual contributions of CSDS first appeared and perhaps still do in these journals.

Just around this time, a convention of the Indian National Congress was held at Bhavnagar in Gujarat. Without waiting for any research grant, Rajni went there and interviewed a number of Congress leaders. This was his first extensive stint of field work in India. He said he was convinced that political theory for India was not possible without going to the field and seeing for oneself how politicians think and behave politically. Days after his return from Bhavnagar, Rajni wrote a series of articles that were published in the Weekly as ‘Form and Substance in Indian Politics’. No longer able to take the slight of being pushed to the margins of the department, Rajni left Baroda University. He was invited to join the National Institute of Community Development at Mussoorie by S.C. Dube who gave him a free hand to do his research. Rajni took full advantage of this, travelling all over the country to interview politicians, bureaucrats and local political activists. He travelled with his steno, to whom he dictated his field notes. This one year of field work proved crucial both for Rajni’s future writings, such as on the Congress System and confirmed his desire to found a research centre independent of any governmental-bureaucratic-university set-up.

 

How would you describe the event of the founding of the CSDS?

By this time, Rajni Kothari had made his presence felt, not just on the academic scene but as a young intellectual with a great deal of promise. Towards the end of his stint with the NICD, he was offered a personal grant for the kind of research he wanted to do by the Asia Foundation. He turned the personal grant into an institutional one for CSDS, which was then just an idea! He also found an organization and a patron who would host his project called CSDS – the Indian Adult Education Association. This was a bit unusual – for one institution to host a project that was about building another institution! It became possible thanks to the visionary institution builder, Dr Mohan Singh Mehta. He hosted not just a project but an institution which was already conceived, and had a name: the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

The CSDS thus became a part of the Indian Adult Education Association of which Dr Mehta was the Chairman. This was not easy because Mohan Singh Mehta had to convince his board about the decision to incubate a new institution that had little to do with adult education. Later on, after I joined the CSDS, I wrote the annual reports for the Adult Education Board showing how the academic and field activities of the CSDS contributed to the cause of adult education. I believe I did an honest job of showing how our research and publications contributed to expanding the idea of adult education to the political education of citizens.

This is how CSDS began to function from the premises of the IAEA. The accounts were kept by the IAEA. Its Governing Board served as the Board of CSDS and Dr Mohan Singh Mehta was its Chairperson. IAEA also provided space and some infrastructural facilities. I was told (though I was not there) that CSDS was formally inaugurated by M.C. Chagla at a small function soon after it had become a ‘part of IAEA’, sometime in November 1963, with four persons on the academic staff. Along with Rajni, there was Gopal Krishna, Ghanshyam Shah and Rishikesh Maru – Rajni’s erstwhile students from the MS University, Baroda. Bashir, Ramashray and I joined in 1964 and Ashis in early 1965. So these were what can be called Rajni’s founding team.

There was some informal institutional relationship that Rajni had also struck with IIPA, which was in the neighbourhood; Ava Khullar, the Secretary of CSDS, came from there. During the 17-B (this is how we referred to the Adult Education address) years, i.e., between 1963 to 1966-67, many events of great significance took place, some of which I was a witness to. The Centre soon made its presence felt in Delhi’s academic, intellectual, journalistic and political circles. Two major electoral surveys were carried out, one for the Kerala assembly elections and the other for the 1967 general elections. The analyses was eventually published, among others in EPW and in the book Citizens and Parties, which I edited. Bashiruddin Ahmed was the architect of designing and carrying out survey operations. Ramashray Roy also published a number of articles during this period. In 1964, Bashir and Maru did field work based studies of the Farukhabad and Rajkot parliamentary constituencies, which was sponsored by the All India Congress Committee – a post-mortem study of the Congress defeat in these constituencies. It was also during this time at 17-B that two major international comparative studies were launched; one, a study of values in politics carried out in India, Poland, Yugoslavia and USA and the other, a comparative study of social change in India, Sweden Japan, Zimbabwe and USA. Also a discussion group was started at 17-B right from its inception. Several academics, visiting scholars from abroad, journalists, and politicians participated. Some people whom I today remember participating in the discussions were Andre Beteille, Inder Malhotra, Inder Gujral, Dilip Mukherjee, Sisir Gupta, Vishal Singh and Raj Krishna.

One important thing about the founding moment was the age cohort. All of us were in our twenties and thirties, and all came from outside Delhi. Around this small core faculty were over a dozen academic and research staff – visiting fellows, project associates. Some were from different collaborating countries on the values and politics project. The place began to hum with activity, with a stream of visitors from Delhi and outside, mainly academics and students from universities, both Indian and foreign, as well as journalists and politicians. And then the bombshell exploded in 1966: the Asia Foundation was funded by the CIA. All of us were stunned. Rajni took immediate action by writing to the Foundation and the government, communicating our disassociation with the Foundation, rejecting the instalment that was in the pipeline. Rajni sought an appointment with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which was immediately given. However, when he entered her room, she said, ‘Is it the CIA exposure that you have come for?’ and laughed! We knew it all along, she stated and asked him to contact Morarjibhai, the Finance Minister. Morarji lectured Rajni about self-sufficiency, and offered him a piece of agricultural land to cultivate and survive. It was L.P. Singh, the Home Secretary, who extended his moral and administrative support to CSDS. Ironically, there was some relief that even Krishna Menon’s Law Institute was funded by the Asia Foundation. So we were not in such bad company after all. These were testing times, but CSDS emerged stronger, with greater confidence and integrity. The staff stuck together, despite being unpaid for over six to nine months, although some provision of payments was made for the supporting staff, both from personal resources of some senior faculty and through loans.

The point of all this is that in the course of three years at 17-B, CSDS had registered a strong presence on the academic and political scene of Delhi, and had earned considerable goodwill through the leadership of Rajni Kothari. It was during this time that, in a manner of speaking, the CSDS (genetic) code was encrypted.

 

Can you tell me something about the intellectual and organizational culture of CSDS during that time?

First, we never thought of the intellectual and the organizational as two distinct and dichotomous parts of the CSDS. The academic and intellectual activity was the core of the Centre, and the organization was subservient. It was seen as an aid, a support system, a necessary condition for our work. But yes, we wanted to break away from the conventional disciplinary academic view of social knowledge. In that sense there was this self-defined view of our work in terms of addressing contemporary issues and problems from different perspectives of history, literature, sociology, political science, social psychology and so on. The idea was to cultivate ones disciplinary strengths and skills and harness them to study the problems one was interested in. This generated an intellectual climate and work culture in CSDS which, I believe, was freer and more open than was possible if the focus and style of research was to be pure academics. Anyway, differentiating the two ideas: academic and intellectual, and cultivation of the intellectual identity of CSDS as a centre of ‘intellectuals’, was a recurrent theme at the CSDS lunches. Some important senior colleagues remained thoroughly unconvinced. They, however, had equal space and showed respect to those not agreeing with them and vice versa. I think certain liberal values formed the core of CSDS culture.

Consequently, differences on organizational matters were minimum. No decision was taken as a purely organizational, administrative one. Everybody had to produce an intellectual, academic justification, rather than administrative or even financial, for even a small organizational measure suggested or contemplated. And right from the beginning there was nothing that was not brought to the group. There was nothing that the director, or anyone else would decide unilaterally, whether it was an appointment of a peon or a colleague, or buying an air-conditioner. It was always a group decision. That was our style. But remember, it was a small group.

Rajni’s style was also stamped on the way he allocated work. Without your knowing, he would drop several things on your lap. This reminds me of a friend. When we walked together, he would surreptitiously slip a bag from his hand into mine, while engaging me in an animated conversation. I realized I was carrying his load only when we reached the destination. This is how Rajni, gradually and imperceptibly, made me carry out the international project on values and politics. After about six months to a year, without my realizing, I was directing the project, while he had completely withdrawn from it.

He always saw some special worth and ability in every one of his colleagues and in members of the supporting staff, entrusting them with some special responsibility. However, he did not like people complaining, for example, about a bad appointment, about somebody not doing well enough academically or organizationally. His answer was: don’t quarrel with your tools, improve them. And if you can’t do it yourself, just ignore it!

Rajni would never say that a person did not fit in here; he let people be. But at the same time, people who did not perform eventually left on their own, and they were facilitated to do so and helped, always, to get a better job. What I am trying to say is that a kind of organic chemistry grew, uniting the intellectual and institutional organization with a vision, which became the basis for processing decisions. It was through this self-conscious, interactive process among the faculty members, it seems retrospectively, that some founding principles evolved which have continued to guide the Centre, intellectually as well as organizationally.

 

And what were these?

Looked at in this way, the first principle was that we must not have an organization that would acquire an upper hand over the academic life. We should not have the role or the organizational identity of a person called the Registrar. We should never lose the perspective that the administration is to facilitate intellectual and academic processes, and should never be allowed to be an end in itself. Unthinking, unreflexive routinization of work is the enemy of collective creative action. These are some phrases picked up from the lunch group discussions.

We were also fortunate that we got an administrative head like Ava Kanga (after her marriage, Khullar). She was given the status and identity as an academic administering the CSDS. The director never wanted a personal secretary exclusively for himself. Instead, he had a typist, Rajan, who kept his files, typed, and prepared drafts of his books and articles. But one Rajan was not enough to carry Rajni’s load and so a couple of more typists were appointed, equally accessible to every faculty member.

 

What about the second principle?

The second principle is integral to the first. It was to always take care of the supporting staff, almost like a family. And all the benefits that came from the government and other grant givers were first given to the administrative staff. They had the first claim on material benefits. There was a time when for some months there was no money for disbursing salaries. Even during those days, the support staff was somehow paid, including the loans managed by some of the faculty for this purpose.

 

Is that why there were absolutely no dropouts?

Yes, but more than that, they were also listened to. Rajni ensured that someone in the faculty, without that person being given an official label or an administrative perk or privilege, was entrusted with one or the other administrative task – whether in the library, the garden, looking after the furniture and other equipment. The emphasis was on listening to their views and redressing complaints. The complaints were usually minor and easily manageable. But if one does not listen and shows the rulebook every time, then the distance is likely to grow. Alienation of the support staff is not good for the kind of institution we wanted to build. This was the second principle.

The third principle was that we should not divide ourselves into disciplinary or even thematic departments. This enabled us to develop trans-disciplinary perspectives on issues and problems and work as a team.

And the fourth principle – mind you, the principles were consciously held and practised, even if not articulated as such, in black and white – was not to grow so big that the place becomes unmanageable. We believed that we Indians are good at small-scale operations which can remain efficient, purposive and focused. But it is the sense of power that perhaps make us want big institutions, with a lot of money to spend and patronize. We found the idea of big institutions like a Russian academy somewhat odd and unworkable in our circumstances. At the same time, we added many dimensions to the Centre, such as the China Report, Lokayan, Peace and Conflict studies, among others. The idea was to incubate and nurture new initiatives and then enable them to spin-off into independent organizations.

 

And what about Lokniti and the other ongoing programmes in the context of incubating?

Lokniti, in fact, was an initiative to salvage the core of the Centre. It had become difficult for the Centre to do empirical studies, which were very expensive. For years, the Centre had ceased to do survey-based political studies because there was no money. And most of us turned to theoretical studies of alternative development, future studies, science policy, etc. Some excellent work did come out from CSDS during this period, but our identity as a centre for empirical studies of politics and society was getting dimmer. And we missed seeing the data printouts of surveys on which some of us depended for empirical sense and fresh theoretical insights.

There was also a kind of ideological objection to surveys because the Indian academic discourse was then dominated by the left, and leading social anthropologists too had a disdain for surveys. They all saw surveys as a hit-and-run method, mimicking American social science practices. In fact, the ICSSR had passed a resolution that no survey of elections would be supported; subsequently, Ram Reddy reversed that. The setting up of Lokniti restored the balance.

 

One discipline that is completely out of the Centre’s purview is economics: was that deliberate or perchance?

It was not a conscious decision, but in those days there were few economists who were interested in doing economics in the form of a complementary or supplementary activity by associating with a larger, multi-disciplinary academic endeavour. I remember, in those days, the economist who interested us the most was Pranab Bardhan. He was engaged in empirical economic analysis, using aggregate data. We were in search of such economists. We even gave such an economist, whom we valued, a name: non-metric economist. In those days they were difficult to come by.

 

What made you spend so much of your time to organizational matters at the CSDS? I am acquainted with your academic contribution, which I think is considerable. So what explains this preoccupation?

My personality is such that when I see something leaking, I want to get it fixed. It is a sort of compulsion. This was how I got into organizational work at CSDS. Perhaps, I gave more organizational time than I should have. It seems that in every institution, ek do gadhey hone hi padte hain [there have to be a few fools]. You may recall the character of Dexter in George Orwell’s 1984. This is thankless work. You get typecast as an organizational man: somebody who worries about money, plugging holes here and fixing things there. Even your colleagues may see you as an under-performing academic, with a creativity deficit. This is one thing. The other problem is that it is dirty work. You just clean the muck and the people get into the habit of messing up everywhere. Sometimes I ended up writing the reports of academic defaulters who enjoyed running a project, but did not complete their work and failed to deliver the product to the grant-giving agency. I wrote their reports, including some for major grants. I somehow got caught in all this. There really was no power in it, though very late down the line I realized that I was seen as a sort of Chanakya of the place, perhaps because I was institutionally alert and did not want things to get out of hand. However, the appellation always amused me. It also sort of served as a protective shield!

 

You were saying that organizational issues have to be resolved...

Yes, let me wind up this organizational thing. What I call founding principles evolved through sharing experiences, and a kind of collective decision making. Rajni saw to it that every member of the faculty felt he/she owned the place. Every member of the faculty could take an initiative with confidence and even act on Rajni’s behalf – and present it to him as a fait accompli. The problem is, it was a bit too informal and hence we discovered that there were no proper records kept of even some major decisions. But I think that in a very fundamental way the decision making was in substance sound and correct, especially when it involved the use of public money. Although there was little file pushing, propriety was maintained in appointments, increments and promotions. Propriety, even vigilance, was observed even in small financial matters. The guiding principle was zero tolerance about wastage of resources. For example, our stores person, Bharat Singh, was such an upright official that once when I went for field work and took time in returning the trunk used for carrying questionnaires, he came to my room, and asked: ‘Should I send someone to your house to collect it?’ It is in this sense that the organization was more than formal.

There was also an awareness of not doing administrative injustice to anyone. Out of turn increments were given to some people because they needed them. So we once got into a situation when a new entrant in the faculty was paid more than the senior-most in the Centre and better known in the field! But the concerned person did not feel slighted. Another important principle about which Ashis felt strongly was that our salary scales should be a little lower than for comparable positions in the university. He argued that people should not stick to the institution for mainly financial reasons. CSDS should be a preference for other reasons like academic freedom; CSDS should be a positive choice.

 

How were appointments made? I was puzzled when invited to join the Centre as I did not have any relationship with the Centre. I had never even attended its seminars, I did not know anybody, and yet out of the blue I received an appointment letter.

We often spotted people by their writings or sometime even by word of mouth. Some of us read their newspaper articles closely. We probably over read: the way they looked at the world, their approach, insights. Basically it was talent hunting. The consideration was not merely talent, but also in terms of the complementarity that we would need. The latter was important because we did not want to end up with colleagues who were all of the same kind. We wanted a diversity of perspectives, and yet ensure a kind of coherence of purpose by socially and politically engaged intellectuals. This was how the appointment process was initiated, though selections were made through open competition by a committee.

But, I don’t want to give the impression of CSDS as having created an ideal organization. In fact, there have been serious faultlines which created some crisis situations. Since Rajni was not just a director but a leader, the issue of closeness to and distance from Rajni was incipiently always there. This created a major faultline in the middle rungs of the faculty, i.e., the group of Associate Fellows. They felt cramped, not having enough intellectual and physical space, not being given definable roles and sufficient recognition for their work. One problem was that people were not asked to do things and report! A kind of authority crisis? I don’t know. Names apart, the best of people, the most talented, were there in that faultline location. Mercifully, this faultline seems to have been repaired with the CSDS having adopted a more clear and formal procedure for appointments, promotions and allocation (with designations) of the institutional work officially to faculty members.

 

I am told there were some persistent critics of CSDS, especially in the ’60s and early ’70s – who were they? Were they the leftists?

Yes, on the whole, it was the Communist left. But you can’t say all leftists. We had quite a few friends among them. We particularly had an interesting and friendly exchange with the socialists. In the ’60s, the political and intellectual discourse was largely influenced by the Cold War scenario. It was carried on in black and white terms and derivatively it led to a pigeonholing of people in terms of pro or anti-American. In fact, we did not mind the critics; one needs them. The problem was the animosity and viciousness with which the attacks were made. We felt that something else was bothering the critics. The problem was that some of them did not like our approach to politics. They found it difficult to pin us down ideologically. We were raising debates on issues of political culture, on the historical role of the Congress Party, and in the process trying to revisit our political history in a different way. Then there were public debates on issues like scientific temper, political commentaries and analysis which celebrated representative democracy as a transformative force in Indian society. Then, Rajni wrote on the Congress system. The most irritating idea the critics found was Rajni’s phrase and perhaps a plea for incremental change. This became a red-rag for the theoretical ideologues of revolutionary politics.

In a peculiar sense, we discovered ourselves through our critics. In a manner of speaking, they gave us an identity; something like a school of thought. We discovered the theoretical coherence of the work of different members of the faculty on a variety of themes and issues. We rarely reacted to comments and criticisms that were snide, vitriolic and laced with standard adjectives, common to the lexicon of the Communist left during the Cold War. We didn’t react because we did not want the ‘enemy’ to determine us. One reacts only when one does not know what to do with oneself. In those days we were new to the peculiar Delhi politics and gossip, networking and name dropping. We didn’t want to distract ourselves from long-term academic goals: which were to evolve appropriate terms of discourse and interpretative methods to understand what democracy was doing to Indian society and India to the idea of democracy itself. Looking back, all this feels like a distant past. Today it appears as if it were a form of ragging, something like teasing and testing a new boy on the block. The equations in Delhi’s intellectual and political life basically changed after the Emergency and CSDS and the CSDS-wallahs became integral to the Delhi scene. In retrospect, it also seems that the ‘battle’ was not ideological. It was a kind of freemason like club of a section of left-oriented academics concerned with wielding political influence in the academia and cornering government patronage.

 

It seems that you turned ideological criticism into some kind of academic response.

Yes, it all happened in the early ’70s. Caste in Indian Politics, Politics in India, The Intimate Enemy and, of course, a series of research based articles on Indian elections, the party system and on the issue of social-cultural identities and citizenship. Many more CSDS publications came out during this period. All this led to a new discourse and criticism. It became interesting and even challenging to join the debates on issues such as reservation, language policy, secularism, development, nationalism and so on. Along the way the issue boiled down to ‘claiming’ and denying intellectual legitimacy by academics of a different hue.

This reminds me of an interesting exchange I had with an erstwhile CSDS adversary, who later became friendlier. I wouldn’t like to name him, but he was a nice open-hearted person. This conversation is worth recalling because it illustrates the change I was talking about. It took place at his residence in Delhi University. Unfortunately, he is no longer with us now. In the course of a discussion, the professor sprang up and said, I am amazed at the kind of academic work you people are doing at CSDS! You are more like journalists, writing in newspapers and news magazines… you should write in peer reviewed journals. But you people… and he named Ashis Nandy. (In those days, Ashis was very much in the news, joining debates in the print media on the scientific temper, sati, a critique of modernity, development etc.) I said, ‘Sir, Ashis has written in highly reputed peer-reviewed journals and so have many of my colleagues, which may not have come to your notice.’ And to illustrate my point, I told him a story about my Lokayan colleague Manoharan from Tamil Nadu. He was once picked up by the Chennai police and given a good thrashing by the DSP, Devaram. Manoharan was a human rights activist and regularly wrote provocative pieces in the Tamil press. The DSP told him, ‘Why do you write this rubbish against us in the newspapers? If you want to write, do so in EPW, write in English, but not in Tamil newspapers!’ So I can understand what troubles people when we write in newspapers. He said, ‘Okay, okay… all that’s okay. But there is something like the responsibility of intellectuals. I wonder why you people take frivolous positions on issues.’ I said, ‘Perhaps, we are not the kind of intellectuals you may approve of.’

I believe there are four kinds of intellectuals in Delhi, perhaps anywhere in the world. We are one kind. And maybe you are some other kind. The first type of intellectuals are those who are pro-system and pro-regime. Nobody cares for them or what they say. The other type is anti-system and anti-regime. They face the bullets, like the Naxals. The third type is of those who are pro-system but anti-regime, i.e., people like us who are called status-quoist and lack patronage. And, finally, there is the fourth type – the intellectuals who are anti-system (revolutionary), but nevertheless manage to stay pro-regime. They usually get the best of both worlds. I must say that my interlocutor was momentarily taken aback, but after a pause, he laughed heartily.