The Rediff Special /T N Seshan

'The minority cannot climb on the shoulders of the majority and say, ''All right, carry me" '

Recently in Uttar Pradesh, some young IAS officers tried to find out the most corrupt bureaucrat through secret ballot...

What purpose would it have served assuming that they found out somebody?

They might have wanted to expose those corrupt ones?

Finally, they didn't have the courage to do it.

At least they took such an initiative. Is it not good?

What is the point in saying, it is good or it is bad?

Is it not like your Desabhakta movement where you are also trying to pinpoint the corrupt?

They didn't have the courage to publish it.

Was it because they are within the system?

No, certainly not. The IAS Officers Association has taken a secret ballot, and at the end of which majority of voters say, Mr X and Mr Y are the most corrupt. What would have happened after that?

You feel they should have the courage to publish the names?

Otherwise, they shouldn't have started it in the first place.

Do you admire any political personality of the past or present?

Past, yes. Rajaji. Sardar Patel. Current, difficult.

When you became the chief election commissioner, politicians started getting scared of you...

It took them a little while to get fully scared.

Did you feel satisfied when they became scared of you? You were the only person they were scared of then?

Why would I get any satisfaction out of merely scaring somebody? If it was adequate to prevent them from doing something wrong, it was a matter of satisfaction.

Till you took over, nobody in India was aware that the chief election commissioner could do something?

The gentlemen who preceded me were 'gentlemen.' There were eight of them behind me. They were all gentlemen. I was not.

Some people say that if not for the British, a country called India would not have been born?

Politically, India had the same kind of unity during the times of Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka, Chandragupta Vikramaditya, Samudragupta, and subsequently at the time of Akbar, and Aurangazeb. So to say that the British put us together is rubbish.

Then, why do we have so much of trouble in the Northeast, Punjab, Kashmir, etc of late?

Survival of a complex structure is dependent upon the strength of elements and the help of a linkage. No majority has the right to inflict its views on the minority or even sound supercilious. You are not giving me a concession. You don't give the minority a concession whether it is on religion, whether it is on customs and manners, or....

If the majority tells the religious minority or the linguistic minority that I'll give you a concession of some kind, then you are asking for trouble. So long as a community has a cogent group of people nobody can brush them aside. Nobody can even say, 'All right, we are going to be generous to you, we will let you be.'

The majority is a majority, but that doesn't give them the right to ride roughshod over the minority. Nor does it give the minority the right to climb on the shoulders of the majority and say, 'All right, carry me.' Which is what is happening in India in some sense. I won't elaborate upon that because of its sensitive nature. During the last 30 or 40 years, some minorities have been made to believe this.

So, it is not an easy question to answer in the case of all societies, particularly so in the highly heterogeneous societies. If you shift to the language of mechanical engineering, if you do structural element analysis, a complex heterogeneous body is structurally sound only when the members are sound and the linkage elastic. I use this language because nothing is more appropriate.

Tamil Nadu must be strong, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Manipur, Mizoram all must be strong but the linkage that we have is not an air tight, water tight linkage. When two wagons are tightly coupled together, both the wagons would tumble. So, the wagons must be safe on their own and the link must hold on but it must have elasticity. That elasticity, we have not found.

The Punjab farmer has money in gunny bags, selling 20 to 30 tonnes of wheat. Punjab was selling ten million tonnes of wheat to the rest of the country. That money had no outlet.

On top of that drugs came in. In order to equip the Afghan soldiers, the Americans dumped millions of dollars worth of automatic weapons into Pakistan. And they were being sold across the border. The AK-47s were sold for Rs 5,000. So, here are young men, nothing to do, lots of cash, nowhere to go, no job, no self respect. There entered drugs and guns. That was the content and the structure of the Punjab fight. But it was reduced to absurd equations.

Mrs Gandhi thought it was the fight between two sardarjis, Darbara Singh and Zail Singh. And something similar is happening in Kashmir, the North-East and .... but you send people who have no concern for what those people are looking and searching for. What do you do? Send army after army.

I went to Srinagar. When I walked out of the secretariat, the governor gave two hundred policemen to guard me. I was in great danger, he said. I was the Cabinet secretary then. But by evening, I had ten people or five people guarding me and we visited house after house. The rooms were very small but each had a man, a woman and eight children living inside. It was minus five degrees centigrade. I asked him, 'In the night if you want to ease yourself, what do you do?' He looked at me, looked at all the others and the girls walked out. He said, 'Sir, we wet our own clothing.'

What kind of development are you talking about? You build a ski slope atop Gulmarg, a convention centre at the Centaur hotel in Srinagar!

You see, people sitting in Delhi do not have the wisdom to understand the complexity of the situation. If you want your son to be good, he should have the freedom to go out and grow strong, but he must have enough linkage with you which can bring him back to you. So, there are two choices: either let go or develop a linkage.

When your tenure as CEC was going to end, you appealed to the people of India to tell you what exactly they expected from you. How did they respond?

The response was tremendous. I got several thousand letters.

What did they want from you?

Half of them wanted me to join politics and the other half didn't. It was evenly divided.

How did you come to a decision?

I have not come to any decision.

Starting the Desabhakta movement, I mean.

Clarity is emerging every day. It cannot be done in one day. It involves millions of people of all kinds, their thoughts, fears, experiences and fancies. To find a common yardstick to appeal to all you need a Gandhi and I am not Gandhi. I will move one step at a time. With the good Lord's intentions, I shall contribute a little towards the country. If his intentions are otherwise, I shall not.

Do you believe in God?

I believe in nothing else, but God.

In what form?

God needs no forms. He is in the face of a hungry man, or a child who cried for new shoes till he saw another child with no legs. God doesn't need any particular form. Yes, that does not mean that as a human being, I don't need a picture to meditate. But the picture is not God, it is an enabling mechanism which enables me to concentrate on God. Some just close their eyes and can be in communion with God.

Who can say that this religion is better than that religion? If you don't want symbolism, be that way. I want symbolism. So long as I don't interfere, don't interfere with me. That is my symbolism.

T N Seshan's photographs: Sanjay Ghosh

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