Memoirs 01-2024
Transitioning through Challenges and Change
Ravi Kumar Pillai
My career started in the shadow of the infamous National Emergency declared by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975.
She was already reeling under a spate of ill-governance issues; the country was facing spiralling inflation and staring at a growing economic morass. The Opposition, though disjointed and lacklustre, was slowly upping the belligerence and noise.
The unexpected judgement of Allahabad High Court finding Mrs G guilty of electoral malpractice was indeed a double whammy for her. She sprang a surprise on an unsuspecting nation by declaring a National Emergency on 25 June 1975. To justify the imposition of the Draconian regime, she cited alleged machinations by the Opposition to subvert constitutional governance and rule of law through orchestrated disruptive agitations.
Even as I was about to take the plunge into my work life, dark clouds were quickly gathering in the political atmosphere in India. Agitations, protests and heightened political antagonism were growing by the day. The imposition of National Emergency brought about a swift change in the work and life context across the nation. Seemingly, by a magic wand, the nation morphed into something closer to a totalitarian State.
The laid-back bureaucracy, the lax work discipline and rampant trade union belligerence seemed to have been taken by surprise by an unprecedented pushback for administrative assertiveness. Since there was plentiful slack in business and economic practices, it was only natural that an overall strictness in governance resulted in demonstrable improvement in performance both in government and in business.
The initial reaction of the middle class was one of appreciation and respect for the new regimen in place. However, the prolonged Emergency saw creeping nepotism and authoritarian insensitivity, especially heightened oppression of the marginalised sections.
The forced sterilisations of the poor slum-dwellers mobilised by over-zealous government officials and the massive demolition of urban encroachments throwing millions of hapless families onto the streets would ever remain blots in our political democracy. Both factors along with the exemplary leadership by Jaiprakash Narain, one of the cleanest and politically honest leaders of our country, to unify all anti-government forces proved to be the undoing of the facade of Indira Gandhi’s invincibility in the 1977 hustling. We shall come to the 1977 showdown later as we traverse the career and life journey of mine through the emergency years.
The overall atmosphere in 1975, in the aftermath of the emergency declaration, was one of urgency, focus on discipline and excitement about what was in store.
It was in this milieu that I took the baby steps in my executive career which was to last well over four decades. I started my career as an Executive Trainee in the then Hindustan Steel Limited on 10th July, just a fortnight into the new regime.
The India that I knew hardly fifteen days back was far removed from the hush-hush, big-daddy-watching climate that swooned on the country in a few days.
Those days, there were very few career options for fresh graduates.
The best students who scored high percentages in their tenth-grade exam, especially from families with less affordability to pursue college studies, opted for clerical positions in the Postal services. For entry-level positions like letter sorters, attendants and junior clerks, selection those days was made based on the marks scored in the school leaving exam. Many students who would have gone on to become scholars, technocrats or civil servants ended up as junior staff in postal services.
Those who pursued college studies subsequently ended up as junior civil servants and technocrats. But those who came on top of all of them and assumed power of administering ministries were in many cases the back- benchers in the classroom who took to politics and student activism. Street smartness and political patronage were far more powerful in taking you to positions that matter!
Well, this was perhaps an exaggerated narrative of those times, but the fact remained that employment opportunities were few and entry was extremely competitive. We had in India at that time an inverted social justice structure with lineage and references counting a lot more than credentials and competitiveness.
Nearly three decades after gaining political independence from British colonial rule, India was still a stunted and skewed economy with the State having a near monopolistic hold on business and economics. Private Sector was nascent and was largely home to crony capitalists. Businessmen would garner the support of local politicians who could connect them to the powers that be in Delhi’s bureaucratic corridors. Licences and permits were dished out through dependable henchmen of political bosses who would ensure anonymity and secrecy regarding the flow of bribes in return for the sought-after permits to import, produce and sell substandard goods. The joke was that motor cars didn’t need horns because the rickety sound of the badly made vehicle would anyway keep strayers off the path.
Indira Gandhi, as the PM was largely following the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, her father and India’s first Prime Minister who was instinctively a socialist. His near infatuation with the Soviet model of command and control economy was a gospel for the nation. Indira too prided on being an unabashed Soviet ally. Indira had a subtle streak of nationalism, a trait that would have been anathema to her father’s avowed belief in global socialism.
The largely risk-averse bureaucrats and business fraternity were devoted to maintaining the status quo and not upsetting the rhythm and pace of slow-paced economic dynamics. No wonder, the West mocked our economic growth as the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ at around 2 to 3% per year and called us a ‘bullock cart economy’- slow-paced and lacking ambition and drive.
Under Nehruvian economics, which became the policy anchor for India through the first three decades of Independence, the Public Sector was accorded a pole position in investments, trade and commerce. The massive investments that disappeared into the apparent bottomless pit of lethargy, inefficiency and lack of executive accountability were euphemistically termed as the policy to “dominate the commanding heights of the economy”, whatever that verbosity couched in socialistic narrative meant.
Having spent my impressionable years of growing up in Kerala, the only Red State of India then (and now too!), which had a permeative leftist tint in everything to do with politics, governance and way of life, I had a seething antipathy to the authoritarianism and Emergency powers of governance. I also had a passionate love for the Public Sector. I started my career as an uncorrupted votary of State dominance!
Through my youthful years, I was fed on the impending dawn of the supremacy of the proletariat and the paragon of social equity and justice on the other side of political deliverance.
My saga of career and life across boundaries and sectors brought me down from the exalted pedestal of ideological illusion to the ground reality of a world that is and will always remain unequal and where hard work, imagination and execution alone would bring in prosperity and growth.
To Be Continued
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