I first saw Dr. Narayan last year in Cincinnati. Someone gave him the prime slot of 7:00 p.m. to speak. Not knowing him then, I wondered if any one would even listen to what he had to say. The moment he spoke, 5000 thousand people sat in pin drop silence and listened. Recently I went back to India and asked a friend why this movement (Loksatta) had become so popular? He replied that it started with simple issues when Loksatta forced the government to build lavatories for people in the rural areas. The Peoples’ Charter is also very impressive. It opened our eyes to what all we can demand from the government as our right. A lot of NRIs in USA have had this belief that conditions in India cannot be improved but this gives a ray of hope that there is someone who has taken up the cause and is trying to make a difference- says Chand Akkineni, an Atlanta entrepreneur and Chairman of the Indian American Cultural Atlanta
A couple of days later I walk into Chand Akkineni’s home to meet Dr. Narayan. Slender, unassuming, soft spoken and intense, he nevertheless laughs uproariously when I tell him that after looking at his mammoth agenda I was beginning to wonder if he was a foolish idealist in search of the ever elusive Utopia. As we start talking I realize here is a brilliant man, who is barely in his 40s and has a clear-cut idea of what he wants. His sincerity and complete devotion to his cause touches me more than anything else.
Lets start at the beginning with your own personal journey.
There is nothing special about me. I grew up in a small village off coastal Andhra Pradesh while my parents were in Maharashtra, and there was no telugu school there. The typical course for kids in those days was to go to school and if they did reasonably well, to proceed to a prestigious Jesuit college like St. Ignatius Loyola and then from there you went to medical college, so my life’s course was planned as such. But then the emergency happened in 1975. I reacted very strongly to the fact that liberty could be extinguished with such ease. I took it as a personal affront even though I was not in any way affected by it. I spoke out against emergency in college but was not put in jail because I was so inconsequential. If you are not a member of any political party or group in India and if you can not be identified by your caste or group they do not know what to do with you! Then came the post emergency phase. I still remember how on 21st march 1977 we danced with joy thinking-here is a Gandhian revolution! It did not take us long to be disillusioned by the process. Soon after, I received my medical degree. Medicine was my passion and I was totally committed to it but then the larger picture was so somber that it continued to trouble me until someone said `Well why don’t you join the Indian Administrative services? Without knowing anything about it I just blundered into it and then went on to have a wonderful time!! I entered with the deep spirit of public service. For me it was never a career option. For most medical graduates from Guntur the normal career option was to come to the USA!”
So did you find like-minded people in the bureaucratic set up?
Honestly, no, but luckily in a large country like India with only a handful of bureaucrats it doesn’t really matter. You have your own sphere of activity and if you get a few lucky breaks and are able to build a good reputation in the early years of service, it sustains you enormously and I have been an enormously lucky bureaucrat in that sense. At the same time I can say this with very deep conviction that I have never spoken an untruth in the government, I have never compromised on a matter of principle and I have never been hesitant to speak out forcefully about something I believed in. If you want to understand the political economy of India and the quality of governance, the best school is the IAS. In the shortest possible time, if you care deeply, you will understand more about Indian governance than anywhere else; and I have had the privilege to understand it very thoroughly.
Is the bureaucratic set-up different in the south as compared to other regions?
That is what the southern states used to claim. When we were probationers we used to snigger whenever there was any mention of U.P or Bihar. We used to have this arrogance that we belong to States that are very well administered. I can now honestly say that it is not true, and in my own state of Andhra Pradesh, there is a little of Bihar, of U.P. or Orissa. There may be variations in terms of degree but we are all going in the same direction.
What are your main concerns?
What disturbs me even today is that most young people enter public service without having a real understanding of India. They are sincere but they do not have any depth. Power has become a magnet more for its prestige, than its service. It is more so in bureaucracy because for some reason we have surrounded the IAS with a halo which is doing tremendous damage, so people join it without really understanding what it entails. In my state when people ask me if they should join it or not, I always tell them, `If you can feel it in your bones so strongly that if you do not enter the IAS and serve India you will die, and if you are exceptionally smart and have the capacity to leverage the opportunities made available to you to promote public good – even then chances are you’ll make a difference of 15 or 20 on a scale of 100′.
Is that why you left?
Yes. There is so much that is wrong. Individually one can have a great career by Indian standards, but when there is so much potential that is being wasted, where institutionalized restructuring is required which is not taking place, and you have a pretty good understanding of what is required then you have two choices – either to stagnate and become part of the problem or to become part of the solution. Once you decide to become part of the solution then the IAS is not the place for you.
I was very clear and precise about my goals and had even put them in writing. How exactly I would go about it except for the broad contours I did not know. I knew that whatever capital I had in terms of credibility I would invest and I would just go to the people. In what way I would fashion that into tools for citizen actions I was not clear. The response was incredible.
How do you motivate a race of people that are notorious for being passive?
I don’ t think the people of India are any more passive than the people of any other country even USA for that matter. Ho many people go to vote in USA? How many really care about the issues in the Presidency? We do have a lot of social baggage but we also have a lot of cultural strengths. In the long run it all evens out. In India there are three things that are wrong. We have no sense of equality, no sense of trust and no sense of common fate. We keep our houses clean but our roads dirty. So these are the fundamental failings in society but we also have our strengths – the sense of family, a sense of peer pressure. I don’t know if there is a God but there is a sense of right and wrong that keeps most people on the right path not because of government or law enforcement agencies. There are hundreds of people in India who earn barely a dollar a day and still finds something to laugh about.
There is a lack of education also in India.
I totally agree with you, but is a lack of education a cause or a consequence? I maintain it is a consequence. Societies which thought on a much narrower base at the same time as us have done a lot better in terms of literacy and other things. We have created misgovernance which ensured lack of literacy and now lack of literacy is shown as an alibi for misgovernance. You have to break the cycle somewhere. Let me give you a positive example. Fifteen years ago Tamil Nadu was just like all the other states, in terms of literacy. Then, one strategic initiative was introduced by M.G. Ramachandran. He was a matinee idol and wanted to give back to the people, perhaps he had compassion so he introduced a mid-day meal program for children at schools. In Andhra Pradesh N.T. Ramarao a similar celebrity with similar ideas and objectives started 2 rupees for a kg. of rice. In Andhra, people ate the rice, digested it and forget about it. In Tamil Nadu because the mid day meal was given only if you sent your children to school, poor people started sending their children to school. Both the schemes were very well implemented. In Tamil Nadu because the political attention was centered around the schools, the quality of education improved and literacy among the people went up quietly. Tamil Nadu is now the second most literate state in India after Kerala. The population growth came down and is almost stagnant now, so much so that in 2001 there is delimitation of parliamentary constituencies. How did this happen? Through just one single strategically placed governance!
So how did Loksatta come about?
Well, we started with Andhra Pradesh because we know the state and the language, and we are known in the state and so is our track record but when I studied as to why things happen in some places and do not in others I realize that the conditions are very similar all over the country. For Loksatta or any other organization there are four conditions that are required to make a substantial difference. You must have a group of people with a tremendous clarity of purpose and goals willing to make the effort. It can’t be a casual approach. There are too many `do gooders’ in India. There must be the capability to unite people over all the barriers that come in the way: caste, language, ideology, etc. There must be the capability to strategize like a general. No detail is too unimportant. And most importantly, there must be a willingness to commit the next 5 to 10 years of your life, if not your whole life, to devote to this cause. That degree of commitment is required.
Where do you find such people?
Good question. That is the reason why we have accomplished the very little we have accomplished. I am not happy about the situation. In a country of a billion people whatever we have done in a short span, had made us the largest civil society initiative in India – and that does not reflect well on India. I would have been delighted if Loksatta had been the 20th such movement instead of being number one. Initially we hand picked the people who we felt had the above four qualities. Later it became self sustaining and now we can pretty much pick and choose. Now of course the question is that having demonstrated the ability to mobilize public in one state how do we make a difference across the country? Our goals are very comprehensive but you can not fight a national struggle like that. For all the goals to be attained there should be a main focus. That focus must be central to everything else, sufficiently real; it must be strategic to the issues so that once it is achieved many other goals become possible to achieve. It must excite the imagination of the, people – it must have sustained media focus and we believe that the electoral reform is one such thing. We have to help people learn from each other and many efforts are going on in the country.
Then the media has to play a very important role. The national media reacts whenever something dramatic like naming the politicians with a criminal record comes up. The media can be a powerful instrument but at times the media has also chosen to play the power game and take sides. Indian society is power centered and there is also a feeling that some parts of media can be manipulated. But now that we have established ourselves in A.P. we have earned the right to appeal to the rest of the country because the rest of the groups in the country are not strong enough to mobilize the public. This responsibility is now thrust upon us and we are ready to work with many others to build a national movement centered on electoral reforms. For that we are taking up specific activities. The first is that we are planning to train and orient 150,000 young people and hope that 10-15% of them would be acting as nuclei in their local governments to fight misgovernance. Of course the biggest problem is replication. There is no institutional framework that makes replication easy. We are not system builders. We have now a pretty good insight in Andhra. The Peoples Charter is now available and others can adapt it to suit their local conditions but use the same techniques. We are trying to share this knowledge with about 3000 activists across the country. Out of some 60,000 organizations there are about 2000-3000 which are of some consequence and see where we go from there. We also have to use modern media effectively and creatively to pulsate the nation.
But to get the finest Indians together will be the a hardest thing. For me this is a full time commitment. Personally I have a small income but generally I believe that once you show the commitment the help and support does come. Today if I have to get 100,00 booklets published, I just have to pick up the phone and it will be done. It is not easy, its a hard and it takes time and hard work and there are days you will wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and worry what are we going to do tomorrow – it is inevitable and part of the process. But we go through a struggle all the time for personal gains so what is so special when you do it for the country?. People will see beyond their immediate needs if you make them; but it has to be a relentless, constant pounding. It may get monotonous at times boring and repetitive, but it has to be done until it becomes part of the people’s psyche.”
Have you faced threats from political parties?
I wish I could tell you something melodramatic that they are after me and I have to hide but nothing of that sort has happened. It’s partly because I am well known and partly because the movement itself is very well respected. Our fight is not individual. It is institutional. In fact the last time we named candidates with a criminal record not one person pointed a finger accusing us. Their only complaint was that there were 25-30 others names that were missing, but in their case we did not have enough evidence. The same goons would come up to me and agree with me and hope that things would change, again if you mobilize public opinion on a large scale with solutions and not merely an attack then you will get support, maybe only passive to begin with and of course India would not be the country it is today had the support been active, but it still has its value in a democracy. Then passivity also applies to the crooks; if you are fighting the whole system of crooks then why should one crook take the odium of finishing you off?
Would you ever want to join politics?
Absolutely not – not because politics is bad, but I can say this – even if Mahatma Gandhi or Ambedkar were to contest an election today and they would obviously contest honestly, chances are they would lose their deposits. The process is so completely vulgarized and corrupt. So the system has to be changed – change the rules of the game and not the players. I think politicians are as much victims of the system and therefore the process must be corrected. After that let the finest people join politics but in my opinion parties like Loksatta should remain non-political.
I saw the agenda for more representation of women but not through reservation of seats as wanted by the government?
Honestly, I wish I could say I have a deep passion for gender issue, but I would be lying. I was somewhat gender neutral in that I treated men and women alike, but in the last 4 years I have come to know a lot about dalits(untouchables) and womens’ issues and as I put myself in their shoes, it has really changed my attitude. I realize now how hard it is for a woman to prove herself, to really even have people’s sympathy when she says that she may have an ambition or a dream beyond raising a family whereas for a man having an ambition and a career is the normal thing in any society. However, when the issue of more women empowerment came up the politicians came up with a bill to simply reserve 1/3rd constituencies for women. There is nothing more disgraceful than that in my opinion. That means you are attaching the odium of reservation to women. It is an ugly way of doing things. We studied the models available throughout the world and we found that in other countries when women contested against men their success was greater than the men, so the electoral system was not against women, the parties were. So we suggested that let the parties nominate women without reserving the constituencies. The parties will then have to nurture the women. Today’s political culture is so bad that no decent woman (and or for that matter, decent man) would want to be involved, so along with women empowerment, the political culture has to change. When we drafted this alternative model, we found. France has taken an identical position and amended the constitution, and gave the women half the seats through the parties as did western Europe.
Where do you see Loksatta going from here?
Loksatta has emerged as India’s largest civil society initiative and governance reform movement in a short period of three years. We recognize that we cannot, on our own, build a national movement in a country as large and complex as India. Therefore we see Loksatta’s role in three areas – sharing our experience in generating citizen action and mobilizing public opinion with activist groups all over the country; generating public pressure for electoral and governance reforms through mass media and Election Watch movements in various states and helping build a national platform of eminent and credible Indians dedicated to electoral reforms.”
How confident are you of its lasting impact?
Great changes take place when the conditions are ripe, and when status quo is unsustainable. People’s movement for electoral and governance reform is an idea whose time has come in India. The fiscal, political and social crisis in India is deepening and cannot be resolved without establishing a genuine liberal democratic state based on liberty and rule of law. If the reforms we advocate cannot be accomplished soon, there is a real danger of India finding itself in a chaotic state – very much like the erstwhile Soviet Union. Our effort is to channelize the yearning of people for change in a positive and constructive manner in time to meet the impending crisis. The real impulse for reform comes from the force of circumstances and people’s deep yearning for a better India. Therefore I am supremely confident that India will soon reform its polity and governance.
Are there other organizations such as Loksatta, and what has been their track record?
There are outstanding individuals and groups whose contribution to public awakening has been outstanding. Sharad Joshi, T N Seshan, Aruna Roy, G R Khairnar, Baba Amte, Anna Hazare, V Kurien, M P Parameswaran, R.S. Mole and many others are true national heroes who made phenomenal contribution to contemporary India. In a country of a billion people groaning under the weight of seemingly insurmountable problems these great efforts may not always be visible. In order to build a mass movement for reforms we need credible people with great track record, tremendous clarity and insight, the ability to harmonize conflicting interests of various groups and bring them together, strategic skills to harness our limited energy and resources and full time commitment of several volunteers. In short, we need people with the heart of a saint, the mind of a general and the attitude of a trader.
Loksatta is willing to be a foot-soldier in this gigantic endeavor. We have to learn from the past successes and failures. Even failures have a lot to teach us. We have many individuals and organizations across India whose skills, abilities and public support should be deployed in full measure for the national cause We need a larger vision and we need to build a movement with synergies in which the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. For that we need a clear focus and a rallying point We believe that electoral reform is the goal which can galvanize all into collective action; it is central to the way a democracy functions, there is broad consensus on the goals; it can sustain public and media attention; it can be achieved mostly through simple changes of law and procedures and it can pave the way for the other vital reforms.
So why are you here and how has the idea of NRI involvement come about?
Let me be up-front. Earlier I never talked about money because of my middle class, bureaucratic upbringing and a misplaced sense of honor. But now I realize that the difference between the success and failure of this enterprise at a certain level is money. If I don’t have enough resources, if I don’t have enough media capsules I can’t get the people together.
NRIs can help financially and there is a culture of giving in this country plus it may be easier to give a dollar as compared to 46 rupees. I’m also fervently appealing to the NRIs that while your own language and culture are very important and you should retain them, for heaven’s sake also act as Indians and build a Pan Indian organization and consistently articulate a clear vision of where India should be. Once we have a clear understanding of our goals and a road map I believe the rest of the world will respect us and make the task easier. Today a billion people cannot be changed without the world understanding and supporting it and United Sates is the center of global communication, it is the global power that matters today. The way it responds to India has a lot to do with India’s future.