LC Jain, last pillar of the original dream of India

Almost 70 people died in Delhi on Monday, as the house they lived in came crashing down on them. It was a shoddily constructed five-story building in a lower middle class area, dedicated to squeezing money out of poor labourers and other migrants in need of shelter. Years ago, that neighbourhood had taught me the term ‘unauthorised regularised’. In short, legalised illegal houses.

The dead were people in their prime who had travelled far from home, leaving their villages in distant Bihar or Bengal in search of a better life. They had fled long-neglected villages deprived of basic opportunities and fallen straight into the hell-hole that migrants in big cities live in. Scores of them had moved to this house built of sand and greed after their slums were demolished to beautify Delhi for the Commonwealth Games. These were lesser Indians, labour used to build our shining India, not people we need to grieve for.

The person who would have grieved for them had died the day before, in another part of Delhi. L.C. Jain, distinguished Gandhian activist and economist, was an unwavering critic of government policies divorced from the masses, that focused blindly on industrial progress, withered village economies and led to premature urbanisation as desperate villagers migrated in search of work. “The stomach is a biological tyrant,” he said.

Jain, Magsaysay awardee, former High Commissioner to South Africa and member of the Planning Commission, passed away on November 14th, Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday. He had worked closely with Nehru on many of his people-centric projects in newly Independent India, and later grown disillusioned with Nehru’s priorities. As a firm believer of Gandhian principles, Jain was a fervent advocate of decentralisation of power and strongly opposed the government’s over-reliance on the bureaucracy and centralised production processes.

As a Gandhian, he believed that social and economic freedoms were prerequisites of political freedom. That the equality of all citizens – exemplified by ‘one person one vote’ – would be secured only when everyone had access to food and employment that gave them purchasing power, and this was possible by focusing on local produce and local self government, not on national or global production that steadily disempowered the majority.

He believed that higher education was all very well, but till every citizen had basic education, we had failed to free ourselves. In short, he believed that for real progress, India needs to strengthen its grassroots. An early critic of top-down development, Jain insisted that participatory development was in the interest of the government. For government programmes to succeed, the people need to have a sense of ownership, he said.

Following Partition, when refugees from the North West Frontier Province flooded Delhi, Jain, working closely with Nehru, helped them build their own city next door, Faridabad, entirely through labour cooperatives, where workers owned industries and set up community health and education systems. With Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay he organised the Indian Cooperative Union and set up the Cottage Industries Emporium which brought craft centrestage and gave artisans independence, dignity and access to a wider market. He also created the government-run Super Bazaar, India’s first people’s supermarket.

With Jain we lost perhaps the last pillar of the original dream of India. Like hundreds who were privileged to know him, I will miss this deeply affectionate, soft-spoken idealist with a deceptively fragile look, gentle eyes and a mischievous smile.