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There was a spell of heart-tugging poignancy at a symposium on Indian sport which I attended in the capital last week. In the audience was three times Olympic hockey gold medal winner and coach Balbir Singh Senior, who chose to break protocol, hobbled on to the dais in the middle of a session and vented his anguish at the utter apathy of the authorities and the public to support his endeavours to make public his life and achievements.

“I want to write a book, but no publisher is interested. I can’t even hold a press conference because there is no financial support. To do this, I will even have to sell my land,” he lamented. The fact that such a man is still in our midst should have compelled historians of Indian sport to make a beeline for him.

But that is not the crux of this piece. With due apologies to the hockey stalwart, I want to juxtapose his choice of metaphor in expressing his helplessness in another context to perhaps understand the recent troubles across the country over acquisition of land for industry.

When Balbir Singh talked of having to sell even his land to meet his meagre financial needs, he did not mean it literally. It was a symbolic reference to his dismay, but it revealed nonetheless that selling land is, by and large, his last and not first option.

This is symptomatic of almost all of us.

There is an unusually high emotional quotient attached to land, to the extent that in some cultures it oftentimes becomes an object of devotion. A feeling of being dispossessed is therefore natural when you have to part with it. How to counter that feeling sensitively becomes the key then.

I don’t subscribe to the view that acquisition of land from farmers for industrialisation is bad. That is a mindless utopian view which caters neither to human enterprise or well-being. Since factories and manufacturing plants can’t be spun off into space as yet, land will have to be used for this purpose. The issue is not whether the enterprises will benefit the economic growth of the country, surely. Rather, it is of establishing mutual benefit to the sellers, and convincing them of the same.

Apart from the price for the land, if jobs, health care, education, women’s welfare, environment, become part of the due diligence associated with the deal, the process of transaction becomes that much easier. As I understand, in several such deals under purview, much of this has been debated and decided on. So what’s the furore about?
The problem arises when the politicians and governments become the interface and agents in working out the modalities rather than this being done directly. Politicians are high on rhetoric and promise, low on delivery. When various parties from the political landscape get involved, it becomes a melee from which emerge no winners, only considerable heartburn.

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In a recent issue of The Spectator, I came across this wonderful anecdote in an article by Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion in England. He argues for the United States to go back to its original strengths to retain its importance in the emerging world order. He cites this example of Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers. Around the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson and some others were riding across the new land and came to a river where they met a man who obviously wanted to cross over. The man waited till the rest of the party had reached the other bank before requesting Jefferson to carry him on his horse. The President agreed.

When he had reached the other side safely, the man was accosted by Jefferson’s irate colleagues. I will let Murray take over the narrative from here: “…What did he think he was doing? Didn’t he know that was the President? The man, ignorant of who had carried him across, explained simply. ‘I looked into all your eyes and they said ‘no’. I looked into his eyes and they said, ‘yes’.”

If I need add, our Founding Fathers too had inspired a similar trust. As in America, the political class here needs to do some serious introspection too; without waiting two centuries for this. Sixty years is long enough.

Email: ayaz@dnaindia.net