MEDITATING ON THE FUTURE

- The cost of modernizing Sikkim must be measured in advance


Sunanda K. Datta-Ray


Jawaharlal Nehru would have been disappointed. Though Balmiki Prasad Singh, Sikkim’s present governor, saved Raj Bhavan from demolition, the retro-fitted villa has lost the simple elegance that so charmed Nehru that he wanted to spend his retirement gazing upon the snows from its panelled cosiness.

Gangtok is the ugly face of India’s future. The contrast of smart shops amidst urban squalor just seems more offensive here than in other state capitals where tasteless medley has evolved over time. Perhaps also because of signs of conscious beautification. Tourists admire the pedestrian shopping plaza. Raj Bhavan is more ornately splendid than in its heyday as the Residency and then India House, the world’s first outpost for what came to be called China-watching. Apart from the governor’s concern for history, the building’s ornamentation probably also reflects the soaring ambitions of the chief minister, Pawan Chamling, who wants Sikkim’s towns and bazaars “to be like those of Singapore” and all its villages “like those of Switzerland”. His model for floriculture and horticulture is the Netherlands.

But the frenzy that the new Sikkim’s catch-as-catch-can ethos has generated could not be more unlike Singapore’s discipline, Swiss stolidity, Dutch placidity or the tranquillity of its own earlier self when letters were addressed to “Sikkim, via India”. Change is not only physical. Adele Diamond, an American academic at the International Conference on Science, Spirituality and Education organized by Gangtok’s Namgyal Institute of Tibetology referred to Sikkim’s suicide rate, the highest in the land. Rinku Tulku Rinpoche, an incarnate Tibetan monk from Benares, who followed her, suggested that though suicide is usually attributed to the death wish, it could also reflect the wish to be free.

Both causes suggest extreme unhappiness with the present, and deserve to be examined in the context of social upheaval, commercial exploitation and a huge floating population. It doesn’t surprise me when an Indian official says that most suicides are among the Bhutiya- Lepchas. Long ago reduced to a minority, Sikkim’s original inhabitants have most reason to fear the future. But dislocation cuts across ethnic barriers as land acquisition for a proliferation of power projects creates sudden millionaires who lord it in hotels or buy scooters and employ drivers to wheel them up and down the steep roads. When the money runs out, they apparently return to the land but as hired hands.

Much has changed, but much also remains the same. Revenue Order Number One still forbids alienation of Bhutiya-Lepcha land, Buddhist monks have a reserved legislative seat, and majority and minority are almost evenly matched in the assembly. Courtly Bhutiya-Lepcha etiquette turns democracy into a feudal ritual. It also helps to sustain an illusion to which the Dalai Lama — who addressed two sessions of the conference as well as two huge public gatherings in the Paljor Thondup Stadium below my hotel — indirectly lent substance by claiming that Buddhists provide a line of defence along India’s Himalayan border.

Paradoxically, the majority is not averse to a vanishing minority being projected as Sikkim’s identity. Someone explains that local Nepalese do not want to be swamped by Darjeeling Gorkhas. And so, the architecture of the new Sikkim House in Calcutta’s Salt Lake, bright handlooms, carved and painted furniture, dragon carpets, intricately worked silver, scroll paintings, the eight lucky signs and even momos and thukpa reflect Bhutiya culture rooted in Tibet. The myth is perpetuated by the state government’s ubiquitous symbol — the coat of arms that Britain’s College of Arms bestowed on the Namgyal dynasty whose last monarch was overthrown in 1975. Many of the dreams he nursed are now being realized. Sikkim has two universities, factories have been established, tea gardens are flourishing, tourism is booming, and one hotel follows another.

So far as the urban experience is concerned, Gangtok is treading a well-trodden path. When Rajiv Gandhi dismissed Calcutta as a dying city, I wrote that spic and span Delhi was India’s last cantonment. The capital no longer qualifies for exception. Only Lutyens’s Delhi still does. But for how long? Incipient signs of encroachment are a reminder that the spaciousness of its bungalows and gardens is as much an inherited asset as the bandar-log’s abandoned city in Kipling’s Jungle Book.

Calcutta long ago anticipated Gangtok’s concrete jungle. Other cities are following suit with vertical slums. Haphazard cheek-by-jowl structures indicate a total lack of planning — or inability to enforce plans that do exist — which is the norm. Once lined on both sides by identical bungalows and expansive lawns, home to only 19 or 20 families, the short, narrow street in Calcutta where I was brought up now houses about a thousand families. It is packed with the human and vehicular fallout of two schools, the conversion of a third into a marriage house doing nothing to ease congestion. Nowhere else in the world would municipal authorities permit educational institutions to overwhelm a residential locality; but then, education is commerce, and little different from the corner grocery expanding into a mini-supermarket or the modest eating house whose popularity obliges it to deny imitators.

But, again, Gangtok and Calcutta are not the only offenders. Somewhere among my papers are meticulous drawings of the greater Bangalore that chief ministers like K. Hanumanthaiya and S. Nijalingappa envisaged, showing residential and service areas, industrial zones and green belts in concentric circles. Presumably, all that was tossed into the rubbish bin when spiralling land prices encouraged officials and politicians to sanction the sale of land earmarked for special purposes to the highest bidders who were free to make the most of their purchase.

One hears of oases like Alibagh near Bombay that are pleasing to the eye and comfortable to live in, with assured electricity, water, drainage, conservancy and all other services. They are havens where the rich have shut out India. A Singaporean journalist commented on a Gurgaon enclave that it was Manhattan if you looked up but filthy, poverty-stricken India if you looked down. And “down” is where most Indians live.

This disregard for the majority means that all safety norms are dangerously flouted so that jerry-built blocks of flats come crashing down and mansions become towering infernos because of overload, poor quality material and no maintenance. With whispers of seepage into mountains that are prone to landslides even without rainfall, Sikkim’s mushrooming hydroelectricity projects could prove even more disastrous. The ground has always been treacherous here. The earthquake of 1897 and cyclone of 1899 are grim memories laced into folklore. A fire razed Gangtok’s old palace to the ground in the 1920s.

Vicky Williams, one of Kalimpong’s legendary Macdonald sisters, remembered rail tracks dangling from the trees after the 1950 floods washed away the railway that meandered 36 km along the Teesta valley to Gyalkhola. Raj Bhavan was declared to be unsuitable for habitation and ready for the bulldozer after the earthquake in 2006. Last year’s cyclone destroyed 4,500 houses in Darjeeling and partially destroyed another 12,000. One hopes that reliable feasibility studies support the proposed Rs 1,339.48-crore broad-gauge line from Sevoke to Rangpo through 13 tunnels and over 100 bridges. No one mentions it, but the plan faintly echoes the British dream of a railway line to Lhasa so that the sahibs could rest and recreate under the shade of the Potala. The cost of modernization must be carefully measured in advance.

In one small detail, Gangtok is still different from any other Indian town. There are no beggars. Nehru would have liked that. Given his impatience with religion and his faith in science and spirituality, he would have approved of the conference that brought the Dalai Lama here. Nehru would also have approved of a still vigorous faith in the power of prayer. I am told that far from deserting his inheritance, Wangchuck Namgyal, the 13th Denzong Chogyal to legitimists, is engaged in the unending meditation for Sikkim’s welfare that is permissible only to his rank.

sunandadr@yahoo.co.in

source:The Telegraph