Anavyartha: 1

Summary

Anvyartha - 1 (अन्वयार्थ - १) is a Marathi-language collection of newspaper columns by the farmer leader and free-market thinker Sharad Joshi, founder of the Shetkari Sanghatana. Published in March 2010 by Janshakti Vachak Chalwal (Aurangabad) as part of his amrit-mahotsav (75th-birthday) commemorative reissue, the volume gathers seventy-seven short essays that originally ran under the ‘Anvyartha’ column in the Aurangabad daily Loksatta/Lokmat between 1992-1994 and 2000-2001. Each piece is dated at its foot so readers can see the political moment in which it was written. The editors thank Hemant Deshmukh, Shaila Deshpande, Sureshchandra Mhatre and Lokmat editor Chakradhar Dalvi for retrieving the clippings.

In his preface dated 8 February 2010, Joshi explains that virtually all his earlier book-length writing arose out of the Shetkari Sanghatana, defending agriculture as the site of state extraction. The newspaper editor who commissioned this column, however, asked him to write about anything except farming, and the present volume is the result: a panorama of his liberal worldview applied beyond the field. Joshi’s signature thesis - that the entire post-Independence Indian governance system was built to loot the surplus produced in agriculture, with the licence-permit-quota raj installed under socialist slogans only deepening the older colonial extraction - recurs as the lens through which he reads news of the day. He invokes Ayn Rand on the fate of the productive in democracies that reward the welfare-seeking voter, and Malthus on technology and population, to argue that bureaucratic socialism is itself the parent of the corruption, terrorism and communal turbulence Indians complain about.

The essays range across the demolition of the Babri Masjid (read through the figure of the abandoned Sita), the autonomy of universities and the Pune University bill, the Dunkel draft and WTO, secularism and the meaning of ‘Hindu’, dowry, property rights, Narasimha Rao’s reforms, Bill Clinton, Mao as the villain of communist history, electronic journalism, Shiv Sena, the Bombay Club’s opposition to liberalisation, and the women’s movement. Throughout, Joshi defends open markets, technology, decentralisation and individual enterprise against what he calls the ‘arrogance’ of the planner-bureaucrat-intellectual class, locating his liberalism squarely in the lived experience of the Indian cultivator.

Key points

• The book collects seventy-seven ‘Anvyartha’ newspaper columns Sharad Joshi wrote for the Aurangabad Loksatta between 1992-94 and 2000-01, reissued in March 2010 for his 75th-birthday commemorative series.
• Joshi’s organising claim, repeated from his Shetkari Sanghatana work, is that the foundation of every Indian system of governance is the extraction of the surplus generated in agriculture, with socialism’s licence-permit-quota raj merely succeeding the colonial loot.
• He argues that the corruption, black-marketeering, smuggling and goonda-raj Indians decry are not aberrations but the direct product of the socialist regulatory state that replaced British rule.
• Citing Ayn Rand, he contends that democracies built on one-person-one-vote welfare politics inevitably penalise the productive, the inventive and the entrepreneur in favour of those who line up for subsidies.
• The opening essay ‘Navya shatakatil manus - manus asel’ surveys evolution, technology, genetic and prenatal-memory research (Kenneth Parker, Alfred Tomatis) to argue science, not Marxism or Gandhism, will reshape human nature in the new century.
• ‘Siyavarytakta Sita’ reads Rama’s repudiation of Sita as the archetype of patriarchal injustice and uses it as a frame for the Babri Masjid demolition of 6 December 1992 and the women abducted during Partition.
• ‘Vidvananchi swayattata limited’ defends genuine university autonomy against the Pune University bill, arguing Maharashtra’s colleges have become political fiefs of sugar-and-liquor barons rather than seats of learning.
• Other essays attack the Dunkel draft critics, the Bombay Club’s opposition to liberalisation, the bureaucratic ‘we-are-your-servants-and-obedient’ charade, dowry and property-rights reform, and Mao as the worst villain of twentieth-century communist history.