Dear Shri KJ Alphons Ji,

I know that you are just a phone call away. Yet, I write this open letter to you because you have raised a public issue by trying to move a private member’s Bill in the Upper House of Parliament. I thought the idea was original and you were guided by altruistic principles. When I read an interview you granted on the subject concerned I realised that there was more than met the eye in your initiative. To put it differently, you had a vested political interest to subserve by raising this issue.

A year before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, you and I attended the Yuhanon Marthoma memorial lecture organised at the YWCA auditorium in New Delhi. You were a part of the audience. When it was time for members of the audience to ask questions, you stood up and used the forum to claim that Modi was the only leader who could meet the challenges of the nation. Your intervention was totally unwarranted. Of course, you could use the forum to praise Modi.

In the interview you have honestly admitted that the private member’s Bill that you seek to move is part of the grand plan of Modi. In other words, you claim that your initiative should not be seen as a flash in the pan but as a straw in the wind. It is a calculated move to confuse the people and reap political mileage. If, by playing this role, you can become a minister or get elected to the Rajya Sabha once again from Rajasthan, I wish you all the best.

I was a journalist in Delhi when you were with the DDA and demolished many so-called illegal buildings. You also claimed to have been carrying a pistol while the demolition squad was at work. Such adventures might have appealed to some but I had a disdain for it. Around that time, I was going up and down the DDA office to get a plot allotted for the housing society of which I was the president. I managed not to pay a bribe but I know how the system works.

You are a Member of Parliament with a lot of privileges. You can look around and see how the DDA-allotted buildings have undergone so many changes that they are no longer distinguishable as DDA colonies. There is rampant corruption. Did your so-called crusade make any difference? Nothing at all. You got some publicity. That is all. It helped you in your career. You became an MLA with the support of the CPM and when you found that you had no chance in Kerala’s politics, you shifted to Delhi and joined the BJP.

For a civil servant, the struggle to survive produces the personalisation of government. The phenomenon consists of putting “me first and not the country, which takes teamwork”. No less a person than PN Haksar thought civil services … are committed, first of all to themselves and their nuclear family … making secure the future of our sons and daughters … and, if possible … the members of our subcaste, caste, community and region”. This deeply embedded cultural characteristic, resting on the scriptural injunction to aid one’s own, makes reform in a scarcity economy incredibly difficult.

I had occasions to hear you narrate your life story. Once on television and another at a function in Delhi. You told the audience how you got very low marks in your matriculation examination and how you decided to change yourself. You had nothing to say about your life after the matriculation except about the high score you had in the civil services examination.

I was curious to know which college you attended and how you became an IAS officer. That is when I learnt that you were being trained to become a Catholic priest and it was this training and life outside of Kerala which enabled you to become an IAS officer. I do not know why you are hesitant about telling your connections with the church. I know many persons who left the priestly vocation, got married and took up jobs as journalists, teachers and principals. What is wrong with that?

Anyway, I write this letter not to dig into your past but to discuss your present position. You want the word “socialist” removed from the preamble of the Constitution. You think that “socialist” denotes a particular ideology and it should, therefore, be replaced by the word “equitable”.

The Bill also suggests changing the words “equality of status and of opportunity” in the Preamble to “equality of status and of opportunity to be born, to be fed, to be educated, to get a job and to be treated with dignity”. It has proposed to add “access to information technology” in the objectives of the Preamble. 

I do not know why you forgot to add these words also in the sentence, “to get married, to produce children, to become grandparents, to have grandsons and granddaughters and to leave millions of dollars stashed away in Swiss banks”.

You are either so simple or so crooked. That is what I thought when I watched a video clipping from your speech in Parliament on the Mullaperiyar issue. At one point you ask, “have you ever heard of a dam built with Surkhi? What is Surkhi. It is a mixture made of lime, jaggery and egg white”.

In India, the first cement factory came up in Madras in 1904. Until then, all the buildings, including dams, were built with different kinds of adhesives. Mullaperiyar could not have been built with concrete as cement was not available at that time. The Great Wall of China, the Tanjore temple, the Padmanabhaswamy temple and the Konark temple were all built much before the Mullaperiyar dam.

The Taj Mahal stands as a great piece of architecture. It was built over nearly 30 years in the seventeenth century. How were the marble stones pasted? As mentioned, cement was not available. A solution was made for the foundation of the Taj Mahal, which was called ‘Saroj’, made from clay. Apart from this, jaggery, pulses, sugar, resin, gum etc. were also added to it. This paste has helped the Taj to fight earthquakes, storms, rain, sun, heat, winter etc.

I agree with your theory that every man-made thing has a life and the dam poses a danger to the Keralites. What I found funny was your astonishment over Surkhi. By the way, who told you that egg-white was also used? To return to the Constitution, it was through the 42nd Constitutional amendment that Indira Gandhi added the word “socialist” into the preamble. She did this during the Emergency.

You have purposely not mentioned the fact that under the Amendment, two words — not one — were added to the Preamble. They are “secular socialist”. I am sure that you know that in the election held in 1977, Indira Gandhi was defeated. The Janata Party vowed to undo all the amendments she made to the Constitution and restore it to its pristine form. Two key persons of the Janata Party government were AB Vajpayee and LK Advani. 

Could the Janata Party remove the words “secular socialist” from the preamble? No, they could not? Do you know why? Jayakprakash Narayan who was the principal architect of the Janata Party was himself a great socialist. The Socialist Party had its roots all over the country. Why? Because it appealed to the people of India.

Socialism is different from Communism. I do not want to waste my space by describing the difference between the two. Suffice to say, India had chosen the path of socialism long before it was incorporated in the Preamble. When India became Independent, there were not many capitalists. However, there were many traders. They were not industrialists. Tatas and Birlas were two large business families.

One of the Birlas was told by an astrologer that he would die young. He believed in it, bought a bungalow in Varanasi, did not marry and led the life of an ascetic. He waited for death. Yes, he died but of old age. A more egalitarian industrialist donated Rs 2.5 lakh to the Government in the twenties to build what is today known as the Lakshman Jhula in Rishikesh when the original hanging bridge across the Ganga was washed away by a flash flood.

He put a condition on the donation. The government should never impose any tax or collect toll from the people using the bridge. The condition is honored even today. The pity is that, often, the cows block the bridge and the authorities cannot touch them because of the special status the animal enjoys in society. I am a journalist. The government wanted Indian capitalists — those like the Jains who own the Times of India — to set up newsprint factories. Nobody came forward. India became one of the largest importers of newsprint, mainly from Canada.

Finally, the public sector took up the challenge and set up a factory at Nepanagar in Madhya Pradesh, first, and at Kottayam in Kerala, later, where you had your innings as a Collector. India was never a poor country. In fact, it was the famed riches of the country that attracted invaders and colonial powers from all over the world.

At that time the wealth of the country was in the hands of some like the Maharaja of Travancore and Jamshedji Tata. Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of his ilk sought to distribute the wealth equitably. I do not have to tell you how Kerala took the initiative to have land distributed among the landless. Vinoba Bhave tried to do the same by appealing to the conscience of the rich landlords who donated their surplus land which were not cultivable.

All such efforts had an impact on the economy. Development began to percolate to the poor. The gap between the rich and the poor began to dissipate. The predecessor of your party, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, had chosen Gandhian socialism as its credo. Narasimha Rao unleashed what is known as the economic reforms. Private sector was allowed to flourish. And then came your leader Modi, who unleashed crony capitalism. By the way, Modi is my Prime Minister, not my leader.

Name any project undertaken by a capitalist. The investment for it came from the government or the public sector banks. There is not a single industrialist who invested his own money in a large project. The Ambanis and Adanis have built their empires by manipulating the government. When the whole country suffered during the pandemic, Adani and Ambani were growing by leaps and bounds. Today Adani has become the richest man in Asia.

The gap between the rich and the poor has widened. Just three days ago the World Inequality Report came. It said, the top one per cent of the population in India owns more than one-fifth of the total national income in 2021, while the bottom half earns just 13.1 per cent. If you think this is a good phenomenon, I have only pity for you. Equitable distribution of the national wealth is the ideal. That is what socialism seeks to achieve.

Whatever you say about the word “socialist” in the preamble can be said about the word “secular” also. Where is secularism when your party leaders like Modi and Yogi allow anti-Muslim rhetoric to flourish in the country? You are being used as a test balloon by the party. Once a discussion happens on socialism, they can use it to argue with greater effect that the word “secular” should also be removed. They would be only too happy to replace it with the word “Hindu”.

Socialism and secularism came together into the Preamble. The BJP wants both to be removed. Alas, it is not sure of how the Supreme Court would react to it as it has not so far repudiated the court’s own Basic Structure doctrine. Once they have pliant judges in place, they will try it. Please remember that you are just a cog in the wheel of Hindutva.

ajphilip@gmail.com