I got to meet Dr B.D. Sharma long after he retired from the Indian Administrative Service. Spartan in his dress and manners, tall and dhoti-clad . He was introduced by an equally remarkable ?doctor saheb? I have now the privilege of calling a friend. ?Dr? Vinayan studied medicine up to the final year before he decided to take sanyas. Though he was persuaded to come down from the Himalayas, he put on first ochre and then white robes. Inspired by JP, he shifted to Bihar, where for some time he headed the mass organisation of a naxalite faction. Over the years that I have known him, I have learnt many things but I will refer here to just one to put this piece in perspective. When I was transferred to Patna in the mid-eighties, doctor saheb rattled out a list of names and asked if I had met any of them. I replied in the negative. ? Why do you journalists have to know only politicians and crooks,? he demanded, ? at least make some effort to identify good people?. I must have looked suitably chastised and devastated for him to explain, ? you see, good people are usually very lonely people and they need all the support they can get.? The evil ones, he had elaborated further, always flock together. That turned out to be an important lesson in life.
Therefore when Dr Vinayan informed that Dr B.D. Sharma was expected in town, I was more than willing to make an effort to meet him. A mathematician by training, Dr Sharma had retired after holding the statutory post of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Commissioner. I was soon informed by other friends in the IAS that Dr Sharma was a legend in the service. His stint as the deputy commissioner of Bastar, the largest district in India, they told me, was part of the folklore in the Academy at Mussorie.
He had discovered, for example, that in the tribal district, teachers rarely attended classes. They would engage a few classes towards the end of the month, receive their salary at the beginning of the month and then disappear for the next three and a half weeks. It seems the deputy commissioner put up a note suggesting that the wives of all men teachers be appointed as assistant teachers in the same school where the husband is employed and at half the salary. This would be incentive enough, the officer reckoned, for the teachers to stay back. Similarly, when the district faced a severe famine, the young deputy commissioner refused to wait for the state capital to give him a green signal for distribution of red cards. Instead, he ordered the godowns of the Food Corporation of India to be thrown open.
After many years there was a call from him. He was waiting for his flight to Guwahati, he said, and he would be returning the day after in the afternoon to catch a night train to Orissa. He has had a heart bypass surgery and is pushing eighty. But he continues to maintain a punishing schedule, travelling all over the country to spread the idea of ?Gram Swaraj?. A colleague asked where he lived. ?Trains? he replied with a mischievous smile.
Why doesn?t he stay in New Delhi and educate the leaders and the bureaucrats , we asked. ?yes, then you will see me on television very often but nothing will get done on the ground,? he chuckled. He added softly, ? I know I have embarked on an impossible mission par impossible kaam karne me hi to mazaa hai.?
Wherever he goes, he recalled with a laugh, he always inquires what would happen to the villagers if there is no government and no government office. The reply is invariably the same. Villagers would look at each other, shrug and say, ?nothing?. The government in this country, he declared, is expensive but completely irrelevant to the lives of ninety per cent of the population.
Till democracy actually empowers the villagers, he said gently but firmly, there is no hope. Strongly opposed to the hegemony of capitalism, he gently reminds us that all the farmers who are committing suicide in the country, are doing so in zones which witnessed the green revolution, where farmers switched over to cash crops, high yielding varieties and capital intensive farming. They were trapped into taking huge loans and eventually were left with no option but to take their own lives.
The new rulers of Jharkhand will do a great service if they periodically listen to people like Dr Sharma. One need not necessarily agree with his worldview or even with his prescriptions. But he is a good man and it pays to listen to good men.
ENDS
