The derailment of E Sreedharan

E Sreedharan, the celebrated engineer, who has joined the BJP with Assembly elections in Kerala a little over a month away, made a very curious statement last week. He said that "to serve the nation honestly, one must stand with the BJP". If one were to invert or subvert this logic, would it then mean that Sreedharan never served the nation honestly because there was scant BJP presence when he was in active government service?

Sreedharan retired from the railways in 1990, which would mean he mostly worked under Congress regimes. His services were extended by the VP Singh-led government, and it continued unabated under the PV Narasimha Rao dispensation, when he apparently did a splendid job with the Konkan railway. Later, his appointment as Delhi Metro chief happened when HD Deve Gowda and IK Gujral’s United Front government was in power. Former cabinet secretary, TSR Subramanian, reveals in his 2014 book on governance that the argument that "he [Sreedharan] was 'over age' was also trotted out to eliminate him", but his bosses showed keenness to appointment him.
Even when Sreedharan was a deputy engineer with the Calcutta Metro in the mid-1970s, there was no BJP government at either the centre or the state. Although Sahib Singh Verma was chief minister of Delhi when he became Delhi Metro chief, it was Sheila Dikshit who was chief minister for 15 years since 1998, and is largely credited with the progress that the Delhi Metro made on the ground. Sreedharan, when asked in a TV interview as to why he had chosen to join the BJP at the ripe age of 88, said he had enjoyed a good rapport with former Prime Minister Vajpayee, and added, quite naively, that Vajpayee had paid for his own metro ticket in 1999. As if that act of token ‘simplicity’ was reason enough for him to belatedly pledge his loyalty to the BJP. In fact, a good amount of the Delhi Metro work was completed when Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister.

Despite this munificence and professional respect he enjoyed under various non-BJP regimes, why does Sreedharan suspend his memory and reason, altogether, to say that the nation is 'honestly' served only under the BJP? Why has the gene of generous acknowledgement for collective accomplishment been displaced by individual vanity?
Anyway, if there is one person who remains totally unsung in the Delhi Metro story it is HD Deve Gowda. As Prime Minister it was he who had offered financial closure to the project in September 1996, battling objections by his own finance minister and finance ministry. Gowda had also held the urban development portfolio while Prime Minister, and NP Singh was secretary in-charge. After a half-day brainstorming at his 7 Race Course Road home-office with experts and stakeholders, Gowda had brought it before the Cabinet and cleared 55.3 km of Phase One at Rs 4,860 crore. The finance ministry placed its reservations on record that the project had less than three per cent Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and lacked consequent commercial viability. Gowda had offered broader logic and understanding.
The media, which often enjoys draining out complexity while crowning prejudices and perceptions, called Sreedharan the 'Metro Man', like it perpetuated the phrase 'Missile Man' for another engineer, APJ Abdul Kalam. The moment the media arranges a delusional whirlwind behind these easily consumable catch phrases, the personalities get sucked into it and start believing in their own mythology and invincibility. It is like the creation of comic book superheroes.

There is a fascinating division that one gets to observe among the intelligentsia, especially since 2014. Perhaps it existed earlier, too, but it was bashfully camouflaged. The engineers, or those who consider themselves 'doers', and think of themselves as 'productive' with enormous applied knowledge, pair well with the BJP. The accountants and business administrators, too, are on this list. On the contrary, those who are in the humanities, arts and the social sciences, also those in the pure sciences, who deal with abstractions, indulge in theorising, and whose worldview is constructed in a broader, liberal way, are aligned against the BJP.
There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and there are some trapeze artists who try to manage both the worlds. In the case of the first category, they put society and knowledge, emotion and reason in different silos, while the latter functions by always integrating the two. Farmers who are application geniuses may be an exception too. They operate with skepticism - as opposed to certainty - since they deal with an infinite variable called nature.
This is probably why Sreedharan did not bat an eyelid when he made gullible utterances on issues like 'love jihad', democratic activism, and eating habits among other things, recently. He did not even mind throwing his hat into the ring for the chief minister’s chair when BJP has just one seat in the current Assembly. He did not realise that power is not an engineering problem. Sreedharan can rush to comment on anything with impunity because he views the world through a pinhole. All complexity in the world for him is reduced to an engineering problem.
In the case of others of his ilk, it is an accounting problem (think of Mohandas Pai), or a mere law and order problem (think of Kiran Bedi). They take the phrase 'nation-building' quite literally. They are wired that way, and it is not that they are dishonest always. The BJP finds it easy to deal with them because their large narrative of cultural nationalism goes unchallenged with the technical experts, who are happy to sublease their 'unproductive' social and cultural thinking to them.
The BJP injects disquiet among its opponents by getting them to make outlandish statements, and also certify those that already exist. The party rides on the hard-earned integrity of their life’s work. The sad part is that Sreedharan and those made from the same mold do not even understand that they have been derailed.

Sugata Srinivasaraju writes on chronicles of the south
(Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own)

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