PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS


Namely for years we have been advocating that s three years course in medical aid, or even two years course, is adequate to turn out reasonably efficient practitioners of medical aid. The Chinese being realists have gone even further. Their arguments is that there is a difference between practical needs and academic ideals. They say, what I have been saying since years, that the basis of a plan is not what is desirable, but what is feasible and practicable.


At the Eleventh Session of the

All India Homoeopathic Conference at GAYA, 1955.

[Continued from page 18]

Politics in its essence is not a philosophy of technical ideas, but an art of the immediately practical. That is exactly what the modern Chinese have eminently understood. We Indians are about the most legalistic minded race, always looking to precedents and authorities; and the only man who broke through this in India was Mahatma Gandhi. He was the greatest statesman of all time in India because he understood the simple needs of the masses. I asked a member of the British Embassy who was travelling with me on the boat back from China what he thought of the modern chinese; and he said that they had something most uncommon, namely, commonsense.

The rulers of New China are, in my view the greatest statesmen I have seen because they know the needs of the masses and, as statesmen, act as brokers of ideas, without whom no bridges can be built between the expert and the multitude. It is no accident, but an inherent quality of his character, that the specialist distrusts his fellow specialist when the latter can reach the multitude. For him the gift of popular explanation is a proof of failure in the grasp of the discipline. His intensity of gaze makes him suspect the man who can state the elements of his mystery in general terms. He knows too much of minute to be comfortable upon the heights of generalisation.

I want to further add, and this is especially meant for our Government and its bureaucrats, that things done by Governments must not only appear right to the expert, no matter whether he comes from America, or Kamaschatka; their consequences must seem right to the plain and average man. And there is no way of discovering his judgment save by deliberately seeking it. this, after all, is the really final test of government; for, at least over any considerable period, no Government can maintain a special policy which runs counter to the wishes of the people or which does not show adequate and rapid results.

Neither good – will in the expert nor efficiency in the performance of his function ever compensates in a state for failure to elicit the interest of the plain man in what is being done. What can be done is not what the plain mans scheme of values permits him to think as just. His likes and dislikes, his indifference and inertia, circumscribe at every stage the possibilities of administration.

Had our planners and our bureaucracy thought out these aspects the picture would have been very different, their attitude towards the basic problems of a resurgent Asia would have been more realistic; and you and I would not have been more realistic; and you and I would not have been here gathered today to dissect the strangely antagonistic policy of the Hon. Health Minister and her Health Ministry to pieces. For, after all what is it that we are asking of them? All that we are asking is for them to look first at facts as they stand, sheer, brutal economic facts of India and Asia and then to build their theories on facts.

The most important fact as Harold Lasky points out is that: “We must ceaselessly remember that no body of experts is wise enough, or good enough, to be charged with the destiny of mankind. Just because they are experts, the destiny of life is, for them, in constant danger of being sacrificed to a part; and they are saved from disaster only by the need of deference to the plain mans commonsense. Indeed, it may come so far that, as Professor Whitehead wrote: “The fixed man for the fixed duty, who in older times was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger. In a sense, the more expert such fixed people are, the more dangerous are they likely to be.

In order to co-ordinate his specialism with the sumtotal of human knowledge, he must cease to be an expert, for the wisdom that is needed for the direction of affairs is not an expert technique but a balanced equilibrium. It is the knowledge of how to use men, money and material available in the present and the near visible future, a faculty of judgment about the practicability of principles under given situations that matters. It consists not in the possession of specialised knowledge, but in the power to utilise at the right moment and in the right directions.”

All this I have been looking for in our Rulers and their bureaucracy of experts and have not found them. So of what use is putting before this ruling class our suggestions even if they are of the utmost value and based on a realistic approach? And how right was I, even as far back as 1951, when I warned you all against having too high hopes that the bureaucratic structure would change or that this Government would rely, less upon their reactionary bureaucracy and more on the realistic analysis of facts. Nothing has changed today. On the contrary, the more it begins to fail the more barren its results turn out to be, the firmer does this Government clings onto its pre – conceived notions – a well known escapist phenomena.

Therefore what shall we discuss further? I think there is something useful I could tell you, mainly that most of the thesis we have repeatedly put up to this Government, and most of what I and some of us have been tirelessly and, to the Government, tiresomely, advocating, quite unknown to us have been put into actual execution in New China. That was the most surprising thing I and others saw when we was the most surprising thing I and others saw when we was the most surprising thing I and others saw when we went there. Namely for years we have been advocating that went there.

Namely for years we have been advocating that s three years course in medical aid, or even two years course, is adequate to turn out reasonably efficient practitioners of medical aid. The Chinese being realists have gone even further. Their arguments is that there is a difference between practical needs and academic ideals. They say, what I have been saying since years, that the basis of a plan is not what is desirable, but what is feasible and practicable. But then it needs the Chinese realism to do things in a unorthodox way. They shocked orthodox Marxism into hysterics by doing the most unheard of and un – Marxist thing.

They based their theories on a peasant revolution and made it a stupendous success. That was the most unheard of thing the orthodox Marxists with their theory of “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, had ever heard of, not only in Holy Russia but it came as a shock also to the orthodox Marxists in India When the Russians first announced their first Five Year Plan, all the learned orthodox Economists in capitalistic countries dolefully shook their heads and predicted dire failure. Why? Because it did not fit in with their fixed theories.

To their utter consternation it succeed, again, in the most unheard of manner. What is the reason for the experts failure to assess rightly the possibility of success of unorthodox approaches to problems? As Lasky points out:

“Vital, too, and dangerous, is the experts caste spirit. The inability of doctors to see light from without is notorious; and a reforming lawyer is at least as strange a spectacle as one prepared to welcome criticism of his profession from men who do not practise it. There is, in fact, no expert group which does not tend to deny that ruth may possibly be found outside the boundary of its private Pyranees. Yet, clearly enough, to accept its dictates as final, without examining their implications, would be to accept grave error as truth in almost every department of social effort. Every experts conclusion is a philosophy of the second best until it has been examined in terms of a scheme of values not special to the subject matter of which he is an exponent.

REALISM IN NEW CHINA. This is exactly what the Chinese understood, without, very likely, ever having read Harold Lasky, and I am openly confessing that my recent visit to China taught me in a six weeks of practical observation, what twenty years of theoretical study could never have effectively taught me. Take for instance their outlook on Medical and Health Problems. They never had the benefit of advice from the W.H.O. like our Health Minister. They are lucky that they did not, because it taught them to think in straight lines without reference to holy precedents.

The first thing I asked the Health Minister in China, who also happens to be a woman there as here, was what the attitude of the Government was towards it own indigenous system of medicine. She said that they could not do without it that China had about 46000 trained medical personnel which was totally inadequate, and they were conscious of the fact that it would take China considerable time to create that adequate, highly trained staff in modern medicine; and what were they to do in the meantime? Obviously, she argued, the Chinese Government could not let the people die without medical aid when there were huge number of Chinese medical practitioners in indigenous medicine who had an ancient system of medicine which the Government had not fully assessed but knew that the people were resorting to it.

N M Jaisoorya