C. K. Prahlad by ReTHINK INDIA

“Will INDIA maintain her INDependence or will She Lose it again?”

Dr. BhimRao Ambedkar

Commemorating the Ambedkarite Triad of Giving Up Grammar of Anarchy | Avoiding Hero Worship | Working Towards Social Democracy on his 132 Birth Anniversary !!!

Commemorating the 132 Birth Anniversary of the Indian Polymath in Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar… !!!

Send in your Institutional Submissions for Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar Accolades 2022 for #SafeguardingIndianDemocracy to editor@rethinkindia.in elucidating as to in what all ways have the titanium triad of Working Towards Social Democracy, Giving Up Grammar of Anarchy & Avoiding Hero Worship has been forged well within the Institutional Framework…based on his iconic speech in Constituent Assembly on November 25th, 1949…

The accolades would thereby be extended on the very day of November 25th, 2022…

Excerpts of the November 25, 1949 speech of BhimRao Ambedkar on the need to give up the grammar of anarchy, to avoid hero-worship, and to work towards a social – not just a political – democracy.

On 26th January 1950, India will be an independent country. What would happen to her independence?

Will she maintain her independence or will she lose it again?

This is the first thought that comes to my mind. It is not that India was never an independent country. The point is that she once lost the independence she had.

Will she lose it a second time?

It is this thought which makes me most anxious for the future.

What perturbs me greatly is the fact that not only India has once before lost her independence, but she lost it by the infidelity and treachery of some of her own people.

• In the invasion of Sindh by Mahommed-Bin-Kasim, the military commanders of King Dahar accepted bribes from the agents of Mahommed-Bin-Kasim and refused to fight on the side of their King.
• It was Jaichand who invited Mahommed Gohri to invade India and fight against Prithvi Raj and promised him the help of himself and the Solanki Kings.
• When Shivaji was fighting for the liberation of Hindus, the other Maratha noblemen and the Rajput Kings were fighting the battle on the side of Moghul Emperors.
• When the British were trying to destroy the Sikh Rulers, Gulab Singh, their principal commander sat silent and did not help to save the Sikh Kingdom.
• In 1857, when a large part of India had declared a war of independence against the British, the Sikhs stood and watched the event as silent spectators.

Will history repeat itself?

It is this thought which fills me with anxiety.

This anxiety is deepened by the realization of the fact that in addition to our old enemies in the form of castes and creeds we are going to have many political parties with diverse and opposing political creeds.

Will Indians place the country above their creed or will they place creed above the country?

I do not know.

But this much is certain if the parties place creed above country, our independence will be put in jeopardy a second time and probably be lost forever. This eventuality we must all resolutely guard against. We must be determined to defend our independence with the last drop of our blood.

On the 26th of January 1950, India would be a democratic country in the sense that India from that day would have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The same thought comes to my mind.

What would happen to her democratic Constitution?

Will she be able to maintain it or will she lose it again?

This is the second thought that comes to my mind and makes me as anxious as the first.

Democratic system

It is not that India did not know what is Democracy.

There was a time when India was studded with republics, and even where there were monarchies, they were either elected or limited. They were never absolute.

It is not that India did not know Parliaments or parliamentary procedures.

A study of the Buddhist Bhikshu Sanghas discloses that not only there were Parliaments – for the Sanghas were nothing but Parliaments – but the Sanghas knew and observed all the rules of a parliamentary procedure known to modern times. They had rules regarding seating arrangements, rules regarding Motions, Resolutions, Quorum, Whip, Counting of Votes, Voting by Ballot, Censure Motion, Regularisation, Res Judicata, etc. Although these rules of parliamentary procedure were applied by the Buddha to the meetings of the Sanghas, he must have borrowed them from the rules of the Political Assemblies functioning in the country in his time.

This democratic system India lost.

Will she lose it a second time?

I do not know.

But it is quite possible in a country like India – where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new – there is a danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship.

It is quite possible for this new born democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact.

If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.

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If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do?

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First :: Abandon the Grammar of Anarchy

The first thing in my judgment we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives.

It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution.

It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha.

When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods.

But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods.

These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.

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Second :: Avoiding HERO Worship

The second thing we must do is observe the caution which John Stuart Mill has given to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely, not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with the power which enables him to subvert their institutions”.

There is nothing wrong with being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness. As has been well said by the Irish Patriot Daniel O’Connel, no man can be grateful at the cost of his honor, no woman can be grateful at the cost of her chastity and no nation can be grateful at the cost of its liberty. This caution is far more necessary in the case of India than in the case of any other country.

In India, Bhakti, or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequaled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul.

But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.

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Third :: Working Towards Social Democracy

The third thing we must do is not to be content with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.

Social democracy

What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life that recognizes liberty, equality, and fraternity as the principles of life. These principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity are not to be treated as separate items in a trinity. They form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy.

• Liberty cannot be divorced from equality, equality cannot be divorced from liberty.
• Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity.
• Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many.
• Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative.
• Without fraternity, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many.
• Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things.
• It would require a constable to enforce them.

We must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is the complete absence of two things in Indian Society.

One of these is equality.

On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty.

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.

In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.

• How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
• How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?
• If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.

We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which is Assembly has to laboriously built up.

The second thing we are wanting in is recognition of the principle of fraternity.

What does fraternity mean?

Fraternity means a sense of common brotherhood of all Indians – of Indians being one people.

It is the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life.

It is a difficult thing to achieve.

How difficult it is, can be realized from the story related by James Bryce in his volume on American Commonwealth about the United States of America.

The story is – I propose to recount it in the words of Bryce himself:

“Some years ago the American Protestant Episcopal Church was occupied at its triennial Convention in revising its liturgy. It was thought desirable to introduce among the short sentence prayers a prayer for the whole people, and an eminent New England divine proposed the words `O Lord, bless our nation’.

Accepted one afternoon, on the spur of the moment, the sentence was brought up next day for reconsideration, when so many objections were raised by the laity to the word nation’ as importing too definite a recognition of national unity, that it was dropped, and instead there were adopted the words `O Lord, bless these United States.”

There was so little solidarity in the USA at the time when this incident occurred that the people of America did not think that they were a nation. If the people of the United States could not feel that they were a nation, how difficult it is for Indians to think that they are a nation?

A great delusion

I remember the days when politically-minded Indians, resented the expression “the people of India”. They preferred the expression “the Indian nation.”

I am of opinion that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation?

The sooner we realize that we are not as yet a nation in the social and psychological sense of the world, the better for us. For then only we shall realize the necessity of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of realizing the goal. The realization of this goal is going to be very difficult – far more difficult than it has been in the United States. The United States has no caste problem. In India there are castes.

The castes are anti-national. In the first place because they bring about separation in social life. They are anti-national also because they generate jealousy and antipathy between caste and caste. But we must overcome all these difficulties if we wish to become a nation in reality.

For fraternity can be a fact only when there is a nation. Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.

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Professor Priti Shankar

In Memoriam (September 1947 – October 2011)

Just before the advent of Deepavali, the festival of lights, the Dept. of Computer Science & Automation at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, lost one of its brightest stars – Professor Priti Shankar, who had made, over a career spanning almost half a century, signal contributions to the teaching and research of compiler design, formal language theory and algorithmic coding theory.

Priti was born into a celebrated Goan family, whose patriarch was the noted medical doctor Dr. Baronio Monteiro, known for his contributions to developing health services in the region. Incidentally, he was also primarily responsible for ensuring that the local tropically-appropriate loose-fitting gown “cabaia” returned to favour, supplanting the de rigueur Western attire introduced by the Portugese!

Priti’s father was Brigadier Innocencio Monteiro of the Indian Army and her mother, Sophia, was a maths teacher. She was part of a deeply socially-conscious family, with her siblings notably including Dr. Vivek Monteiro, the theoretical physicist turned trade-union leader and low-cost science educator; Prof. Anjali Monteiro, the documentary film-maker and professor of media studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences; and Dr. Nandita de Souza, the Goa-based developmental and behavioral paediatrician.

Priti, whose birth coincided with that of the newly independent India, fully imbibed the pervasive spirit of freedom and blazed her own distinctive trail throughout her life. In an era where the parlously few women in Indian science were largely confined to the biological disciplines, she pursued mathematics and engineering, culminating in her being the first female electrical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi. She then went abroad to the University of Maryland at College Park for her doctoral studies, returning soon after to the nascent School of Automation at IISc, and played a pivotal role in piloting it to a pre-eminent position in the country.

Research Contributions

Priti’s research contributions spanned both the theory and practice of computer science, an ability that can be laid claim to by only a select band of researchers. Her results on error correcting codes are characterized by deep and elegant mathematical insights, while her contributions in compiler design have been incorporated in high-performance computational tools. The lasting impact of her work is reflected in her papers being cited by influential authors, and featuring in the advanced graduate courses of leading international universities.

In the area of coding, Priti’s foundational contribution in 1979 dealt with generalizing the BoseChaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes, which had hitherto been defined over finite fields, to be operational over Galois rings. This technique found application about fifteen years later in the award-winning paper on linearity of Kerdock and Preparata Codes by Hammons et al, and was acknowledged by the authors to be among the starting points for their investigation. Her later work dealt with “trellises”, layered graph descriptions for block codes that find applications in soft-decision decoding. In 2003, she brought out the organic and novel connection between trellis representations and finite state automata, leading to an abstract characterization of trellis state spaces in terms of equivalence classes of a bi-invariant equivalence relation on the Kleene-closure of the input alphabet set. This line of study was extended to developing an
algebraic structure theory for the special class of “tail-biting” trellises in 2006. Her most recent work was on low-density parity-check codes (LDPC), where she proved an important negative result that computing the stopping distance of a Tanner graph is NP-hard.

n the area of automata theory and compilers, her contributions were mainly in the generation of automatic compiler and compression tools from formal specifications. Specifically she developed a theory for tree parsing that enabled the automatic generation of code generators from formal machine specifications in the form of regular tree grammars – this important result appeared in the prestigious ACM TOPLAS journal in 2000. She also co-edited with Y. N. Srikant the first handbook of compilers, published by the CRC press in 2002.

A few years later, Priti proposed, implemented and released as open source software, a scheme for automatically generating XML file compressors from formal syntax specifications. This scheme is based on recursive finite automata working in tandem with arithmetic compressors. A chapter by her on this topic appears in “Modern Applications of Automata Theory”, a soon-to-be-published volume of the IISc Research Monographs series that she co-edited with Deepak D’Souza.

Pedagogical Contributions

While Priti was an accomplished researcher, as highlighted above, it is as an educator par excellence that her talents really came to the fore. She was an exemplary role model to her colleagues and students, maintaining uncompromising technical standards tempered with compassion and humanity. Being a steadfast custodian of the noblest academic traditions of kindling and nurturing young minds, her students thought the world of her while her colleagues tried to learn and emulate her pedagogical skills. Several of the current CSA faculty were fortunate to themselves be her students, and experienced at first-hand her brilliant and inspirational teaching.

Priti conceptualized, introduced, and taught a rich portfolio of over twenty courses, exhibiting a remarkable flair for communicating complex concepts in an alluringly simple manner accessible to all categories of students. In fact, the new academic programmes introduced by CSA during the 70s, 80s and 90s, that kept pace with the rapidly changing landscape of computer science, were largely championed by her. Moreover, at an operational level also, her hand was at the tiller, chairing the Departmental Curriculum
Committee (DCC) for several years, and serving on the Institute’s Senate Curriculum Committee (SCC).

Overall, she mentored close to thirty research students, and almost a hundred ME projects. Several theses were nominated for recognition, with the PhD dissertation of K. Muralikrishnan receiving the 2008 Alumni Award for Best Thesis. Further, her students have gone on to create names for themselves in academia and industry, the truest hallmark of a great teacher.

Institutional recognition of her teaching mastery came through IISc awarding her the Jaya Jayant Award for Teaching Excellence in 2007, and IEEE naming her as a Distinguished Lecturer during 2006-09. Priti also played a leadership role on the editorial board of Resonance, India’s primary journal of science education. She developed a coherent discourse tailored to stimulate the scientific temper in our college students, and authored as many as ten highly popular articles in this forum.

Evocative of her personality, even on the last day of her life, she insisted that her student, Rajesh Pillai, visit her home to obtain the signature on his PhD thesis submission form, and fulfilled an important official commitment in her final hours.

Social Contributions

Priti was a born nurturer, not just of students, but of the environment around her. She was passionate about gardening and many of the flowering plants that now adorn the CSA quadrangle were gifted by her. Three years ago, she introduced an avocado sapling and regularly monitored its health.

Even during her last conversation with the CSA Chairman just a week before her demise, although in great personal pain, she did not fail to enquire about the plant’s status and was gratified to know it was now six feet tall. Like these plants, she herself unstintingly gave the fruits of knowledge to generations of CSA students.

Personality

As no doubt already evident, Priti was an extraordinarily gentle humanitarian, generous to a fault, unfailingly polite and gracious to all, and warmly sympathetic and helpful to those in distress around her. She possessed outstanding communication skills, both spoken and written, and her quiet dignity and understated demeanour shone brightly through them. Anyone who came in contact with her went away a better person for the experience, and it would be hard to find a soul who did not cherish their interactions
with this impeccable personality who was always exceedingly modest about her own achievements.

In a nutshell, Prof. Priti Shankar was a gifted teacher, researcher, and educationist, serving as an exceptional ambassador of computer science for the Indian Institute of Science and the nation. In everything she touched, whether technical or personal, she epitomized the phrase “grace and elegance”. We, at the CSA department, are truly blessed to have had the fortune of her association for close to four decades, and in her demise, have lost a long-standing pillar of our institution.

Perhaps the most befitting epitaph for Prof. Priti Shankar is the moving quotation:
“A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others” . .

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If an orientation is made early on as to the shaping of the future on the aforesaid counts early on, say from the students of class 9th onwards they would not only make the best use of their school time which shapes a rounded inter-disciplinary academic persona but would also get relieved of the mounting pressures from various quarters giving them only a myopic perspective of careers ahead and sap their inordinate creative energies.

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