F O R E W O R D

to

R.P. Saraf's Collected Works,

Volume III

The third volume of the Collected Works of R.P. Saraf was to be released on the second anniversary of his demise as a homage to our departed leader and guide. But due to certain difficulties this task was delayed by one year. In 2010 too at the end of the month of June when a year had elapsed after Mr. Saraf’s passing away, we paid tributes to his incessant memory by bringing out the first volume of his Collected Works in Hindi which was later in the same year followed by publication of the first and second volumes of his Collected Works in English.

The four years during which Mr. Saraf penned these writings was a period when he and his comrades had been in the midst of charting a path for the Internationalist Democratic Party which they had formed in the mid-1986 after bidding good-bye to Marxism-Leninism which he had been adhering to since 1946-47 after completing his formal education from Punjab University, Lahore. It was also a period when following the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of the Socialist Bloc, the world had been, after a brief spell of unipolar order, experiencing a multipolar system; the state of Indian politics had been unstable and uncertain with the people becoming weary of all the unscrupulous political groups and even eleventh and twelfth Lok Sabha elections could do little to resolve matters; the nuclear explosions by both India and Pakistan had jolted the South Asian people as well as the world community; the popularity of the concept of regional cooperation for development had been growing in Asia; and an undeclared Indo-Pak war had been building in Jammu-Kashmir.

He dealt with all the above issues profoundly in his write ups of that period which had been published in the Internationalist Democratic Viewpoint of which he was the Editor, Printer and Publisher from its outset. He also gave away his views on a wider range of subjects. During these four years his focus was on India’s national crisis perpetrated by its ruling political parties which had been engulfing its national building process and hence he laid down his own blueprint regarding India’s restructuring agenda, with an aim to establish a just and fair social order in India and the world which would be nature-friendly as well as people-friendly and having a general approach of scientific realism and social perspective of globalism or rational humanism. Mr. Saraf wrote as many as 15 articles on this subject.

The ongoing globalisation process and its implications too could not escape his observation and he took up such questions as the present state of human interdependence and its priorities, the present behaviour of human society, unjustness of non-proliferation treaty, right and wrong of N-weaponry, gender inequality in the present world, super-powerism in the multi-polar world, etc.

By globalisation he meant that the whole human community was ultimately going to become one social unit, with necessary changes in the present national structures. As he said, “In the course of this process, all human issues become global. As humankind addresses to these issues, there will logically be a harmonisation between the interests of human society and nature, on the one hand, and within human society itself, on the other. There is going to be a fair leveling off between high and low, rich and poor, gender inequality and other discrepancies between countries and within each country. The human community will become prosperous as a whole and not region or group-wise. To believe that in this epoch of globalisation, one country or a bloc can dominate others or prosper amidst backwardness, poverty and deprivation is a perversion in terms. At the moment, all basic human issues, having become global, will have to be tackled by each country in friendship and cooperation with other countries, especially the neighbouring ones.”

South Asia and Jammu-Kashmir problem also grabbed most of his attention as this region was and continues to be one of the few major flashpoints in the world and he delved upon it on about two dozen occasions.

The biggest hurdle in the development of South Asia, he believed, was the Indo-Pak conflict over Jammu-Kashmir; the other impediments being the apprehension about India among the smaller countries, the bilateral irritants between India and every SAARC member, and the domineering ‘big brotherly’ role of India which has in the past tried to dominate its youngsters.

As for the Jammu-Kashmir problem, he proposed a just, fair and viable solution to it being the one that reconciles the respective national interests of both India and Pakistan, on the one hand, and fulfils the aspirations and concerns of all the ethnic groups of Jammu-Kashmir state, on the other. As he wrote, “Based on this principle, an appropriate option is the establishment of an Indo-Pak or SAARC Condominium over the entire Jammu-Kashmir state (which will handle only defence, foreign affairs and currency concerning this state), with full autonomy to each of the eight ethnic regions of Jammu-Kashmir under a federal setup. Such an arrangement will result in creating a partnership of India, Pakistan and Jammu-Kashmir people, on the one hand, and open the way for the development of SAARC, on the other.”

Besides, he examined such questions as problems of minorities in the sub-continent, human rights, Punjab, nuclear explosion by India and Pakistan, role of NGOs, science-technology and engineering’s role in sustainable development, the management of India’s dryland and forests etc. The writings concerning all these matters and much more are included in the present book.

During this period Mr. Saraf also wrote about Gandhism in November 1995 and about Hindutva politics in February 1996, both of which were reprinted in somewhat modified form in September 2000. ‘Understanding Historical Reality’ written in March 1997 was republished with a lot of amendments in May 2002. Evolution of agriculture in history and state of Indian agriculture, harm done to it and its remedies—the three articles written in June-July 1998—were reshaped during June 2005 and March 2006 and published subsequently in Nature-Human Centric Viewpoint. We did not include these write-ups in the present volume, as they had already been included in first and second volumes respectively.

We have been publishing these works so that the readers could have a comprehensive view of Mr. Saraf’s standpoint and its historical growth. Though a number of his old formulations had undergone transformation during the subsequent years, yet the genesis of his prevailing standpoint lay in his past theory and practice. In the last years of his life he had propounded Nature-Human Centric Viewpoint and had been working to replace the existing social-political order which is capital based, market led, individual or self oriented and headed by the money equipped highly corrupt politicians with a Nature-Human oriented system. He had envisioned a system that considers environment and man as two top priorities and follows environmental promotion, fair equality, productivity, peoples led democracy and all sided transparency as its basic principles.

In the end, we would like to express our gratitude to Mr. Om Saraf who despite his busy schedule did a fine job in bringing out all the three volumes of R.P. Saraf’s Collected Works in English. Though all the articles and writings contained in these three books had been published earlier, yet all credit of retrieving them first through scanning the originals and then by arduous editing, proof reading and page making goes to Mr. Om Saraf. Beginning from April 2010, he had a strenuous task of dealing with more than 1,700 pages in almost in a single year. In fact without his help it would have been nearly impossible for us to give present shape to these Works.