03-11-2007, 12:24 AM
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070326/deb
<b>The Spoils of Indian Democracy</b>
by SIDDHARTHA DEB
[from the March 26, 2007 issue]
There is a fundamental dissonance between lived experience and analysis that
becomes pronounced at certain times, across particular cultures and in
relation to certain subjects. Today this is especially true of books that
look at people living on the margins of globalization, at groups whose
assimilation into the model of neoliberal capitalism is still unfinished,
still unpredictable. All too often, a writer crossing the border into other
realms of existence chooses to ignore the dissonance, offering an analysis
that hardly takes into account the difference between the way things look
from the Western centers of neoliberal capitalism and the way life feels in
the new capitalist outposts in Asia.
Such, at least, seem to be the overwhelming response of the journalists and
scholars who have turned their gaze on China and India in the past few
years, hoping, apparently, to discover in these two fastest-growing
economies in the world some shape of the future. The interest is, on the one
hand, perfectly justified. China and India together account for more than 2
billion people; <b>both possess civilizational identities that predate anything
in the Western world; and in each case these identities are inflected by the
tremendous damage visited upon them by colonial powers</b>. But an inquiry into
China and India also serves other, less benign, intentions. As evident from
the international business class strolling through the airports of India and
China, these countries represent a success story for Western capitalism, a
phenomenon that comes as a relief from the crisis in the imperial center,
the quagmire in the Middle East and the dominoes toppling quietly but
effectively in Latin America.
Even more than China, India seems to have emerged as a case study in
effective Western indoctrination, leaving behind the reputation for chaos
that once prompted John Kenneth Galbraith to describe it as "a functioning
anarchy." As unabashedly capitalist as China, its cities similarly filled
with new elites flaunting their wealth, India also possesses two attributes
guaranteed to disarm the itinerant Western observer: democracy among the
masses and fluent English among the elite. <b>More than any other factors,
these characteristics seem to explain the recent rhapsodies about India,
from Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat to the cover stories last year in
Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Time and The Economist.</b>
For Western observers like Friedman democracy in India is like
air-conditioning in a building. Once they know it's there, they don't have
to think further about it. It is possible for them to settle down and enjoy
the fact that most people in the building, including the service staff,
speak English. This is what Friedman did in his whirlwind tour through the
office parks of Bangalore, and what he discovered was that India is more or
less like Kansas. The world is flat.
Yet experience suggests otherwise. Although the Indian metropolises and new
suburbs display a runaway consumerism boosted by rising incomes and easy
credit, this is an incomplete and superficial picture. The upper and middle
classes benefiting from the new flows of capital, when examined closely,
appear both self-centered and riven by paradoxes, seeking validation for
their lives from Hindu evangelist gurus even as they acquire the latest
consumer gadgets. The call-center and technology workers Friedman calls
"zippies" no doubt manifest a Darwinian drive to earn more money, but they
are equally likely to question the nature of their work; they are
contradictory people capable of expressing chauvinist ideas about their
foreign clients and empathy for the Western workers they are replacing. And
these are only the upper layers of Indian society, their numbers remarkably
small compared with the 350 million people who still live on less than a
dollar a day.
In a provincial city like Bhopal, which is relatively untouched by
globalization, Indians can appear far more complex than is suggested by
reports in the foreign and national press. When one talks to the displaced
peasants, slum dwellers and small entrepreneurs there, they express both
frustration at their marginalization by the new economy and a healthy
skepticism about the benefits it promises. Unlike most members of the
English-speaking elite, who dismiss references to the colonial past as a
hang-up of the left, for unprivileged and often uneducated Indians the point
of comparison for multinational corporations remains the East India Company.
Some of this complexity of the Indian experience was captured well in an
article written two years ago by Financial Times journalist Edward Luce.
<b>Oxford-educated and a former speechwriter to Lawrence Summers during the
latter's term as Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary--as the jacket informs
us--Luce nevertheless demonstrated a remarkably firm grasp of the
contradictions of India's rise as a superpower</b>. Reporting from Gurgaon, the
Delhi suburb that has gone from farmland to elite enclave in a decade, Luce
described an encounter with a former army colonel who manages the suburb's
first shopping mall:
I ask him *why everything in Gurgaon has a Californian name*. The apartment
high-rises are called Beverly Hills, Belvedere Towers, Silver Oaks, Windsor
Court and West End Heights. The office blocks are called Royalton Towers,
Icon Pinnacle, Plaza Tower and Gateway Tower. And the malls are prefixed by
Metropolis, or Mega or Super or City. Which way is it to India? I joke.
ââ¬Æ"We offer a total experience for the full family entertainment," says
Bhutani, as we sip our cafe lattes. "It is a total all-round experience. You
don't have to haggle in the retail outlets, the prices are fixed. You don't
have to watch rats scurry across the floor in the cinema or worry the power
supply will go. And afterwards you can eat in a restaurant with a clean
kitchen and guaranteed quality."
The colonel's automaton speech is a <b>revealing example of the Newspeak that
passes for public discourse among India's elite,</b> far more representative
than the gnomic pronouncements of Friedman's zippies. And unlike Friedman,
whose faith in liberal capitalism is shared by Luce, the latter is a good
enough reporter to note that Gurgaon is a fantasy, a Sim City in concrete
and glass that appears bewildering to most Indians.
Luce has since moved to Washington, and his book on India arrives as a
summation of his reporting experience on the subcontinent. Unfortunately,
the insightful, funny article he wrote for the Financial Times can be found
only in a bowdlerized version in the book, crammed hurriedly and
apologetically into the last chapter. It is as if Luce has suddenly
remembered the Washington Consensus and the Summers memo, and the account in his book is strangely disembodied despite its claims to move away from "the detached and impersonal style that journalists follow."
As far as its neoliberal dogma goes, In Spite of the Gods doesn't offer much
that is new. Luce visits a few places, talks to some people, fitting each
experience and observation into its ritual slot. Modernization is good,
traditionalism bad. Bureaucrats are corrupt, businessmen honest and
efficient. When Luce meets social activists and villagers who speak of
alternative ways of development that don't involve large-scale resettlement
in urban slums, he finds them charming and moves on. "A hundred years ago,
France was predominantly rural," he writes. "Now it is predominantly urban.
But French culture lives on and so do its villages." When he interviews
young Indian entrepreneurs who speak in marketing acronyms, he finds them
funny but representative of the country's potential. When he has tea with
technology barons who talk about the need to urbanize more rapidly, he nods
approvingly as one of them says, "We have to embrace the future." There is
nothing very objectionable or illuminating about any of this. It is a form
of pilgrimage, where one casts some ritual stones at demons (the state,
bureaucrats, unions), prostrates oneself a few times before the gods (IT
executives, businessmen speaking in acronyms) and moves on, faith restored.
Luce's book is a competent summary of those aspects of India likely to be of
interest to Western capital--the role of the state, the new business class,
Hindu fundamentalism and the Muslim minority, India's relation to China and
the United States. Should you invest your money in India? The answer is a
guarded yes. Luce is clear-eyed in his analysis of the relations between
India, China and the United States, seeing an emerging entente between the
two Asian powers despite American efforts to promote India at the expense of
China. But when he descends from the heady superstructure of geopolitics to
consider India at the level of everyday existence, his details are
necessarily selective in nature.
When Luce writes about the bloated Indian state and the widespread
corruption in its ranks, he is quite right, even if such corruption doesn't
seem qualitatively different from the enlightened market practices of Enron
and Halliburton. When he notes that inefficient and costly state programs
justified in the name of the poor end up disempowering the poor and
subsidizing the rich, he makes a worthwhile point. But when he says that
things have improved vastly in India since the opening up of its economy and
the scaling back of the state in the early 1990s, and that "further
liberalization would lead to higher growth and bring greater benefits," he
is wrong.
There's no doubt things are much better for business executives and former
army officers. It's easier to get a good cup of coffee in the cities and a
mobile phone connection pretty much anywhere. Even in the small towns on the
northeastern frontier, it's possible to buy a plasma TV (although next to
impossible to buy a book other than Harry Potter or one by Paulo Coelho). In
terms of economic growth, India's average of 8 percent is higher than it was
before the globalization of its economy, although even then India's growth
wasn't bad for a country devastated by two centuries of colonialism (about
which Luce has relatively little to say except that it has become
"fashionable since India's independence" to criticize Britain's presence in
the subcontinent). But when it comes to the question of whether the new
economy has benefited the majority of Indians, Luce refers us to the very
state bureaucracy he derides elsewhere, noting without comment:
According to the government of India, the proportion of Indians living in
absolute poverty dropped from 35 percent to just over 25 percent between
1991 and 2001. The ratio is likely to have dropped further since then.
In fact, the figures provided by the Indian government depend on a survey
methodology that has been changed since the economy opened up, rendering
simple comparisons with earlier measures of poverty quite meaningless. Other
assessments show either a slight decline in poverty or none at all. Like the
World Bank estimates that show there are fewer poor people in the world than
before, estimates that have been challenged persuasively by Sanjay Reddy and
Thomas Pogge in their paper "How Not to Count the Poor" (
www.socialanalysis.org), the Indian government's figures on poverty serve
less as an indicator of the way things are and more as an illustration of
how to spin the facts to fit your needs.
It is not hard to understand this need to show that things are better than
they really are. The sudden explosion of wealth among India's upper classes,
looked upon approvingly by the West, has created fresh anxieties. The divide
between rich and poor in India is not a creation of the last decade, but the
utter separation between winners and losers is, a condition in which it
becomes both easy and necessary to point out all that shines brightly under
the tropical sun. Yet the software parks and glass-and-steel office towers
working round the clock are easily portrayed; what is less obvious is their
relation to the parched soil of the farmlands, where 25,000 farmers have
killed themselves in a decade. The feverish business speculation and
late-night parties of what the Indian media call "Page Three people" are no
doubt colorful, exciting affairs; yet they go on at the same time as entire
villages are submerged by dammed rivers and new slums arise on the outskirts
of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
Where Luce's book attempts to engage this other reality, it does so
unevenly. Traveling to Patna, capital of India's poorest state, Bihar, Luce
seems so baffled by the conjunction of shabby infrastructure and mass
politics that he falls back on clichés:
In Hyderabad there are as many five-star hotels as you would find in any
Western city. Most of them offer a seamless "wifi" service so you can
connect to the Internet by laptop from anywhere in the building. At Patna's
best hotel the crackle on the internal phone system was so noisy you could
not communicate with the receptionist.... Naturally, Internet access was
unthinkable. Likewise, although often clogged with traffic, Hyderabad's
roads are paved and smooth. Meanwhile in Patna, a city of three million
people, there is not a single functioning traffic light. Such is the
reigning inertia, the city has not even changed the colonial names of its
streets. I got a kick out of driving up and down Boring Road. It was named
after a British official.
This account is perfectly believable, but the failure of the state in
Bihar runs deeper than the absence of wifi access in
Patna hotels. It is a subject that has been explored with insight and
empathy by, among others, the Patna-born writer Amitava Kumar in his books
Bombay London New York and Husband of a Fanatic. The rise of the oppressed
castes as a political force in Bihar, a phenomenon Luce notes as having
contributed significantly to the decaying infrastructure and the breakdown
of law, is in itself a response to the long, brutal domination of the upper
castes. The abysmal social and economic conditions in the state are not
simply products of lower-caste assertion or state socialism but of the
inequality enforced through decades by dominant groups of civil servants,
businessmen, politicians and landlords. Because of this, Bihar remains a
state where Dalits (at the very bottom of the caste order) are murdered with
impunity. And until recently, Dalits retaliating against upper-caste
landlords were charged under a terrorism law while upper-caste men accused
of killing Dalits were booked under the usual criminal code.
Some of the weakness in Luce's account seems to come from his belief that
the efficient entrepreneurs of the new economy are very different people
from the corrupt functionaries of the Indian state. <b>Yet evidence suggests
otherwise, indicating that it is the same social layer--upper-caste, Hindu,
middle- and upper-class--that reaps most of the benefits, whether these are
filtered through the state or through capital. </b>This is true of most of the
engineers and business executives competing in the global marketplace today,
people reared largely on government salaries and nurtured in
state-subsidized institutions, and who today furiously protest affirmative
action or subsidies for the lower castes, aboriginal people and other
marginalized groups. The new elites may speak better English, but their
sense of hierarchy remains undisturbed.
If Luce's book is shaped by the rigid certainties of neoliberalism, Mira
Kamdar's account of <b>how India is changing the world is fueled by a
breathless enthusiasm that seems to have less to do with economics and more
to do with identity.</b>
An Indian-American scholar at the Asia Society, Kamdar is an enthusiast of
most things Indian and has clearly done extensive research for this book. As
a result, Planet India contains nuggets of information on everything from
the animation industry in India to a party at Tavern on the Green for Mira
Nair's new film:
At the cocktail party preceding the screening, the Who's Who list of the
Indian diaspora cultural elite went on endlessly. I did catch celebrated
actress and author Madhur Jaffrey, just out with her memoir Climbing the
Mango Trees, and her husband, accomplished violinist Sanford Allen.
Filmmaker Jagmohan Mundhra... and his wife, Chandra, and their film producer
daughter, Smriti Mundhra, were there. I saw Sarita Choudhury, who starred in
Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala.
I'm sure Kamdar enjoyed herself, even if there were people she missed in the
huge crowd.
In India, she covers a wide terrain and a great breadth of subjects,
including the obvious divide between the upper classes and the majority, the
distress in rural areas and the overwhelming environmental crisis. Kamdar is
clearly liberal in her worldview, critical of Wal-Mart, American inequality
and the elite Indians who worship at the shrines of Wal-Mart and
American-style inequality. But too much of her book is taken up by
smooth-toned capitalists who assure her that they will "create purchasing
power and turn India's poor into consumers," which sounds more like a threat
than a promise, and who say, "Our biggest challenge is the challenge nobody
has solved in the world: how to grow equity," which sounds like hokum.
Both books reveal, if in different ways, how significant India's business
class has become in shaping perceptions of the country. Ostensibly suffering
under the weight of the state, they have nevertheless managed to accumulate
great wealth and are in the process of discovering solutions to inequality,
social injustice and environmental degradation. In that sense, Indian
businessmen--especially those in technology--spout the rhetoric of
"frictionless capitalism" that enriches the individual while saving the
world. Slavoj Zizek, writing in The London Review of Books about the
originators of this idea--Bill Gates and his "court-philosophers" like
Friedman--noted how they offer a geeky smartness as the solution to all the
world's problems:
Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised
bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central
authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as
against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoeisis as
against fixed hierarchy.
Zizek observes that this kind of corporate philanthropy simply involves
giving with one hand what has been grabbed with the other. In India,
however, there seems to be more grabbing than giving going on, reminding us
of what <b>Marx said of the British in India: They had to first get India in
order to subject it afterward to their sharp philanthropy.</b>
In any case, the frictionless capitalism in India reveals its sharp edges if
you rub it long enough. *When Luce visits the Art of Living Foundation near
**Bangalore** to visit Sri Sri **Ravi** Shankar, a guru equally popular in *
*Bangalore**'s boardrooms and in **Manhattan** penthouses, he finds: *
* *
*On the pillars that supported the dome around the central stage were the
symbols of the world's main religions: the Islamic Crescent, the Star of
David, and the Cross of Jesus. In the center, much larger than the other
representations, was a depiction of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth. *
* *
*Despite the ecumenical distribution of religious symbols, the guru turns
out to have "a close attachment to the RSS," the right-wing Hindu
organization that drew inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini and whose
history of violence ranges from the assassination of Gandhi to more recent
massacres of Muslim and Christian minorities. Luce's book is especially good
on Hindu fundamentalism, reporting superbly on the strange convergence of
science, business, paranoia and fascism that characterizes the right in **
India**.** *It is not an accident that the "biofuturologist" Luce meets
should be spouting nonsense about the "software" of human development
intrinsic to India (naturally) and the "hardware" of the West, nor that he
was encountered at the residence of a "prosperous industrialist."
There is, of course, much more to India than the corrupt state, right-wing
Hinduism and unctuous businessmen. In fact, what is surprising is the number
of Indians skeptical of the direction the country has been taken by its
comprador elites, although their voices tend to go unrecorded by media
obsessed with telling the most obvious story. The experience of these other
Indians who dwell outside boardrooms can be depicted, but this can be done
only by books that address what it means to be human in a time and place of
great change. It requires writing that takes its own possibilities
seriously, eschewing the language of the press release and the annual
corporate report, choosing a form true to experience, whether this be the
novel or the work of social reportage.
There are already books that show how it can be done, from the sharp,
pungent essay collections put out by *Arundhati Roy to Temptations of the
West by Pankaj Mishra and **Maximum** **City** by Suketu Mehta.* And if the
subterranean murmurs are anything to go by, it seems that there are still
other writers willing to examine the experience of India critically and with
empathy, who take their inspiration not from Friedman but from Barbara
Ehrenreich in how to bring a hidden world to light. Because otherwise, there
is only the glib promise of capitalism, no different from what the Red Queen
says to Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to
keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at
least twice as fast as that!"
<b>The Spoils of Indian Democracy</b>
by SIDDHARTHA DEB
[from the March 26, 2007 issue]
There is a fundamental dissonance between lived experience and analysis that
becomes pronounced at certain times, across particular cultures and in
relation to certain subjects. Today this is especially true of books that
look at people living on the margins of globalization, at groups whose
assimilation into the model of neoliberal capitalism is still unfinished,
still unpredictable. All too often, a writer crossing the border into other
realms of existence chooses to ignore the dissonance, offering an analysis
that hardly takes into account the difference between the way things look
from the Western centers of neoliberal capitalism and the way life feels in
the new capitalist outposts in Asia.
Such, at least, seem to be the overwhelming response of the journalists and
scholars who have turned their gaze on China and India in the past few
years, hoping, apparently, to discover in these two fastest-growing
economies in the world some shape of the future. The interest is, on the one
hand, perfectly justified. China and India together account for more than 2
billion people; <b>both possess civilizational identities that predate anything
in the Western world; and in each case these identities are inflected by the
tremendous damage visited upon them by colonial powers</b>. But an inquiry into
China and India also serves other, less benign, intentions. As evident from
the international business class strolling through the airports of India and
China, these countries represent a success story for Western capitalism, a
phenomenon that comes as a relief from the crisis in the imperial center,
the quagmire in the Middle East and the dominoes toppling quietly but
effectively in Latin America.
Even more than China, India seems to have emerged as a case study in
effective Western indoctrination, leaving behind the reputation for chaos
that once prompted John Kenneth Galbraith to describe it as "a functioning
anarchy." As unabashedly capitalist as China, its cities similarly filled
with new elites flaunting their wealth, India also possesses two attributes
guaranteed to disarm the itinerant Western observer: democracy among the
masses and fluent English among the elite. <b>More than any other factors,
these characteristics seem to explain the recent rhapsodies about India,
from Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat to the cover stories last year in
Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Time and The Economist.</b>
For Western observers like Friedman democracy in India is like
air-conditioning in a building. Once they know it's there, they don't have
to think further about it. It is possible for them to settle down and enjoy
the fact that most people in the building, including the service staff,
speak English. This is what Friedman did in his whirlwind tour through the
office parks of Bangalore, and what he discovered was that India is more or
less like Kansas. The world is flat.
Yet experience suggests otherwise. Although the Indian metropolises and new
suburbs display a runaway consumerism boosted by rising incomes and easy
credit, this is an incomplete and superficial picture. The upper and middle
classes benefiting from the new flows of capital, when examined closely,
appear both self-centered and riven by paradoxes, seeking validation for
their lives from Hindu evangelist gurus even as they acquire the latest
consumer gadgets. The call-center and technology workers Friedman calls
"zippies" no doubt manifest a Darwinian drive to earn more money, but they
are equally likely to question the nature of their work; they are
contradictory people capable of expressing chauvinist ideas about their
foreign clients and empathy for the Western workers they are replacing. And
these are only the upper layers of Indian society, their numbers remarkably
small compared with the 350 million people who still live on less than a
dollar a day.
In a provincial city like Bhopal, which is relatively untouched by
globalization, Indians can appear far more complex than is suggested by
reports in the foreign and national press. When one talks to the displaced
peasants, slum dwellers and small entrepreneurs there, they express both
frustration at their marginalization by the new economy and a healthy
skepticism about the benefits it promises. Unlike most members of the
English-speaking elite, who dismiss references to the colonial past as a
hang-up of the left, for unprivileged and often uneducated Indians the point
of comparison for multinational corporations remains the East India Company.
Some of this complexity of the Indian experience was captured well in an
article written two years ago by Financial Times journalist Edward Luce.
<b>Oxford-educated and a former speechwriter to Lawrence Summers during the
latter's term as Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary--as the jacket informs
us--Luce nevertheless demonstrated a remarkably firm grasp of the
contradictions of India's rise as a superpower</b>. Reporting from Gurgaon, the
Delhi suburb that has gone from farmland to elite enclave in a decade, Luce
described an encounter with a former army colonel who manages the suburb's
first shopping mall:
I ask him *why everything in Gurgaon has a Californian name*. The apartment
high-rises are called Beverly Hills, Belvedere Towers, Silver Oaks, Windsor
Court and West End Heights. The office blocks are called Royalton Towers,
Icon Pinnacle, Plaza Tower and Gateway Tower. And the malls are prefixed by
Metropolis, or Mega or Super or City. Which way is it to India? I joke.
ââ¬Æ"We offer a total experience for the full family entertainment," says
Bhutani, as we sip our cafe lattes. "It is a total all-round experience. You
don't have to haggle in the retail outlets, the prices are fixed. You don't
have to watch rats scurry across the floor in the cinema or worry the power
supply will go. And afterwards you can eat in a restaurant with a clean
kitchen and guaranteed quality."
The colonel's automaton speech is a <b>revealing example of the Newspeak that
passes for public discourse among India's elite,</b> far more representative
than the gnomic pronouncements of Friedman's zippies. And unlike Friedman,
whose faith in liberal capitalism is shared by Luce, the latter is a good
enough reporter to note that Gurgaon is a fantasy, a Sim City in concrete
and glass that appears bewildering to most Indians.
Luce has since moved to Washington, and his book on India arrives as a
summation of his reporting experience on the subcontinent. Unfortunately,
the insightful, funny article he wrote for the Financial Times can be found
only in a bowdlerized version in the book, crammed hurriedly and
apologetically into the last chapter. It is as if Luce has suddenly
remembered the Washington Consensus and the Summers memo, and the account in his book is strangely disembodied despite its claims to move away from "the detached and impersonal style that journalists follow."
As far as its neoliberal dogma goes, In Spite of the Gods doesn't offer much
that is new. Luce visits a few places, talks to some people, fitting each
experience and observation into its ritual slot. Modernization is good,
traditionalism bad. Bureaucrats are corrupt, businessmen honest and
efficient. When Luce meets social activists and villagers who speak of
alternative ways of development that don't involve large-scale resettlement
in urban slums, he finds them charming and moves on. "A hundred years ago,
France was predominantly rural," he writes. "Now it is predominantly urban.
But French culture lives on and so do its villages." When he interviews
young Indian entrepreneurs who speak in marketing acronyms, he finds them
funny but representative of the country's potential. When he has tea with
technology barons who talk about the need to urbanize more rapidly, he nods
approvingly as one of them says, "We have to embrace the future." There is
nothing very objectionable or illuminating about any of this. It is a form
of pilgrimage, where one casts some ritual stones at demons (the state,
bureaucrats, unions), prostrates oneself a few times before the gods (IT
executives, businessmen speaking in acronyms) and moves on, faith restored.
Luce's book is a competent summary of those aspects of India likely to be of
interest to Western capital--the role of the state, the new business class,
Hindu fundamentalism and the Muslim minority, India's relation to China and
the United States. Should you invest your money in India? The answer is a
guarded yes. Luce is clear-eyed in his analysis of the relations between
India, China and the United States, seeing an emerging entente between the
two Asian powers despite American efforts to promote India at the expense of
China. But when he descends from the heady superstructure of geopolitics to
consider India at the level of everyday existence, his details are
necessarily selective in nature.
When Luce writes about the bloated Indian state and the widespread
corruption in its ranks, he is quite right, even if such corruption doesn't
seem qualitatively different from the enlightened market practices of Enron
and Halliburton. When he notes that inefficient and costly state programs
justified in the name of the poor end up disempowering the poor and
subsidizing the rich, he makes a worthwhile point. But when he says that
things have improved vastly in India since the opening up of its economy and
the scaling back of the state in the early 1990s, and that "further
liberalization would lead to higher growth and bring greater benefits," he
is wrong.
There's no doubt things are much better for business executives and former
army officers. It's easier to get a good cup of coffee in the cities and a
mobile phone connection pretty much anywhere. Even in the small towns on the
northeastern frontier, it's possible to buy a plasma TV (although next to
impossible to buy a book other than Harry Potter or one by Paulo Coelho). In
terms of economic growth, India's average of 8 percent is higher than it was
before the globalization of its economy, although even then India's growth
wasn't bad for a country devastated by two centuries of colonialism (about
which Luce has relatively little to say except that it has become
"fashionable since India's independence" to criticize Britain's presence in
the subcontinent). But when it comes to the question of whether the new
economy has benefited the majority of Indians, Luce refers us to the very
state bureaucracy he derides elsewhere, noting without comment:
According to the government of India, the proportion of Indians living in
absolute poverty dropped from 35 percent to just over 25 percent between
1991 and 2001. The ratio is likely to have dropped further since then.
In fact, the figures provided by the Indian government depend on a survey
methodology that has been changed since the economy opened up, rendering
simple comparisons with earlier measures of poverty quite meaningless. Other
assessments show either a slight decline in poverty or none at all. Like the
World Bank estimates that show there are fewer poor people in the world than
before, estimates that have been challenged persuasively by Sanjay Reddy and
Thomas Pogge in their paper "How Not to Count the Poor" (
www.socialanalysis.org), the Indian government's figures on poverty serve
less as an indicator of the way things are and more as an illustration of
how to spin the facts to fit your needs.
It is not hard to understand this need to show that things are better than
they really are. The sudden explosion of wealth among India's upper classes,
looked upon approvingly by the West, has created fresh anxieties. The divide
between rich and poor in India is not a creation of the last decade, but the
utter separation between winners and losers is, a condition in which it
becomes both easy and necessary to point out all that shines brightly under
the tropical sun. Yet the software parks and glass-and-steel office towers
working round the clock are easily portrayed; what is less obvious is their
relation to the parched soil of the farmlands, where 25,000 farmers have
killed themselves in a decade. The feverish business speculation and
late-night parties of what the Indian media call "Page Three people" are no
doubt colorful, exciting affairs; yet they go on at the same time as entire
villages are submerged by dammed rivers and new slums arise on the outskirts
of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
Where Luce's book attempts to engage this other reality, it does so
unevenly. Traveling to Patna, capital of India's poorest state, Bihar, Luce
seems so baffled by the conjunction of shabby infrastructure and mass
politics that he falls back on clichés:
In Hyderabad there are as many five-star hotels as you would find in any
Western city. Most of them offer a seamless "wifi" service so you can
connect to the Internet by laptop from anywhere in the building. At Patna's
best hotel the crackle on the internal phone system was so noisy you could
not communicate with the receptionist.... Naturally, Internet access was
unthinkable. Likewise, although often clogged with traffic, Hyderabad's
roads are paved and smooth. Meanwhile in Patna, a city of three million
people, there is not a single functioning traffic light. Such is the
reigning inertia, the city has not even changed the colonial names of its
streets. I got a kick out of driving up and down Boring Road. It was named
after a British official.
This account is perfectly believable, but the failure of the state in
Bihar runs deeper than the absence of wifi access in
Patna hotels. It is a subject that has been explored with insight and
empathy by, among others, the Patna-born writer Amitava Kumar in his books
Bombay London New York and Husband of a Fanatic. The rise of the oppressed
castes as a political force in Bihar, a phenomenon Luce notes as having
contributed significantly to the decaying infrastructure and the breakdown
of law, is in itself a response to the long, brutal domination of the upper
castes. The abysmal social and economic conditions in the state are not
simply products of lower-caste assertion or state socialism but of the
inequality enforced through decades by dominant groups of civil servants,
businessmen, politicians and landlords. Because of this, Bihar remains a
state where Dalits (at the very bottom of the caste order) are murdered with
impunity. And until recently, Dalits retaliating against upper-caste
landlords were charged under a terrorism law while upper-caste men accused
of killing Dalits were booked under the usual criminal code.
Some of the weakness in Luce's account seems to come from his belief that
the efficient entrepreneurs of the new economy are very different people
from the corrupt functionaries of the Indian state. <b>Yet evidence suggests
otherwise, indicating that it is the same social layer--upper-caste, Hindu,
middle- and upper-class--that reaps most of the benefits, whether these are
filtered through the state or through capital. </b>This is true of most of the
engineers and business executives competing in the global marketplace today,
people reared largely on government salaries and nurtured in
state-subsidized institutions, and who today furiously protest affirmative
action or subsidies for the lower castes, aboriginal people and other
marginalized groups. The new elites may speak better English, but their
sense of hierarchy remains undisturbed.
If Luce's book is shaped by the rigid certainties of neoliberalism, Mira
Kamdar's account of <b>how India is changing the world is fueled by a
breathless enthusiasm that seems to have less to do with economics and more
to do with identity.</b>
An Indian-American scholar at the Asia Society, Kamdar is an enthusiast of
most things Indian and has clearly done extensive research for this book. As
a result, Planet India contains nuggets of information on everything from
the animation industry in India to a party at Tavern on the Green for Mira
Nair's new film:
At the cocktail party preceding the screening, the Who's Who list of the
Indian diaspora cultural elite went on endlessly. I did catch celebrated
actress and author Madhur Jaffrey, just out with her memoir Climbing the
Mango Trees, and her husband, accomplished violinist Sanford Allen.
Filmmaker Jagmohan Mundhra... and his wife, Chandra, and their film producer
daughter, Smriti Mundhra, were there. I saw Sarita Choudhury, who starred in
Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala.
I'm sure Kamdar enjoyed herself, even if there were people she missed in the
huge crowd.
In India, she covers a wide terrain and a great breadth of subjects,
including the obvious divide between the upper classes and the majority, the
distress in rural areas and the overwhelming environmental crisis. Kamdar is
clearly liberal in her worldview, critical of Wal-Mart, American inequality
and the elite Indians who worship at the shrines of Wal-Mart and
American-style inequality. But too much of her book is taken up by
smooth-toned capitalists who assure her that they will "create purchasing
power and turn India's poor into consumers," which sounds more like a threat
than a promise, and who say, "Our biggest challenge is the challenge nobody
has solved in the world: how to grow equity," which sounds like hokum.
Both books reveal, if in different ways, how significant India's business
class has become in shaping perceptions of the country. Ostensibly suffering
under the weight of the state, they have nevertheless managed to accumulate
great wealth and are in the process of discovering solutions to inequality,
social injustice and environmental degradation. In that sense, Indian
businessmen--especially those in technology--spout the rhetoric of
"frictionless capitalism" that enriches the individual while saving the
world. Slavoj Zizek, writing in The London Review of Books about the
originators of this idea--Bill Gates and his "court-philosophers" like
Friedman--noted how they offer a geeky smartness as the solution to all the
world's problems:
Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised
bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central
authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as
against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoeisis as
against fixed hierarchy.
Zizek observes that this kind of corporate philanthropy simply involves
giving with one hand what has been grabbed with the other. In India,
however, there seems to be more grabbing than giving going on, reminding us
of what <b>Marx said of the British in India: They had to first get India in
order to subject it afterward to their sharp philanthropy.</b>
In any case, the frictionless capitalism in India reveals its sharp edges if
you rub it long enough. *When Luce visits the Art of Living Foundation near
**Bangalore** to visit Sri Sri **Ravi** Shankar, a guru equally popular in *
*Bangalore**'s boardrooms and in **Manhattan** penthouses, he finds: *
* *
*On the pillars that supported the dome around the central stage were the
symbols of the world's main religions: the Islamic Crescent, the Star of
David, and the Cross of Jesus. In the center, much larger than the other
representations, was a depiction of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth. *
* *
*Despite the ecumenical distribution of religious symbols, the guru turns
out to have "a close attachment to the RSS," the right-wing Hindu
organization that drew inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini and whose
history of violence ranges from the assassination of Gandhi to more recent
massacres of Muslim and Christian minorities. Luce's book is especially good
on Hindu fundamentalism, reporting superbly on the strange convergence of
science, business, paranoia and fascism that characterizes the right in **
India**.** *It is not an accident that the "biofuturologist" Luce meets
should be spouting nonsense about the "software" of human development
intrinsic to India (naturally) and the "hardware" of the West, nor that he
was encountered at the residence of a "prosperous industrialist."
There is, of course, much more to India than the corrupt state, right-wing
Hinduism and unctuous businessmen. In fact, what is surprising is the number
of Indians skeptical of the direction the country has been taken by its
comprador elites, although their voices tend to go unrecorded by media
obsessed with telling the most obvious story. The experience of these other
Indians who dwell outside boardrooms can be depicted, but this can be done
only by books that address what it means to be human in a time and place of
great change. It requires writing that takes its own possibilities
seriously, eschewing the language of the press release and the annual
corporate report, choosing a form true to experience, whether this be the
novel or the work of social reportage.
There are already books that show how it can be done, from the sharp,
pungent essay collections put out by *Arundhati Roy to Temptations of the
West by Pankaj Mishra and **Maximum** **City** by Suketu Mehta.* And if the
subterranean murmurs are anything to go by, it seems that there are still
other writers willing to examine the experience of India critically and with
empathy, who take their inspiration not from Friedman but from Barbara
Ehrenreich in how to bring a hidden world to light. Because otherwise, there
is only the glib promise of capitalism, no different from what the Red Queen
says to Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to
keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at
least twice as fast as that!"