This is a gem of a book. If someone out there hadn't heard the India story then he or she must have been in a cave the last couple of years. So one has to be careful before picking up yet another book on India. This one is similar in some respects to the ones out there (and ones which may be written). It has the usual stuff -about demographic dividends, the success of IT industry etc. But where it scores is in its sweep, insights gathered from encounters with ruling class as well as ordinary folk (along the way the author runs into police, underworld and religious types) and a detached yet understanding view of the country.
Edward Luce has been partly Indianised, I guess, both by his stint in India as FT's bureau chief and his marriage to an Indian. He starts off promisingly debunking the spiritualism bullshit that has been peddled by too many foreigners (and quite a few Indians along the way) in the past. Having got that off his chest, he proceeds to look at India from different angles - economic, social, political, geopolitical, religious. In doing so, he doesn't come up with startling conclusions but reiterates some obvious home truths. That being a democracy is India's strength. That India's diversity and the regional coalitions that make up the government keep India on the democratic path. That the welfare state's good intentions end up harming the very poor that it is supposed to help. That India's future doesn't lie in villages and consequently India must proceed on a rapid urbanisation, creating durable urban infrastructure to absorb the millions who will migrate from the villages.
This last point is germane to the debate in India today about conversion of agricultural land for industrial purposes. Luce points out that the NGOs'/liberals' favourite rural idyll exists only in paper. Villages are the hotbed of caste-based discrimination and suffer from limited opportunities afforded by an agrarian economy. History suggests that an agriculture based society cannot sustain as the surplus from land alone is not enough to support the growing population. For India to reap the true rewards of its demographic dividends, more people have to be shifted out of agriculture into industry and cities. As Luce observes, the advantage, for the lower castes, in shifting out of villages, is that in cities, caste based discrimination is less commonplace and more opportunities come by everyone. However India's elites, including the ruling classes - conditioned by Mohandas Gandhi's anti-industrial bias - don't frame the problem in this manner and are content to perpetuate rural poverty. Luce is scathing about the rural employment guarantee scheme that is the UPA's flagship pro-poor programme. Indeed, the programme, Keynesian in its vision, is no more than digging up holes and filling them. Be that as it may, urban migration is an inexorable trend that can at best be slowed, but not stopped. As the book points out, overhauling urban infrastructure is one of India's big challenges.
While Luce funds that caste boundaries blur in cities, no such claim can be made about religious differences. Religious identities are sharper in India today than they were sixty years ago and this represents some sort of a success for the Sangh Parivar's Goebbelsian propaganda machine. Luce finds that the RSS is unmistakably fascist in its symbols and convictions; indeed if he had chanced to converse with closet RSS sympathisers he would discover that they marvel at the organisation's discipline,much the same way wiser men across Europe marvelled at the Nazis' industrial success and military strength prior to the second world war. The chapter on Indian Muslims is the most delightful in the book and should help dispel the urban legends that have gained currency amongst Hindus. (As an aside, the short description of the origins of the Deobandi movement is fascinating and is a microcosm of the issues Muslims face reg. modernity) The finding that the Gujarat riots targeted the more tolerant branches of Islam is poignant. Luce's conversation with Modi is predictable as the latter lapses into his brand of chest-thumping bigotry that is so beloved of the knickerwallahs. Despite the conclusion that Hindu nationalism is here to stay, there is hope. By being a preserve of upper castes, the Hindu cause has suffered electorally; hence, according to Luce the future of the cause lies in co-opting the lower castes, much the same way as the nascent Hindu evangelical movements have started doing. Indeed there are reports that the VHP is already going down that route. As the communists found out in the past, India's caste identities can't be wished away in favour of other divisions. Whether this will blunt the edge of this dangerous movement is yet to be seen.
Engrossing as these insights are, the most compelling chapter in the book is the one looking at India's role in today's geopolitics. And Luce is spot on when he opines that the triangular interactions between US, China and India will shape global affairs in years to come. While it is interesting to read how the US has decided to play 'midwife' to India's birth as a global power with the Indo-US nuclear deal, one feels that Luce has reckoned without the political cycle in US throwing spanners in the works. One is not surprised to read accounts of how Indian diplomats are generally perceived by foreign diplomats as pompous and naive. The Indian communists take the cake in advocating suicidal, dogmatic foreign policy but it appear Nehruvian socialists weren't far behind. Altogether the take on India's geopolitical emergence is a frank mix of history and analysis.
Some minor misgivings remain even in a book of such scope and meticulousness. The bit about India's challenge to lift '300 million' out of poverty is ctrl ced,ctrl ved from some world bank powerpoint slides. Luce presents a laundry-list of dos. Disappointingly, he trots out the usual suspects of government needing to step up spending in primary education, health care and so on. Given that he has found that the private sector in India has succeeded in creating world class enterprises in fields as diverse as software and textiles and his own experience of how Muslim women in Hyderabad prefer to send their kids to neighbourhood private schools, the failure to see private sector as the answer for these problems is a glaring omission. I am still waiting for the day when liberals start mentioning the words "vouchers" and schools in the same sentence. Among other gaffes, the small section on Hindi movies is stereotyped and thinly researched. But that is excusable as I am tired of themes like crossover and Bollywood being India's best export. The chapter on Nehru-Gandhis' doesn't break any new ground on Sonia Gandhi, but that may not entirely be Luce's fault. Apropos of nothing, one is reminded of Churchill's remark when someone said that Attlee was a modest man. "He has much to be modest about" the old man opined.
In the end the book is thoroughly enjoyable to read, a rarity given its mix of economics, social issues, politics and geopolitics. Lots of things have been written and said about India. For outsiders this is a good place to start as it surveys what others have said and backs it up or contrasts it with anecdotes as the case may be. For Indians, it is a good opportunity to take a break from the hype about ourselves and appreciate the enormity of the task. As Luce points out in passing in the last chapter, the country is already in the grip of a premature spirit of triumphalism (aided in no small part by the Bennett Coleman group, one might say). And that, more than anything else, is the biggest stumbling block facing India.
1 comment:
Well written article.
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