India:The
Promises Betrayed
By John Pilger
08 September, 2004
New Statesman
The crows beat their wings against the
bay windows, waiting to ascend and dive. Their cries are incessant;
it is their apocalyptic swarm that is different in India. They dance
in the rain and wait in the yellow heat of unyielding farmland turned
to dust and hover above corridors of refugees fleeing flood and war.
Now, in the late monsoon in Mumbai, they perch on a billboard image
of young businessmen, who are white-skinned and joyful and celebrating
their ownership of a mobile phone that combines a TV screen. The young
businessmen and the fat crows overlook a pyramid of rubbish, which is
inhabited by a scabrous dog and darting rats (with an eye to the crows)
and a tiny sari-clad figure, digging methodically with her hands.
Mumbai is India's
richest city. It handles 40 per cent of the country's maritime trade;
it has most of the merchant banks and two stock exchanges and Asia's
biggest slum. Delight and shock are simultaneous responses. Raise your
eyes and the magnificent Gothic edifices of the British Raj seem hardly
real: the Rajabai Clock Tower, which once chimed "Rule Britannia"
on the hour, and epic indulgences like Victoria Terminus, the greatest
railway station in the world, through which a million workers pass every
day, and the Prince of Wales museum (it is still called that on the
streets, as Mumbai is still Bombay) with its remarkable collections
and perfect dome dominating the Crescent Site, leading to the Gateway
of India.
Then lower your
eyes to the concave human forms under rattan and hessian, aliens to
the beaming faces on the billboards, and the question is always the
same: why should such a rich and resourceful and culturally wise society,
with its democracy and memories of great popular struggle, live like
this?
When I was last
in Bombay, a generation ago, I asked the great Bollywood film director,
Raj Kapoor, why poverty was so resistant in India. "Outsiders misjudge
us," he said. "We are a dynamic society. But most of us are
forced to live a life pre-ordained by powerful groups for their benefit.
The point is, they need the poverty, which is very good for their enrichment,
for raising political hopes, for passing out food parcels, so to speak,
and for reinforcing divisions of religion and caste. However, all that
is distraction: just as my movies are distractions. When people fully
understand this and act, things will change in India."
A few years earlier,
in 1971, I asked Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, the same question.
She and the Congress Party had just been re-elected by a huge majority.
Her campaign had been one of promises, and the poor voted for her. "After
independence," she said, "I realise that somewhere along the
way our direction changed. We had a choice. Either we bought foreign
goods or we helped the industrialists to grow rich. So now we have a
middle class and we have poor people who know they are poor. That is
the beginning of our great change."
The "great
change", apart from her disastrous imposition of martial law followed
by her own assassination, never happened. Rather, it happened with the
arrival of a strain of extreme capitalism, designed in England in the
early 19th century and known today as neo-liberalism. With the defeat
of Congress and the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP-led government
in the 1990s, the divided society was shorn of its paternalism and licensed
by the IMF. The barriers that had protected Indian industry and manufacturing
were demolished; Coca-Cola entered what had been forbidden territory,
along with Pizza Hut and Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch. "Shining
India" was invented by the illusionists of its beneficiaries: the
expanding middle class (a misnomer in India; there is no effective middle)
and transnational capital. They said India would catch China as an economic
power, and that poverty would be eradicated.
Indeed, official
figures appeared to show that, at the close of the 20th century, the
number of Indians living in absolute poverty had fallen by 10 per cent.
However, in his study, Poverty and Inequality: getting closer to the
truth, Abijit Sen, says that the Indian poor actually increased and
that, for them, the 1990s were a "lost decade". In 2002, those
in absolute poverty made up more than a third of the population, or
364 million people. "Inadequate nutrition is actually far more
widespread than either hunger or income poverty," he wrote. "Half
of Indian children are clinically undernourished and almost 40 per cent
of all Indian adults suffer chronic energy deficiency."
Certainly, India's
growth rate has leapt above six per cent, but this is about capital,
not labour, about liberated profits, not people. All the talk about
a new high-tech India storming the barricades of the first world is
based largely on myth. The new technocratic class is tiny. The famous
call centres, where educated young Indians effect knowledge of Britain
and American "lifestyles" in order to service the likes of
American Express, employ only 100,000 people, or 0.01 per cent of the
population. Since 1993, the so-called consumer boom in India has embraced,
at most, 15 per cent of the population; and for the majority of these
people the new prosperity has meant the acquisition of basic modern
living amenities, rather than cars and mobile phones.
For most Indians,
the "new market" has another meaning that is familiar across
the "globalised" world. As the images of role models with
white skin and good teeth have gone up, so public services have deteriorated.
According to UN figures, India today spends less than one per cent of
its gross domestic product on health and, in the health services available
to most people, ranks 171st out of 175 countries, just ahead of Sudan
and Burma. And yet spending on private health, which only the well-off
can afford, is one of the highest in the world.
The Indian newspapers
reflect this in striking ways. The Indian Express presents a searing
investigation into appalling hospital conditions, then trumpets India's
inclusion in a facile "best countries in the world" list drawn
up by Newsweek and based entirely on the rise of the "new market".
Maharashtra's director of health, reports the Times of India, is off
on "a plum assignment" with the World Health Organisation.
He will be away for months, conducting a survey in South East Asia.
During the past year, in his domain, some 9,000 tribal children - the
poorest - have died from malnutrition and a lack of medical care. The
acting chief justice has criticised him for "negligence" of
duty. "The deaths are common," the director replies, "and
I have done enough in the past 10 years. Now why should I sabotage my
career for this issue?"
There is much about
this story of almost casual betrayal that explains why the majority
of Indians voted as they did in the general election last May and with
such evident anger. Although aimed specifically at the BJP-led government,
the principal sponsor of the "new market", their anger was
described by one commentator as "a scream against an elite that
has made them all but invisible since independence".
Like Indira Gandhi,
her mother in law, Sonia Gandhi spoke against poverty, but rarely against
the elitism that controlled it. The man who replaced her and became
prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has made clear there will be "no
rollback" of the "new market"; like new Labour, Congress
will be as neo-liberal as its rivals, if not more so. After all, wrote
Jawaharlal Nehru in 1936, "Congress's outlook is essentially petty
bourgeois", adding prophetically, "It is not likely to succeed
that way."
More than 70 per
cent of the population live off agriculture. Not only is malnutrition
and discrimination rife among the minorities, the 70 million tribal
people and 150 million Dalits (untouchables), small farmers from all
ethnic groups have suffered during the "lost decade". Suicides
among share croppers "now run into many thousands", the environmentalist
and writer Vandana Shiva told me. "Governments dare not admit the
true figure." Debt, often owed to money lenders at interest rates
of up to 120 per cent, is aggravated by an open market in the patenting
of seeds, plants life and natural fertilisers by foreign bioscience
companies: "the piracy of our life source", as Shiva calls
it.
The alternatives
exist. Since the 19th century, mass movements in India have demonstrated
that the poor need not be weak. Since it was elected in 1978, the popular
socialist government in West Bengal (officially, communist) has operated
Operation Barga, a campaign to keep track of and register every one
of the state's 2.3 million share croppers. Each tenant farmer is sought
out and his rights are explained, and the state government's political
organisation in his village ensures that he can get long-term loans
and is not intimidated by landowners. Operation Barga is regarded throughout
India as a success, especially as rice production in West Bengal has
soared.
The antithesis of
this is to be found on the fringes of the cities, a spectre for much
of the world as small farmers are driven off their land. It was sheeting
rain when I visited the "rail roads" area of Bombay. Many
of the people here have fled their land tenancies and hunger, and they
barely subsist. Once, the city offered work in and around its textile
mills, but these have been replaced by "ITES parks" (IT-Enabled
Services). Even the lowly messenger is being superseded by the computer.
The conditions these
people live under are barely describable: an extended family of 20 is
packed into a packing case, the sewage ebbing and flowing in the monsoon;
in the dry season it stays. The fat crows ride on people's skeletal
umbrellas; pariah dogs chew at nothing. Yet glimpse inside this stricken
Lilliput and there is new-pin neatness and clothes wrapped in plastic,
and the children in vivid colours. It is both haunting and humbling,
always, to see such dignity. I met a man from Bengal who had been saving
weeks for the equivalent of £6, which would buy him a shoe-shine
stool; he discussed his predicament with me; he asked for nothing. Along
Chowpatty Beach, where the Quit India movement once held its great freedom
rallies, is property said to be worth more than in London or Paris.
The speculators call it "brown gold".
At the Oxford book
shop in Church Gate, I went to the launch of a book by Rajmohan Gandhi,
the Mahatma's grandson. He has written a biography of Ghaffar Khan,
the inspirational "Muslim Gandhi" who opposed Partition. "India
is in many ways a violent country," he told me. "The fact
that we have democracy today is largely due to the non-violence of the
main freedom movement." Democracy perhaps, but freedom waits.