India

by Shashi Tharoor

  The most vital challenge for Indian democracy remains the need to contain and accommodate these inevitable clashes of interests, eliminating the need (and even the temptation) for marginal groups to resort to violence to pursue them. The strength of Indian democracy has always lain in its willingness to permit the expression of all varieties of political opinion; those who cannot be heard by their words will want to be heard through their bombs. But this alone is not enough; the institutions of the Indian democratic state must also be able to deliver what all democratic states are expected by their citizens to deliver, namely national security and economic prosperity. If corruption, maladministration, and political failure result in a citizenry that feels insecure and deprived, the resultant disillusionment with the system can lead to violence and destruction that could destroy democracy itself.

  There is some unlikely anecdotal evidence for this fear. In India the biggest hit film of 1996 was Indian, a Tamil film that went on to na tional success in a dubbed Hindi version, Hindustani, and was then entered for a foreign-language Oscar. The eponymous hero of the film is a serial killer who stalks through the movie murdering one archetype after another of the Indian establishment — a policeman, a politician, a revenue official, a senior administrator, and so on. Each killing was greeted in the movie halls of the nation with prolonged applause; friends reported witnessing standing ovations. This was not film criticism of the “I saw a movie being shot, and the actors deserved to be” variety: the audience’s own fantasies about the punishment of the powerful were being sublimated on screen. The level of popular cynicism this reflects about the workings of Indian democracy in the eyes of the “common man” suggests that many wrongs still need to be set right.

  The significant changes in the social composition of India’s ruling class, both in politics and in the bureaucracy, since independence is proof of democracy at work; but the poor quality of the country’s political leadership in general offers less cause for celebration. Our rulers increasingly reflect the qualities required to acquire power rather than the skills to wield it for the common good. The democratic process has attracted figures who can win elections but who have barely a nodding acquaintance with ethics or principles, and are untroubled by the need for either. Too many politicians are willing to use any means to obtain power. Even the time-honored device of the dodgy campaign promise has sunk to record lows. One leading politician, now a cabinet minister, became chief minister of India’s most populous state after promising that, if elected, his first act in office would be to abolish an ordinance that prevented college students from cheating on their exams (the ordinance forbade outsiders to smuggle crib sheets into the exam halls, regulated the examinees’ freedom to leave the exam hall and return to it, and so on). He won the youth vote and (as a champion of the “backwards” and the Muslims) the elections in a landslide, and he was as good as his word; within seconds of taking the oath of office, he withdrew the anti-cheating ordinance.

  Sadly, this politician’s willingness to elevate political expediency above societal responsibility is all too typical of his fellow politicians today. The profession of politics has attracted many who are unprincipled, inept, corrupt, or even criminal. As Rajiv Gandhi recognized, their quest for power is unaccompanied by any larger vision of the common good, any sense of responsibility to the society as a whole. But they do get elected, repeatedly; for one of the failures of Indian democracy has certainly lain in its inability to educate the mass of voters to expect, and demand, better of their elected representatives.

  One relevant development appears to be the passing of the towering “great figure” from the Indian political stage. The last two were both Gandhis, Indira and Rajiv, and for most of their time in power the organized opposition possessed no leader of national standing (defined as an individual seen by more than 10 percent of the electorate in public opinion polls as a worthy alternative candidate for prime minister). Today three of four parties can put forward a credible prime minister, partly because the success of Narasimha Rao and the mere ascent of Deve Gowda, I. K. Gujral, and Manmohan Singh have broadened popular acceptance of what constitutes credibility in that role. Equally, though, there is no national political figure who enjoys the admiration and support of the majority of the electorate; despite Sonia, we have no Snow White, only the Seven Dwarfs.

  The basis of democracy is, of course, the rule of the demos, the people — the rule, in other words, of all rather than few. Democracies uphold the right of the general body of citizens to decide matters of concern to society as a whole, including the question of who rules them in their name. A democracy changes governments by free and fair elections, guarantees rights and privileges to individuals and minorities, and seeks to promote the participation of ordinary individuals in decision-making. All this, and more, may be found in Indian democracy; but much more needs to occur to entrench both the institutions and the habits of democracy among both the leaders and the led. Winston Churchill was right in describing democracy as “the worst form of government except [for] all those other forms that have been tried.” India’s challenge is not to perfect it, but simply to make it better than it now is.

  9

  India at Forty-nine

  Notes Toward an Impression of Indian Society and Culture Today

  The night I arrived in Delhi on a visit in January 1996, the elevator at the Maurya Sheraton took us up to the twelfth floor in abreathtakingsixorsevenseconds.”Remarkable,”Icommented admiringly to the friendly hotel employee in a maroon sari and businesslike pageboy haircut, who had draped a three-kilogram marigold garland around my neck as I stepped across the threshold. “We couldn’t have ascended faster in the U.S. of A.”

  She took my praise in stride, as well she should have. Jet-lagged after an eighteen-hour journey from New York, I had failed to notice that this was not some superfast new elevator technology that the Maurya had brought into Delhi, but rather some highly creative labeling. When I finally woke and looked out my window, I realized that what the elevator buttons had called the twelfth floor was in fact the second. The gleaming Maurya elevator had merely taken me for a ride — and a shorter ride than I’d imagined.

  I couldn’t keep the accusatory tone out of my voice the next time I ran into the maroon sari. “Twelfth floor, huh?” I said pointedly. “I didn’t think liberalization meant being liberal with the facts.”

  She was surprised that I had taken offense. “Our foreign visitors much prefer to think of themselves as being on the eleventh and twelfth floors than the first or second,” she replied with wide-eyed innocence. “And they don’t look out the windows that much.”

  Welcome, I thought, to the new India. An India I was discovering for the first time: an India of five-star hotels, welcoming garlands, and smooth-talking hotel staff, where nothing is quite what it seems (not even the elevator buttons), where windows are not meant to be opened and appearances are the only reality.

  * * *

  Time for a pause, right there. I’m beginning to do exactly what I’ve always criticized the Naipauls for doing: drawing grand, sweeping conclusions from the flimsiest of anecdotal evidence. After all, one cannot be unaware that in trying to paint even an impressionistic portrait of contemporary Indian society and culture, one is recalling a concept so undefinable that T. S. Eliot was cautious enough to call his book on the subject Notes Toward the Definition of Culture and George Steiner, two and a half decades later, could do no better than subtitle In Bluebeard’s Castle as Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture. I have neither the desire nor the ability to attempt to define or redefine this slippery term; one cannot entirely forget the pro-Nazi poet Hanns Johst’s declaration, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.” Nonetheless it is a word I cannot escape in outlining my concerns and impressions in this chapter. By “Indian society and culture” I mean the social heritage and contemporary life of Indians, the mental and creative artifacts produced by the Indian people in the course of their ongoin
g lives and within their particular life conditions. In the Indian context, even so narrow a usage embraces something rather vast and varied, from the five-star hotels with which I began this chapter to the homeless sleeping huddled on railway platforms, from the classical schools of Indian dance to the village equivalents of the whirling dervishes, from the ancient Sanskrit epics to the B-movies of Bollywood, from stories retold around rural fires to those recycled on the television screen, from the patterns daubed on the walls of mud huts to the postmodern canvases now sold regularly at high-priced auctions by Sotheby’s — none of which I intend to discuss in this book. Since Indian society and culture are so broad and undefinable, I shall only try to touch on a small portion of what is visible to a middle-class Indian. In doing so I seek to be illustrative rather than comprehensive; and in any case what follows is not just impressionistic and subjective, but even leaves out many of my own obsessions — Indian cricket, for instance, and Indian cinema — as belonging elsewhere.

  At the beginning of The Labyrinth of Solitude, for more than four decades a seminal work on Mexican society and culture, Octavio Paz muses: “At one time I thought that my preoccupation with the significance of my country’s individuality. . . was pointless and even dangerous. Instead of asking ourselves questions, it would be better, I felt, to create, to work with the realities of our situation. We could not alter those realities by contemplation, only by plunging ourselves into them. We could distinguish ourselves from other peoples by our creations rather than by the dubious originality of our character, which was the result, perhaps, of constantly changing circumstances. I believed that a work of art or a concrete action would do more to define the Mexican — not only to express him but also, in the process, to re-create him — than the most penetrating description.” Paz went on to overcome his hesitation and write a compelling portrait of his countrymen, but his point here is both a call to action and a suggestion that a country essentially defines itself. The impressions that follow accept both premises entirely.

  * * *

  I had averaged a visit home each year since leaving India for postgraduate studies in the United States more than twenty years ago, but I had always stayed with family and friends, of whom thankfully I still have several across the country. This time, however, I was in India not on holiday but for work, to address a United Nations peacekeeping seminar and to accompany the UN’s future secretary general Kofi Annan on a series of official meetings. As a result I was seeing another India, the India we present to foreigners. It was a curiously disorienting experience.

  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. It’s difficult to complain about a standard of hoteliering I have rarely come across in four continents in the course of a peripatetic professional life: overwhelmingly attentive staff who were far more numerous than their counterparts in the developed world and far more capable than their counterparts in the developing world; startlingly efficient housekeeping; and food of a deliciousness and variety that Western cuisines would be hard put to imagine. One could gladly exchange a week in paradise for a week in the Maurya Sheraton, and not notice the difference.

  Provided one doesn’t look too closely at the bill.

  What should an Indian make of a room rent that costs more, in one night, than any of the hotel’s diligent staff make in a month? Of a telephone system that charges seven rupees a pulse for local calls, when a one-rupee stamp will carry a thick letter to the other end of the country? Of an efficient laundry that will wash and return your socks the same day, for ten times the price you paid to buy them? Of a hospitable lounge where bowing waiters will ply your guests’ children with three-inch half-glasses of Fanta at ninety rupees each, plus tax, a sum on which the waiters themselves could eat and drink for a week?

  I had come to India and found America, or at least as good an imitation of America as India can manage, with a price tag that even Americans, except those on expense accounts, would gag at. And what is more, though the charges seemed to have been calculated in dollars and then converted to rupees, I found this India patronized by as many Indians as Americans. So, if anyone was out of touch, it was me.

  It certainly wasn’t the beggar woman, a mewling infant at her breast, who approached my rented Contessa at an intersection. I offered her my largest coin, and she practically thrust it back at me: Babuji, do rupye se kya hoga? (“What can I do with two rupees?”) If two rupees aren’t enough for a beggar in today’s New Delhi, one wonders why the government bothers to mint any of the smaller coins. As hotel doormen expect ten-rupee tips for letting you into your car and railway porters start their tariffs at three figures, I imagine the rupee going the way of the lira or yen, becoming the indivisible base monetary unit as the paisa ceases to have any value at all.

  * * *

  The sums one routinely hears about in the capital certainly tend to confirm my prediction. Lakhs (one hundred thousand, the sum I grew up thinking of as the psychological if not the numerical equivalent to the American million) are discussed as if they were small change; the new Indian entrepreneurs are crorepatis. (A crore is a hundred lakhs, or ten million rupees: it was not so long ago that the very idea of a crorepati in our stifled and taxed economy was as fanciful as a unicorn in the Purana Qila zoo.) Outside the international five-star circuit, of course, the talk was all of the hawala scandal, of sprawling multi-crore farmhouses and the diaries kept in them, and of the dramatic change the latest scandal was going to bring about in the nation’s political fortunes. Much of the excitement seemed, however, to be confined to journalists, who as a tribe tend to hear earthquakes when others merely slam doors. “This is terrific!” one media man said to me about the hawala affair shortly after interviewing me on the more prosaic questions of United Nations peacekeeping. “It’s the biggest story since independence!”

  Ordinary Indians were more blase; I did not meet a single person who didn’t think all politicians were corrupt anyway. Their attitude to the hawala scandal was a combination of “What’s new?” and “So what?” For the newspapers to wax indignant about the names in Mr. Jain’s list of pols on the take is rather like finding a “P” page of the telephone directory and concluding that only Patels have phones. The few politicians on whom the press and the Central Bureau of Investigation were focusing represented those who received money from one rather small-scale operator during one particular year. It is a safe assumption that there are other politicians who have taken money from other operators in different years, quite probably in amounts that would dwarf those dispensed by the meticulous Mr. Jain; but they have been lucky enough to have been suborned by people less diligently devoted to the art of double-entry bookkeeping.

  The truth is that whereas Americans demand of their politicians standards that don’t exist in their society at large (ask Gary Hart), most Indians accept conduct from politicians that we wouldn’t tolerate in our neighbors. As a people we tend — and I know all generalizations are risky — to be open, hospitable, generous, truthful, faithful, and scrupulously honest, and we except our friends and relations to be the same. Two classes of people are, however, exempt from those norms: politicians and movie stars. Such larger-than-life figures enjoy a societal carte blanche to lie, cheat, dissemble, and commit large-scale larceny, adultery, and tax fraud; only murder is a little more difficult, though even there a major politician and a leading film star have been released from jail after allegations of offenses that might have earned lesser men fates worse than death. So what the media mavens discovered is that their journalistic enthusiasm isn’t entirely mirrored on the street; Indians except their politicians to be dishonest and duplicitous, and are not surprised to have their assumptions confirmed.

  * * *

  Some have seen in Indian society a constant struggle between two distinct attitudes to life: those exemplified by the elevated, sophisticated spiritualism of the renunciatory Vedanta philosophy and their opposites, the materialist, hedonistic, amoral (and atheistic) charvakas. To those analysts, Indian soci
ety reflects this dualism in the constant struggle between opposed tendencies — the stark white simplicity of the dhoti or mundu (the ankle-length waist cloth worn by most Indian men) versus the richly colored silk sari of the women, easily the most alluring garment devised by humankind; the culinary asceticism of the vegetarian Gandhi or the nut-eating (and urine-drinking) Morarji Desai versus the complexity and richness of the most varied, subtle, and challenging cuisine on earth; the fatalism of the poor and oppressed versus the cupidity and greed of the corrupt and powerful; the nonviolence of Gandhi versus the militarism of a potential nuclear power with the fourth-largest army in the world. And then there is the most basic duality of all, that between “India” and “Bharat.” India, the country I have been writing about, has shot satellites into space, boasts in Bombay a business capital with the highest commercial rents in the world (higher than Manhattan or Tokyo), has had the most rapid televisual growth of any country on earth, and is the country whose first-ever cellular telephone call was made (in English) between the Communist chief minister of West Bengal and a millionaire Telecommunications minister in Delhi. “Bharat,” the indigenous India that speaks Hindi, lives in village huts, plows the fields, has no phones to use, observes caste rules, and rejects (or resents) all the trappings of secular modernism.