Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  Poverty is an embarrassment for any country keen on projecting itself as a global superpower in waiting. What is not usually mentioned in the dominant narratives and perspectives relating to India’s economic success story is this issue of poverty and inequality. The list of reforms suggested for the Modi government mentioned above will do little to alleviate these problems. It might be argued that increased economic success will trickle down to wider groups, or that increased profits lead to more productive investments or that booming companies result in the growth of more jobs and growth of incomes, or that failure to attract large capital results in them going elsewhere. Empirically these fairy tales don’t add up as the International Labour Office and, even recently, the International Monetary Fund have argued. Instead we have the growth of crazy bonuses, increased dividends to shareholders and ‘jobless growth’. Poverty and inequality is a political problem, not an economic one. The only group to benefit from low-distribution policies are the super-rich. From a global perspective there has been astonishing growth in the developing world. Almost 30 countries have officially gained middle-income status over the last couple of decades – countries which include India, Zambia and Ghana. And yet India remains home to one-third of the world’s poorest people. The combined net worth of the 46 Indian billionaires in 2012 is roughly equivalent to 10% of the country’s GDP – equivalent to 424 billionaires in the US. For the majority of India’s poor, they are caught in a hereditary problem. In a number of studies over the last thirty years, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) have concluded that over 50% of Indians are the ‘chronic poor’ – that is, those that remain poor throughout their lifetime. Moreover, there is a geographical pattern to this chronic poverty. There are 15 regions across six states where poverty is being concentrated and chronic. And the people in the tribal and forested or degraded forested regions are more likely to remain poor forever.

  For a small number of commentators, the shame of India’s poor is not accidental. As John Pilger for example notes, “India has become a model of the imperial cult of neoliberalism – almost everything must be privatised, sold off… (which) has produced in India a dystopia of extremes that is a spectre for all of us.” Of course, India is not striking out on some new innovative path. It is following the new economic mantras that shape most of the Western economies today. In the sixth richest country in the world – Britain – we have an advanced model of what India is about to introduce. As mentioned earlier, Oxfam, the charity campaigning around development issues, has released a report entitled “A Tale of Two Britains” which maps out the gross and widening inequality driven by British governments over the last few decades. The extent and increasing nature of this inequality is illustrated by the variety of political measures introduced to protect the already wealthy at the expense of the majority of the population. The current $18 billion cuts to the British public welfare bill indicate that the most vulnerable will bear the costs of the restructuring. Meanwhile Britain is at the centre of a global tax system designed to evade payment of any tax. One-third of all global tax dodging is held in UK territories and dependencies amounting to at least $7.18 trillion. All this against a background of some 800,000 falling into absolute poverty. As the current British government is demonstrating, this is not all about economics. As in Modi’s India, neoliberalism is ultimately about the creation of a new political settlement, about the building of a new ‘common sense’ which explains how things work, what things are important and what needs to be prioritised in the future.

  ‘How is India doing?’ Maybe Dréze and Sen can have the final word. There has been, they demonstrate, “an extraordinary tolerance of inequalities, stratification and caste divisions – accepted as allegedly necessary parts of social order.” Any Government in India needs to have this conclusion emblazoned upon the entrance to its workplace.

  Chapter 9

  The “good days are ahead”

  The great experiment

  I have visited India a number of times since our first visit in 2003, travelling to different parts of the country and meeting many friendly local people who have always been happy to share with me their local stories, worries and hopes for the future. Our discussions and the places I visited, as usual, raised more questions than answers – one of the great attractions of being a tourist. Increasingly though, it seemed to me that India, and South Asia more generally, hasn’t received in the West the attention its history and position today merits. In the West, India struggles to escape from contrasts with and the shadow from China. This Western media focus reflects largely the narrow economic and military agendas driving our domestic and global interests. We either wanted trade deals or to sell to India the newest military hardware. Occasionally, headlines will make the front pages of our newspapers; in the main, they play to a small number of stereotypes. Absent from most media attention are the surprises, bewilderment, joys, puzzlement and exhilaration that confront any half-nosy overseas tourist to the country. The absence of a serious and continuing media attention today is even more surprising given the case that the region must be one of, if not the, most crisis-prone part of the world. Wars, nuclear weapons and historically hostile neighbourly relations of suspicion and distrust characterise the region. Political developments and actions by the largest of the regional players – India – matter to everyone. And yet events in this part of the world are not characterised by their shared aspirations and interests but by their divisions and hatred. The continuing human costs have been great. The recent thirty-year civil war in Sri Lanka is only the most recent example of the murderous nature and brutal character of these communal hatreds. A byproduct of this historical legacy is the twenty million strong diaspora residing outside of the region. Their returning cash remittances have continued to keep economies afloat but also to fund and sustain these communal divisions and conflicts. The lot of the “midnight’s descendants”, as John Keay describes them in his recent study, is a precarious and volatile one but one that could affect everyone. Politics do matter.

  Alongside the burgeoning Indian economy, most visitors are aware of the country being the ‘world’s biggest democracy’. If they didn’t know, it will be mentioned in all likelihood somewhere in their tourist discussions and reading. Indians justifiably are very proud of this fact. Together with its claims of secularism and harmonious territorial integrity, India’s democratic nature is commonly seen as one of its great defining attributes. Elections are fair and regular, a vigorous press and independent judiciary and a linguistic diversity that is symbolic of integrating democracy with diversity are well documented. As Ramachandra Guha notes, India “is the world’s most unnatural nation and its least likely democracy. Never before had a single political unit been created out of so many diverse parts. Never before had the franchise been granted to a desperately poor and largely illiterate population.” Winston Churchill’s response to the 1930s claims for political independence was both typical and predictable. If the British were to leave he argued, “India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.” It wasn’t only the colonial dinosaurs that forecast political catastrophes ahead; in 1967 the Delhi correspondent of The Times (of London) wrote that: “the great experiment of developing India within a democratic experiment has failed.” Many others too felt that the massive problems of population numbers, poverty, literacy, cultural and linguistic diversity, religion, caste, gender and ethnic difference provided insurmountable obstacles. “When Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship,” wrote Aldous Huxley.

  Sixteen general elections later India seems to be doing OK. At one level, it is an uplifting story. While most of the country’s neighbours vote into office military generals, India ploughs on with “its great experiment”. There hasn’t been a process of military rule or Balkanisation. Instead, in the 2014 general election, some 814 million people were eligible to vote with around 150 million being first-time voters. As The New York
Times put it, “the sheer size of the electorate makes this election the largest in the world and an inspiring celebration of universal adult suffrage.” Five million people were required to administer the election with a similar number of police involved in the six weeks covering the nine phases of voting in the various states and regions. 930,000 polling stations were ready for this 16th general election since Independence with just under 1.5 million electronic voting machines. 543 seats were up for election to the Lok Sabha (Parliament). The statistics all involved huge numbers and were reported throughout the world’s media during the elections. Apart from the political issues and likely results of the election there was this fascination from around the world with the logistics and bewildering complexities of ‘democracy in action’. And as was reported excitedly in most countries, the National Democratic Alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a sweeping victory with 336 seats (of which the BJP itself won 282 seats). The previous government of the United Progressive Alliance led by the Indian Congress Party took a miserable 58 seats (of which 44 were won by the Congress). The crushing victory of the BJP resulted in it being the first party since the 1984 general election to govern without the support of other parties. Once again and for a short while, India was the focus of the world’s media. As Narendra Modi tweeted, the “good days are ahead.” The tweet became India’s most retweeted post after the 2014 election.

  I was in India for the last two general elections, in 2009 and 2014. Not surprisingly the closer to the election date, the more the national and local newspapers were filled with election news. Because of the importance of political alliances between the national parties with those that are regionally based, the news for me as a tourist was difficult to follow. Just over 50 parties (registered with the Election Commission) were involved in the election. The personalities and the often family dynastic-based nature of the state parties resulted in a marginalisation of issues. Mention of individuals seemed to be a proxy means of summarising substantive issues – difficult to follow if you are a visitor to the country but more intelligible to local participants. In 2014 there was a noticeable edge of excitement and anticipation to the election given the consistent high opinion poll ratings for the BJP and the poor showing of the Congress Party over the last few years. I remember that in the previous election of 2009 there was surprise that the Congress Party had managed to win. This time there was little surprise. Perhaps the only surprise was the extent of the BJP’s victory. The controversial nature of the BJP and its leader together with its huge number of seats led to much speculation about the future of India – economically, socially and religiously – in the post-election period.

  In February 2014, I was travelling around Tamil Nadu in south-east India having arrived in Bangalore by plane from Europe. Here the particularities and complexities of Indian politics became apparent. This is ‘the south’, a shorthand for a distinctive history and people different to the more northern states. As mentioned earlier, the southern states suffered less historically from conquering people that periodically overran northern India. The three great dynasties that ruled and shaped the south over a period of a thousand years – the Cholas, the Pallavas and the Pandyans – developed their own distinct cultural and religious traditions. Tamil, one of the more popular Dravidian languages spoken in southern India, has provided a strong and distinctive continuing link to ancient customs, devotional practices and classical culture. This distinctiveness has also shaped the politics of Tamil Nadu. A strong nationalist movement has characterised politics in the state over the last sixty years. A more anti-Brahmin, anti-Hindi, pro-poor outlook has been the defining quality of the political campaigns. The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) under the popular but firm grip of the state’s Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa (fondly referred to as Amma) won 37 out of the 39 parliamentary seats available in the state. Clearly there was no Modi-mania in Tamil Nadu. A previous film star, a Dalit and with numerous run-ins with the courts over charges of fraud and corruption, Jayalalithaa was a dominant political figure with a national profile. It’s ironical, given the strong patriarchal culture of India, that three regional women Chief Ministers were seen as possible ‘kingmakers’ in the 2014 election. There was of course Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and, finally, Mayawati Kumari in Uttar Pradesh. All three women came from poor backgrounds (although Mayawati is far from poor!) and, through a variety of ploys, contested and outfought opponents in the brutal, murky and male-dominated world of Indian politics. All three shared a mixture of populism and welfare provision underpinned by a strong display of personality cultishness.

  This personality business was evident as I wandered around Chennai. Huge posters of Amma were evident everywhere and helped distract from the heat and humidity. In the main, they tended to be large rectangular posters depicting a face or full portrayal. Authority and control with a touch of intimacy and friendliness seemed to be the message behind the poses. In contrast to these 2014 election posters, there are the earlier more famous flamboyant designs promoting Amma. There is this famous photograph of a gigantic hoarding of Amma on the Marina promenade that captures the populist and personality-centred nature of the state’s politics. Other posters said to be have been paid for and promoted by ‘grateful citizens’ have Jayalalithaa centre stage, being applauded by a plethora of world leaders including those from North America, Japan, North Korea and Russia. There are other posters with this theme repeated. Then there is this roadside poster showing Jayalalithaa on the left, and in huge lettering, the message, “You are the unbeaten king. You always make the right move. You are our champion.” on the right of the poster. And these are big posters, far bigger than would be allowed in Europe – perhaps eight by ten metres and usually supported by bamboo poles. Maybe this is not too surprising given the incestuous relationship between the powerful Tamil film industry and political parties – Jayalalitha came to prominence as an actress in Tamil cinema in the 1960s. The politicisation of the film industry provided a rich source of stories depicting Dalit-inspired victories against high caste baddies. Or again, the poster well-wishers might be reflecting the autocratic, hierarchical and dynastic features that characterise much of Indian politics. Whatever the reasons it is clear from the 2014 election results that something is working for the AIADMK party under Jayalalithaa. In December 2016, Jayalalitha, Chief Minister for some fourteen years, died.

  Modi and the India of 2014

  The results of the general election were stunning and, for a brief time, the issues of Indian politics were a major focus of the world’s media. I had returned home from India by the time of polling but followed events closely. Perhaps in anticipation of surprises, newspapers and television channels in Europe and I’m sure elsewhere outlined some of the issues and personalities involved. Much analysis and reporting struggled to make sense of this post-election India.

  At one level, the results were not a surprise. The BJP under Narendra Modi was expected to win although the number of seats won (282 by the BJP alone from a total of 543 seats) was a surprise. This majority gives Modi the ability to govern alone unfettered by the constraints of alliance partners. Amongst the reasons given for this landslide was the economy. Under the last Congress government economic growth had slowed from around 8–9% to less than 5%. Not since the introduction of neoliberal policies in the 1990s has India experienced such a wobble. The rupee was down strongly against world currencies – dropping by 20% – and a looming balance of payments was apparent. Price increases for food staples such as vegetables were rocketing. For the growing middle class these were worrying times.

  However, it was not only a deteriorating economy that worried voters. Corruption in everyday life has traditionally been a feature of ‘getting through’ but had reached new heights of despair in the last four or five years. It encouraged a culture of patronage and favouritism which allowed senior politicians in particular to hand out business contracts and licenses. The corros
ion of public institutions remains a particular source of anger. The lack of trust in the police and in local and national government officials is endemic as reported by the organisation, Transparency International: the global coalition against corruption. Connection to energy utilities or entrance to schools requires the traditional backhander. As mentioned earlier, a number of national scandals such as those surrounding the 2010 Commonwealth Games continued to be a major embarrassment to India on the world stage and a deep source of anger to its people. Then there were the 40 billion dollars stolen from the Treasury by the Communications Minister through selling the broadband spectrum at massively undervalued prices. The popular but short-lived anti-corruption protests and rallies under the social activist Kisan Baburao Hazare seemed to indicate for a moment anyway that people and the middle class in particular had had enough of these scams. The spectacular success of the new anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party – the Common Man Party – in Delhi in recent years was evidence of this revolt against corruption.