At the outset, I should clarify one more point. I have read that there are two Indias—one that is primarily rural and dominated by caste, superstition and traditional beliefs; the second, an urban, elite culture, more national in its outlook, for whom caste and other social hierarchies do not matter. The economist Amit Bhaduri has called this a politically correct cliché. He writes:
(one is) the India that shines with its rich neighbourhoods, corporate houses of breathtaking size, glittering shopping malls and high-tech flyovers over which flow a procession of new-model cars. These are the images from a globalized India on the verge of entering the first world. And then there is the other India. The India of helpless peasants committing suicide, Dalits regularly lynched in not-so-distant villages, tribals dispossessed of forest land and livelihood, and children too small to walk properly yet begging on the streets of shining cities.13
Author Aravind Adiga also calls the ‘two Indias’ the ‘India of light’ and the ‘India of darkness’.14 However, my intimate association with both, the metropolis and rural India, has taught me that this concept of the ‘two Indias’ cannot be further from the truth. The underlying issue of inequality plagues cities as well as small towns and villages. Urban poverty is rampant, as is poverty in the villages. Discrimination based on caste and class is as prevalent in the cities and the ‘high society’ of metropolises as it is in smaller towns; this is further amplified in the villages. Discrimination against women and the girl child is prevalent across all societal classes, in varying degrees and in different ways. There is only one India, because despite the exterior differences between cities and villages, our social ailments flow through all strata.
It was the year 2011, and it had been two years since I quit my job as a hedge fund manager in Paris to create my not-for-profit organization that worked on improving the education and health of women in the Middle East and India. This step had been a choice I made to live a more useful life. I wanted to help alleviate some of India’s social challenges rather than make the European ultra-rich even richer via the hedge fund, a job I had gradually realized was rather pointless and not worth my precious life.
At that time, I was living in the sleepy little Swiss town of Geneva, where I also worked at the World Economic Forum, an organization that brought together world leaders from all fields to solve critical global problems. I was the only employee in the history of the World Economic Forum to own and run, in parallel, a private not-for-profit organization.
My fledgling organization was running a project located in another continent, thousands of miles away from Geneva. The aim of the project was to improve the education and health of women and children in Nizamabad, a small district in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh (now in Telangana) in India with a population of just over 300,000. It is four hours away by road from the city of Hyderabad, where the nearest airport is. In this unusual arrangement I had crafted for myself, I would fly out from Geneva at least one weekend every month on a twenty-hour journey, by air and by road, to arrive at Nizamabad. Then, with my six-member team, I would work towards renovating and improving the facilities of dilapidated anganwadis—rooms with a courtyard built by the government of India four decades ago for providing education and nutrition to preschoolers and expecting mothers. I had partnered with a global technology company to provide the children with learning tools and games on electronic tablets. I had also brought on board a Chennai-based pharmaceutical company which had agreed to supply to me, at cost price, prenatal multivitamin tablets, which I distributed to women at the anganwadis.
I had a team in place to carry out this work, but I was also on the lookout for a local from Nizamabad to give a boost to our work. For this, I established a master’s degree scholarship at King’s College in London for one underprivileged girl who displayed extraordinary leadership skills in community service. I had negotiated with King’s College to waive the tuition fee for this candidate. I had naively thought I would find such a candidate in Nizamabad in the hope that she would continue overseeing the development work after my organization left.
This was why Rajvi Naidu,15 the vice principal of the local college in Nizamabad, introduced me to Swapna.
‘Swapna is exactly whom you are looking for,’ Rajvi told me.
‘Who is she?’ I asked.
‘An eighteen-year-old girl in her final year of a Bachelor of Arts degree in our college,’ she said. ‘She belongs to the Devadasi community here.’
Devadasi is not a caste, but an occupational community that sprung up because of the caste system. The tradition of the Devadasi community, found mostly in the south and west of India, dates back several hundred years, with its popularity reaching a peak in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.16 The basic premise of the Devadasi tradition was to make girls who reached puberty dedicate their lives to the service of God. They took care of temple rites, danced and sang in their rites of worship.
However, during British rule, the kings who were the patrons of temples and temple arts became powerless. As a result, the Devadasis were left without their traditional means of support and patronage from the royal families. In desperation, they turned to prostitution to support themselves. Gradually the practice withered to such an extent that Devadasis were expected to have sexual intercourse with men in the community, an obligation that had no relation to religion.17
‘I thought that the practice had been abolished,’ I said. As far as I knew, the Devadasi practice had been outlawed in 1988 on the grounds that it was akin to prostitution.18
‘Yes, it has been abolished by law, but not by society,’ Rajvi said softly.
I met Swapna the following day at Rajvi’s office. After exchanging greetings, Swapna and I stepped out to the college sports field for a walk.
‘Madamji, why are you here?’ she asked me before I could inquire about her.
‘To meet you!’
‘You have come from Geneva?’
‘Yes.’
‘I went to America once.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘I got myself admitted in school here. My mother did not want me to, but I managed. I do not know who my father is,’ Swapna explained in slow, broken English with a smattering of Hindi and Telugu (which I did not understand). ‘Then, when I was nine I thought that I should bring together all orphans in my school because they must have had difficulties to study like I did. So I started The Child’s Club. All orphans in my school were part of The Child’s Club and we met and played together. One American organization heard about it and they got me to America to give them a speech about the club. They gave me an award.’
‘That is wonderful. But why did your mother not want you to go to school?’ I asked.
‘She wanted me to follow our Devadasi tradition!’
‘How do you like it in college here?’
‘I like it, but it is difficult to attend classes.’
‘Why?’
‘I am a Devadasi. My people and my mother still do not want me to study. Some other people think I am bad and they do not want me to be with their children,’ she said.
‘Then how did you manage to complete school and enrol in college?’
‘I told everyone that I did not want to follow the Devadasi tradition. I wanted to go to school. I had to fight my people. I live with my mother far away, outside Nizamabad, near the fields. It was difficult to come to school every day,’ Swapna told me.
‘Here, in college, it is difficult to attend all the classes. But vice principalji helps me. She tells the teachers to give me extra classes. Sometimes, she even arranges for my exams to be held later, only for me, when I cannot come to college for them. Vice principalji is very kind,’ she added.
Swapna’s teachers at the college had told me that Swapna was a good student, but she had to deal with the wrath of her community to pursue an education. Her actions had caused mayhem at home and almost ruined Swapna’s relations with her mother, who, from what Swapna told me, woul
d much rather have her daughter follow the community’s traditions.
Before returning to Geneva, with Swapna’s consent and as a precursor to her education in London, I arranged to have her sent to train during the summer at an organization in South Africa that mobilized local communities to overcome social challenges. I was glad to see Swapna excited about her trip.
On another visit to Nizamabad a few months later, I met Swapna again. She had just returned from South Africa with a marvellous new self-confidence. She seemed to have gained even greater strength to break the shackles that tradition had clamped on her. I was immensely hopeful. King’s College had pointed out that English language skills would be the only requirement for Swapna because she had the remaining qualifications. I made arrangements to improve her English. Rajvi helped me by organizing English language classes for Swapna in Hyderabad.
The date of Swapna’s departure for London was approaching and I was trying to raise funds for her living expenses and travel. London is an expensive city to live in, and I wanted Swapna to be financially comfortable so that she could get the most out of the experience.
The following month, I returned once again to Nizamabad for a few days to oversee our anganwadi projects.
‘I’ve heard Swapna is not going to London,’ one of the women at the local dispensary told me while I was making my usual rounds in the community.
‘Who told you that?’ I asked.
‘That’s what people around here are saying. In our tradition, Devadasis don’t leave the temple,’ she replied.
Later in the day, Rajvi called me. She sounded panicked.
‘Maa, I tried to convince Swapna but she does not want to go,’ she told me.
‘Did you ask her why?’
‘She is not telling me. I think she has a boyfriend here in Nizamabad, and he is telling her not to go!’ said Rajvi, distressed.
The next day, a few others told me that the community had threatened Swapna and told her not to leave. I decided to speak to her.
‘I cannot go to London, madamji,’ Swapna told me.
‘Is that a choice that you have made?’ I asked her.
Swapna did not answer.
Swapna did not tell me why she declined the offer to study at King’s College, and I chose to neither probe further, nor convince her. She had the right to decide for herself, irrespective of what decision I thought would be appropriate for her.
Consequently, I will never know the real reason why she declined. In many ways, I have always felt that Swapna’s refusal was my failure. Should I have met her more often? Perhaps I should have engaged more with her mother. What else could I have done to bring her community on board? Making choices for individuals seemed to be the prerogative of the community in Nizamabad.
If the preservation of tradition could lead to progress, or if tradition and modernity could walk hand in hand—as our Constitution intended—I would celebrate that. But this is not always the case in India. The dogmatic observance of archaic rules of community, jati and caste supersedes individual volition and freedom. By no means am I opposing tradition, but my point is that if either ‘modernity’ or tradition hinders individual free will, that cannot be progress.
I was elated to be making myself useful in resolving some of the most critical issues in the world through my job at the World Economic Forum. But working with my tiny NGO in India also convinced me that firstly, I needed to return to India to be aware of the ground reality; and secondly, I needed to find a platform in India so that I could make an impact on a larger scale. The scope and outreach of my NGO was too small and the challenges in India were far too many and too large.
Another reason I felt I needed to return was that while we had brilliant development economists who had written on India, often based out of other countries, they rarely chose to be full-time practitioners in implementing the required changes. For instance, some environmentalists in India have been actively and vociferously engaged in protecting rivers and opposing large construction projects that damage the environment, but there are not many similar ‘practising’ economists at significant positions. Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, broke this trend, but he left the role in 2016 after a stint of three years.19 India’s Planning Commission was replaced by the government’s policy think tank, NITI Aayog, in 2015, and economist Arvind Panagariya from Columbia University in New York was brought in to head it, but he too left within two years. A number of other economists did not live in India, and their assessments of the challenges here were often made from universities and research institutes at a distance from the action in India. As a result, these assessments—however astute they may be—were often based only on secondary reports, sample groups, and at times their consultancy experience with the non-academic world, there being no actual engagement. So I wondered how they could reveal an accurate picture of India’s development.
While working at the World Economic Forum, I therefore searched various avenues for almost a year to find the best platform through which I could combine impact and scale to contribute. There were opportunities and offers that came my way from time to time, but I turned them down, mostly because they did not have the scale I was looking for.
On the afternoon of 26 February 2014, I had an exchange of phone messages:
‘How are you doing?’ wrote Naveen Jindal, a member of Parliament, and the owner of one of India’s largest business conglomerates, Jindal Steel and Power, and a friend of mine.
‘Doing well. Still trying to find a way to return and make myself useful to India,’ I replied.
‘Why don’t you join me in politics here?’
‘No, not politics.’
‘Oh.’
‘How about joining our company?’ he inquired after a few minutes.
‘I have been thinking about that.’
A week later, I flew to New Delhi to meet the chief executive officer of Naveen’s company. Together, we carved out a new position for me—chief sustainability officer. I would be responsible for ensuring that the growth of Naveen’s $3.6 billion company included the commensurate improvement of the lives of its employees and the well-being of local communities around their plants and factories. This included ascertaining that the surrounding air and water resources had not been polluted, and contributing to the development of our country in various other creative ways.
Three months later, I had started work at the Jindal Group’s headquarters in New Delhi, moving to India after fourteen years of being abroad.
The company’s production facilities were concentrated in the states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand—which had large tribal populations. I spent the larger part of each month living in these areas, touring the forests and surrounding villages and our factory premises. Some of the tribes, such as the Birhor tribe of Jharkhand, were so primitive that they were on the verge of extinction.
To establish mines and plants, private companies had to acquire land belonging to the Adivasis, with their consent and at times accompanied with various development programmes such as those offering free education and skilled jobs for the landowners and their families. These are all well-intentioned attempts at modernization. The Birhor tribals, for instance, are traditionally expert rope makers, skilled in tying knots and making traps for hunting.20 The Jindal Group provided them with industrial waste sacks—free of cost—from which they could extract jute to make ropes. Saranda was an Adivasi zone in Jharkhand where private companies had provided animal husbandry training to the Adivasi population. In the neighbouring Godda area, the Jindal Group had set up a formidable vocational college in which 60 per cent of all students were Adivasi; they had been enrolled in a specially designed programme to develop skills such as carpentry, welding, electrical goods repair. Their tuition, boarding, meals, study materials, and clothes were fully sponsored by the company.
However, all these efforts seemed fairly ironic because in reality the Adivasis had little use for the interference of
private companies in their lives. They were reluctant to participate in the skills training programmes and take up jobs. Even the building of a road in the Adivasi area made them apprehensive, for roads brought with them external influences. The Adivasis I met were self-sufficient and content with the resources they had, isolated from the tumult of the modern-day world. Their path of progress, I felt, was not necessarily the same as the one that we in urban pockets considered desirable. I wondered, what gave us private companies the legitimacy to ‘develop’ the Adivasis? What gave us the right to believe that the Adivasis did not know what was good for them? If their well-being was our primary intention, why were we imposing on them a system that we felt must be appropriate for them?
To make matters worse, the Adivasis were threatened by violent insurgent groups—or Maoists—which claimed they were trying to ‘protect’ them from modern developmental attempts. In an essay titled ‘Adivasis, Naxalites and Indian Democracy’, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, the historian Ramachandra Guha has explained the failure of the formal political system in India that has created a space for Maoist revolutionaries to occupy. He writes:
. . . there is a double tragedy at work in tribal India. The first tragedy is that the state has treated its Adivasi citizens with contempt and condescension. The second tragedy is that their presumed protectors, the Naxalites, offer no long-term solution either.21
The Maoists’ primary aim, I gathered, was to capture power in New Delhi, and they were using the Adivasis as a stepping stone in this larger endeavour. Over the past few decades, the Maoists had been living with tribal populations as the hills and forests of central India were well suited to their methods of roaming guerrilla warfare. Their violent actions had indeed occasionally protected and helped the Adivasis survive—for instance, the Maoists had procured for the Adivasis higher wages for labour in a landlord’s field, and higher rates for the collection of forest produce. However, their involvement in the Adivasis’ habitat and affairs has not been consensual. The Adivasis have suffered during Maoist attacks on the government,22 being caught in the crossfire,23 for instance, when security forces poured into the state of Chhattisgarh to restore the primacy of the Indian state against the Maoists.24
Indian Instincts Page 4