The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  For a hot second, there were (facile) prognostications that India was becoming almost American.10

  The opening of the Indian economy went hand in hand with something far less tangible, and something that stemmed from the democratic experiment that began in my father’s time, when India gained independence from Britain at midnight, on August 15, 1947. Salman Rushdie memorialized that generation in his mind-blowing novel Midnight’s Children.11

  Since then, something had shifted in the Indian ethos. The freedom that was promised in 1947, when India won its independence from British rule, had quietly settled in the Indian imagination. Almost seventy years later, ordinary citizens up and down the social ladder believed they did not have to be bound by their past, that they could escape what had been predestined.

  Nandan Nilekani, one of India’s most well-known technology magnates and the author of Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century, a book about the vast changes in his country, post-reforms, summed it up this way: “For the first time, there is a sense of hope across the country,” he wrote.12

  He published the book in 2008, the year my daughter was born. This was a time of new reckoning. The generation of Indians growing up in the years since economic reforms began in 1991 were hopeful, but also impatient. Their demands were beginning to unsettle the soul of New India. They were pushing their country to deliver on the freedoms promised at midnight.

  I call them noonday’s children.

  India’s youth bulge came at a time when much of the rest of the world was growing old. By 2000, fertility rates in Europe had so plummeted that the continent was no longer replacing its population. America, despite its infusion of young immigrants, was aging. Even China, whose own youth bulge in the 1980s propelled its phenomenal economic ascent, was projected to soon have a larger share of old people to care for, and, thanks to its one-child policy, only one child to care for both parents.

  India’s big youth bulge turned out to be astonishingly big. The median age was 26 in 2012, the latest year for which comparable figures are published. (In China, the comparable figure was 35; in the United States, 37.)13

  More than 300 million Indians are estimated to be under the age of 15, making India home to more children than any country at any time in human history. More important, every month, between 2011 and 2030, nearly 1 million Indians are expected to turn 18 and join the global labor force. By 2030, India is projected to reach its demographic sweet spot. That’s when the majority of its population will be working age, with a relatively small share of children and elderly to care for.

  All of them will have their noses pressed against the hopes of a better life. The trouble is, a great many of them will be altogether unequipped to get a job. And, anyway, the manufacturing jobs that blossomed during East Asia’s demographic dividend are vanishing. What lies ahead is an increasingly automated workplace and what the demographer David Bloom calls an “unforgiving” global economy.

  India faces a formidable challenge: Every year, India must create at least 10 million jobs for them.

  Whenever a big bulge of young people comes of age, wherever that is in the world, disruption inevitably follows. American baby boomers sat at lunch counters in the segregated South and protested the Vietnam War: they changed the United States forever. Both the Arab Spring, beginning in 2011, and the rise of the Islamic State a few years later, were spurred by the disaffection of the young; when Tahrir Square burst into protest, the median age in Egypt was 24.8.

  India is too big, too diverse for its baby boomers to spawn one coherent revolution. India’s youth are not seeking to overturn the societal conventions of their parents’ age entirely. Nor are they politically more liberal. But they are fueling implosions big and small, in different directions. You can feel it. It’s unmistakable.

  India’s demographic challenge is complicated by one peculiarity: according to the 2011 census, for every 1000 boys that are born, there are only 919 girls. This represents the sharpest gender imbalance in India’s own history—one measure of the degradation of daughters that starts in the womb. This degradation is also the source of turmoil, as young women begin to push, in great numbers, against the rules and ways that hold them back. The more they push, the more violently they are pushed back, often by men as young and hungry as they are.

  India’s story line would turn. The euphoria that greeted me in 2005—a mood that many of my Indian friends had warned me to be skeptical of—would give way to disenchantment, anger, even bitterness.

  By 2011, the economy slowed. Foreign investors began pulling out. The price of food soared. Corruption scandals burst open. A coalition government, led by the Indian National Congress party, was paralyzed. The country was experiencing its worst economic crisis since before liberalization. On the eve of the 2014 parliamentary elections, there were loud calls for change.

  Many reasons were offered: the global financial crisis, a fragile coalition government, reckless spending, and insufficient progress in carrying out economic reforms. All of these may have been true to varying degrees. But to my mind, the shift in India’s trajectory pointed to more fundamental gaps—and these were precisely the fault lines that its young had begun to reveal. The post-1991 generation had been led to imagine it could rewrite its destiny, that it could shake off the karma of past lives. The country was utterly unprepared for this.

  After nearly seventy years of democratic rule, and a decade of galloping economic growth, there is still nothing close to a level playing field—neither functioning schools that would let poor children take advantage of new opportunities, nor parity for daughters to allow women to realize their true potential, nor even tolerance for different points of view. Life for millions of young people remains utterly fragile. About 30 percent of children under the age of five remain clinically malnourished; most women suffer from anemia; one-third of all Indian children are not immunized against preventable childhood diseases; and, despite roaring economic growth and a stream of state-sponsored programs, nearly one in four Indians lives in dire poverty, or on less than $1.25 a day.14

  India is being propelled from within by what I regard as its most transformative generation—those who have grown up since economic reforms began in 1991. Their demands are reshaping the country. Their ambitions are exposing important fault lines. They are poking at the fable of freedom at midnight.

  I have a personal stake in this. My daughter was born in this India.

  In the coming years, India can thrive because of its young. Or it can implode. Or both. There’s little time left.

  “When the world sleeps,” Nehru had said in 1947, on the eve of independence, “India will awake to life and freedom.”

  That was India at midnight.

  Were he to come to my daughter’s India, he might say otherwise. While the world sleeps, Indians come of age—and holler.

  This is India at noonday.

  To understand noonday, let’s rewind to midnight, to when the story of independent India begins—in a burst of bloodshed.

  As British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan in August 1947, the vast province of Bengal, which is where my family is from, was carved into two. The western part of Bengal fell in Hindu-majority India. The east fell in Muslim-majority East Pakistan, which would later become a sovereign nation, called Bangladesh. Millions fled during the time of Partition. Hindus headed west to seek refuge in Hindu-majority India. Muslims moved the other way, to Muslim-majority East Pakistan.

  Hemendra Nath Sen, my great-grandfather, my father’s mother’s father, did not flee. He had no intention of fleeing. He was a lawyer in a small provincial city called Rangpur, in what would fall in East Pakistan. He was a Hindu, well-known, well-off, the father of seven children—five girls, two boys. In Sen-para, which is how the neighborhood of the Sens was known, he had built a sprawling bungalow of red bricks and green wooden shutters, with high ceilings to let out the heat and a jamun tree that littered the yard with purple berries all summer. This is wh
at he called home.

  By 1947, the year of Partition, all seven of Hemen Sen’s children had left Rangpur. Most of them had settled in Calcutta, in what became Hindu-majority India. Hemen Sen and his wife stayed on, perhaps for as long as five years after independence—the dates are impossible to verify more than half a century later—until his children insisted that he leave. And so, sometime in the early 1950s, he sold his house to a Muslim family who came from Jalpaiguri, a city just across the border in what had become Hindu-majority India. With his wife, Hemen Sen boarded a Calcutta-bound train. It broke his heart to leave, his youngest daughter, my great-aunt, recalled.

  There are stories like this in family after family across north India. Partition seared the consciousness of my parents’ generation and left a mark on generations to come, though the facts of what actually happened during that time remain shrouded in mystery and myth. Hindus and Muslims attacked one another without mercy. Between 250,000 and 2 million people are estimated to have died. Up to 10 million people are said to have been uprooted from home forever. Women were raped, though no one bothered to count how many. There was never any accountability for what happened, nor even a truth and reconciliation effort to get to the bottom of the awful things that people did to one another.15

  By independence, Hemen Sen’s eldest daughter, Sushoma, was the mother of five children in Calcutta. The fourth among them was my father. No one is quite sure about his date of birth. It was probably 1941, possibly July, maybe August, definitely during the rains.

  Baba was a schoolboy at the time of the Partition. His family lived in a three-room ground-floor flat in a Hindu-majority neighborhood near bustling Gariahat Market. The milkmen of his area were amateur wrestlers who had migrated from the countryside in the neighboring state of Bihar. They were seen as the local toughs you turned to when you needed to keep troublemakers out, and so during the Partition years, it fell on them to lead the neighborhood vigilante group. One day, amid the rumors and fights that were routine at that time, the milkmen-wrestlers stopped to accost an older gentleman, a stranger, as he walked through the neighborhood. Who are you, they demanded to know, why are you here? They stripped off his pants, standard practice to assess whether a man was circumcised, and therefore a Muslim. The stranger was a Muslim, and for that reason, they beat him so thoroughly that he died right then and there. Baba remembers it vividly. He says he watched from the sidelines. Who among his friends and neighbors took part, I will never know for sure.

  Baba heard that in retaliation Muslim mobs set upon Hindus in the old man’s neighborhood. Like this, violence spiraled across Calcutta. There were several rounds of bloodletting, in 1946 and 1947. Newspapers described corpses floating in the canals. Refugees poured in on trains from East Pakistan. Baba’s father—tall, self-possessed, passionate about politics—marched through the neighborhood trying to find shelter for the newcomers. Baba was with him when he persuaded the residents of Jasoda Bhavan, an elegant four-story apartment building across from Gariahat Market, to open up their homes. He turned the courtyard into a communal kitchen. He goaded every household to send a pot of dal.

  Circumcision and pots of lentils: these are Baba’s most vivid memories of Partition. He describes it as a time of trouble. He uses the Bengali word gondogol, which is one of those elastic, imprecise words. One might refer to a rumble in the stomach as a gondogol.

  Baba’s sister, who is ten years older, has another memory. She was at a family wedding in a neighborhood near the Hindu temple to the black goddess, Ma Kali. The wedding must have been sometime in the months before independence. And what a strange wedding it was. You couldn’t turn the lights on for fear of drawing attention. You couldn’t blow the conch. You sat in the dark, as quiet as could be. The priest quickly whispered the bare minimum prayers, and the shutters remained closed. My aunt occasionally peered through the slats. She saw men lunging at one another with knives in a field across the street. The image stamped itself on her memory. “They were cutting each other’s heads off,” she said.

  Close to midnight on August 15, 1947, when freedom officially arrived, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation. His speech was broadcast live on state-run All India Radio. These were among his most famous lines. “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history,” he said, “when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

  Nehru and his fellow members of India’s Constituent Assembly deliberated for three years over the language of the constitution of independent India. What they came up with was a document of extraordinarily audacious pledges. India was to be a nation like none the world had seen: secular, democratic, held together by no shared language, faith, or race. The majority of its people were hungry and illiterate. Its social order treated women and outcastes as lesser beings. Never mind all that. The Constitution, which came into effect on January 26, 1950, enshrined the right to equality for all its citizens.

  No country had ever pulled this off—except America, and that too, only sort of.

  The Constitution of India guarantees every citizen a set of “fundamental rights,” which includes the right to freedom of expression and the right to practice one’s religion and culture. It compels the state to try to establish a social order in which “justice, social, economic and political, shall inform all the institutions of the national life.” It underscores the hope that the state would soon offer free, compulsory education to all children up to the age of fourteen.

  Implicit here is a promise that one’s path in life would no longer be determined by the past, that all men and women could forge it themselves—that they could escape karma.

  Its preamble reads:

  WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens: JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY, of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity.

  The framers of the Constitution capitalized those words, as if to underscore their own audacity.

  For centuries, an Indian’s destiny has been scripted in the womb. There, it was determined whether you could go to school or look a policeman in the eye, what work you did, who you married and if you could wear diamond studs in your ears. Bhimrao Ambedkar, chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution, was keenly aware of this. “Democracy in India,” he said, “is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”

  Top dressing. Not part of the undersoil.

  Ambedkar was not alone in recognizing that a society as stratified as India’s could scuttle the experiment with democracy. Many of the men who shaped modern India—and they were by and large men—set out “social revolution” as their most important goal, the historian Granville Austin observed, rivaled only by the need for national stability.16 These two imperatives—fundamental reforms and a strong state—would set the stage for several crucial battles in the years to come.

  Since independence, India has unquestionably proved its democratic credentials. Unlike many of its Asian neighbors, which boasted swift economic growth under totalitarian rule, India has stuck to its democratic path.17

  Since 1951, it has held free and fair elections for local and national office. Only once, during the emergency rule of Indira Gandhi, did India bow to authoritarianism. The judiciary is independent (though often accused of corruption). Civil society is robust. The press is free and aggressive. The country’s many castes and languages are better represented in politics than ever before. India has withstood three crippling wars with its neighbors, battled insurgencies of many stripes, and survived some of the worst terrorist attacks in the world. These are enormous achievements for any country, especially one that was born so poor.

  Through it all, the lives of ordinary people have improved on the whole.

  In 1951, the average Indian could expect to live until the age of thirty-two; t
oday, life expectancy is sixty-six.

  Infant mortality, one of the most telling measures of a country’s well-being, has plummeted. In 1951, about 180 out of 1000 infants were likely to die before their first birthday; in 2011, that figure was 44.18

  Fewer women died in childbirth too, compared with seventy years ago. Many more Indians can read and write than ever before.

  But beware. It is impossible to tell one story about how India has fared since independence: its northern, eastern, and central states are the poorest, with human development indicators that mirror those of sub-Saharan Africa, while its southern and western states resemble Southeast Asia in terms of health, education, and well-being.

  Taken as a whole, India has one of the world’s fastest-growing large economies, second only to China’s. Its gross domestic product is the third largest in the world, after the United States’ and China’s.

  Freedom has delivered these things. But has prosperity brought greater freedoms to those who had so little? That is a point of contention, and that will be underscored by the life stories of the people you will meet in the pages of this book.

  At the same time—and this is of course impossible to quantify—the idea of freedom has unquestionably taken root, even in the undersoil. In my father’s India, so many Indians would dare not question their station in life. In my daughter’s India, they expect to shape their destiny. Escape is a given. Democracy has anchored itself in the minds of India’s young. It speaks to the triumph of an audacious idea.