by Barkha Dutt
If the first wave of protests against the Mandal Commission driven quotas were elitist and not entirely thought-through, the brazen politicization of reservations over the years had the danger of reducing affirmative action to a farce. Despite a Supreme Court mandated cap of 50 per cent on all quotas—a number that was meant to include both scheduled castes and OBCs—competitive caste politics led several states to openly flout the legal limit. Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan were among states where more than 60 per cent of seats in government institutes fell in the ‘reserved’ category.
It was the forces unleashed by liberalization—and the social aspirations they created—that would prove to be the biggest challenge to all the old calculations about which community was ‘backward’. As more and more people aspired to white-collar jobs and a life in the city it was no longer enough to be born into a caste that had traditionally wielded influence.
For Narendra Modi, who had positioned himself as the market reformer who understood the dreams of the emerging middle class of modern India, as opposed to the Congress that was stuck in an archaic politics that romanticized poverty with a culture of doles, the collision between liberalization and old caste politics came back to bite in the form of a man called Hardik Patel. A virtually unknown young twenty-something, Patel was able to galvanize lakhs of people in the powerful Patel community, traditionally BJP voters, to rise against the government’s quota policy. Though overtly his demand was that the Patels too be made beneficiaries of affirmative action, his stir was in effect an anti-quota stir. Either caste quotas should be scrapped, he argued, or they should be recast to include an economic criterion. That the agitation had erupted in the prime minister’s home state carried its own message, both about the limitations of old-style caste politics and the difficulties of managing competing aspirations in a changing society.
Others argued that it was precisely the emergence of this neo-middle class that was a challenge to old social bigotries. Either way, the middle class, once alienated, now resurgent, channelled its new political identity through what Leela Fernandes has called ‘class and consumption’. The ever-growing numbers of those who came to fall within its ambit—conservatively, it has been estimated it will number over 500 million by 2025—created a potential new powerhouse of consumerism. With an eye on them being the next big spenders this was a constituency favoured by both the markets and the media. But the middle class had come to be remarkably insular, inward-looking and disengaged with the realities that lay just outside the boundaries of their own nation-state. They wanted to read, hear, watch and discuss mostly their own issues. So, in an irony of the information age, as private media proliferated with more than 400 television channels, the stories of India’s poor fell off the airwaves.
In the competitive hysteria of the media battlefield ‘poverty’ stories were not attractive enough to score TRP victories over your rivals; they apparently won you international awards, but not eyeballs. Perhaps Indians rising up the economic ladder felt far too uncomfortable in being confronted with stark destitution or perhaps they were inured to it. Either way, while post nineties India sought to dissolve the differences of caste, language, region and religion in the all-encompassing embrace of globalization, inequities of class had only been exacerbated to virtually create islands of affluence in an ocean of poverty. People were getting richer but the gap between the rich and the poor was widening. Wealth concentration, a key characteristic of this widening imbalance continued to raise questions over whether economic growth alone could solve the problems of our staggeringly unequal society. Soon enough, it was clear that the opportunities thrown up by liberalization were available to just a sliver of the population. Inequality in earnings had doubled in the past two decades according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It pointed out that India was ‘the worst performer on this count of all emerging economies’. The top 10 per cent of India’s wage earners now made twelve times more than the bottom 10 per cent, up from a ratio of six in the early 1990s. ‘Wealth managers’ in banks commissioned entire reports to study patterns of spending. One such report helpfully informed us that ‘exclusivity’ now drove choices among the super-rich. According to the authors of this report one such big spender had imported nine crates of Japanese whiskey priced at $750 per bottle for a wedding party, partly because the drink was difficult to source in India. India now had annual ‘luxury summits’ tapping into this new culture of competitive (and conspicuous) consumption. So what if 190 million people went hungry every day. All that was somewhere else, it was too remote to feel real, comfortably far away from the gilded borders that now demarcated the rest of India from this private middle-class Xanadu. Now, there was greater media attention on the ‘boom’ in the luxury market than there was on dying children. The International Monetary Fund held a mirror up to India when its managing director, Christine Lagarde, did the not-so-tough math to reveal that the net worth of the billionaire community in the country had increased twelve-fold in fifteen years and was enough to eliminate absolute poverty in India twice over.
VI
Many of the dramatic changes in post liberalization India are healthy and democratic and represent the power of hope. Millions of Indians now have the opportunity to leave the circumstances of their birth behind. Young women in small towns learn English and train to be airline stewardesses or beauticians in spas or salons. Men from the hinterland come to the cities to work as drivers for private households but also for twenty-first-century taxi services like Meru and Uber. Middle-class and upper middle-class families find it much more difficult to get full-time domestic help because the women who once used to migrate from the villages of Jharkhand and Bihar to urban India to find employment as nannies and ayahs now want jobs in malls as saleswomen at Burger King or Zara.
But the churning currents of a society in flux also claim victims—men and women who are pulled under because of thwarted ambition, unsustainable dreams, entrenched prejudice and remorseless competition. Cases from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum are legion but headline-hogging stories about people from the highest levels of society who come undone are also becoming fairly frequent.
In recent years, two women came to represent the social fault lines that are being drawn and redrawn at the top—Sunanda Pushkar and Indrani Mukerjea. Although there were some similarities between their profiles, there was one very importance difference—Sunanda committed no crime while Indrani was accused of perpetrating a ghastly murder. But rather than go into the specifics of how the promise of each of their lives was cut short, I would like to comment on how they were regarded by society and the media while they were at the height of their powers, as also at the time when they fell. They were both photogenic, glamorous, self-made women from small towns. And this caused a lot of heartburn in urban Indian society especially among the Establishment types who saw them as interlopers and celebrated their downfall. Their ambition was held against them, more particularly because they were women.
The daughter of an army man, Lt Col P. N. Dass, Sunanda Pushkar graduated from a Srinagar college and worked for some time in the city before moving to Dubai. There, she joined an ad agency and soon became part of the city’s social circuit. She eventually founded her own event management company. Sunanda came to the Indian media’s attention as a result of her relationship with Shashi Tharoor, who was then a minister in the UPA government. Shashi is indisputably one of the brightest and most articulate of India’s politicians. His unlikely presence in politics—after a long stint as a diplomat—is also indicative of social change. Perhaps his not being from the old-school wink-wink, nudge-nudge brand of politics is one of the reasons why he so often finds himself in the middle of controversy. This time around however the charge was serious. Sunanda and he made the headlines when it was revealed that she had been given a stake in one of the cricket team franchises of the Indian Premier League (IPL).
The IPL grew out of post-liberalization India and displayed it
s best and worst characteristics—its energy and its dynamism, as well as the corruption and shallowness. The confluence of politics, film stars and big business within the organization went a long way towards creating one of the most successful and addictive brands the country had ever seen. Its success notwithstanding, the way it was financed, and the complex ownership patterns of its overt and proxy owners, made it the subject of a Supreme Court investigation.
Much like many of the stars of the new India, the IPL came to believe it was a country unto itself. This became evident to me when its founder—the brash and controversial Lalit Modi—and I had a row in 2009. In an interview, P. Chidambaram, the then home minister, told me that the IPL would need to rearrange its schedule that year because the security forces available were required for the imminent general elections. Modi refused, choosing instead to move the IPL out to South Africa. Modi believed me to be friendly with two men he deeply disliked in Indian politics—Chidambaram and Arun Jaitley. As a result, when he saw my report on the clash between the election dates and the cricket league schedule, he said I was prejudiced against him. A few years later it was he who would be confronted with a non-bailable warrant in the course of a money laundering investigation. But by then he had already made his home in London; his Instagram feed taunted his detractors with all the famous people he knew (including the former head of Interpol). His political friendships across party lines—Sushma Swaraj’s husband was his lawyer for many years, Sharad Pawar would meet him for lunch when in London, and Vasundhara Raje Scindia even signed a testimony in support of his application for asylum in the UK—would bring Parliament to a halt and exposed the incestuous web of networks and connections that held the IPL together. But back then, Modi was still the League’s big boss and his target was Tharoor. Modi was the first to accuse Shashi of holding sweat equity worth Rs 70 crore in the Kochi IPL team through Sunanda. Shashi and Sunanda dismissed the charges but the media would not let go of the controversy. Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, exacerbated the situation by quipping during an election rally in 2012 that Sunanda was Shashi’s ‘50 crore girlfriend’. Shashi retorted cuttingly that she was ‘priceless’. The BJP, which was then in the Opposition, began clamouring for Shashi’s resignation from government.
I reached out to Shashi for an interview to be able to present his point of view. After some cajoling and persuasion he did a live interview with me where he defended himself against the charges. He also ruled out resigning—this did not go down well with the party high command (read the Gandhis). Soon enough, Shashi was forced to step down as minister. As a result of this interview, and its consequences, my relationship with Sunanda and Shashi grew strained.
As time went by, we would sometimes meet at the occasional Delhi party and I got to know Sunanda socially. Our conversations were confined to polite nothings till she called me one day and told me that she wanted to go on television to speak on the debate over Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir. As a Kashmiri Pandit she wanted the special status of the state to be scrapped; by taking this position she was echoing the Opposition’s ideology and contradicting her husband’s stated position. I was impressed with her willingness to take an independent stand so publicly. I was also pleased that Sunanda, so long the object of unkind, sexist whispers, appeared to be coming into her own.
Less than a month after that television appearance on my show Sunanda phoned me in tears to talk about a domestic quarrel that she and her husband were having. She said that he was having an extramarital affair; she had moved out of her home into a Delhi hotel and was planning to file for divorce. It later transpired that I was one of the four-odd journalists she had reached out to that evening. Among other things she said she was going to go public with some unsavoury truths about the IPL scam. Reminding me of the interview on the IPL controversy that I had done with Shashi four years earlier, she alleged that in fact it was she who had been exploited and used as a front. She told me, ‘I know nothing about sports... I was made to take the flak for him.’
Sunanda was planning a press conference as a well as a meeting with the Congress president to reveal this. She had called to offer me the first interview. As a journalist I listened intently; the IPL scam was undoubtedly a legitimate story. But I was also uncomfortable. I worried that her judgement was being blurred by her emotional state. I was keen to separate what was a private matter of their marriage from what was genuinely newsworthy.
I tried to calm her down and told her that the interview could wait a day or two. I advised her to call a friend and not be alone. The next morning she and Shashi issued a brief statement claiming that all was well between them.
A day later Sunanda was dead. Although it was initially suspected that she died from an accidental overdose or suicide, her death became the subject of a murder investigation. The case got widespread media attention, some of it extraordinarily irresponsible. The coverage of this story—and so many others—was further illustration of all that was different about India now. Television studios had become trial courts pronouncing guilt and innocence and apportioning punishment to those they deemed guilty to the cheers of a bloodthirsty and impatient urban Indian audience that sought confirmation of its own prejudices on the nightly news. I gave a detailed written account of my conversation with Sunanda to the Delhi Police. I still have no idea how Sunanda died. All I’d like to say is that I thought that her untimely death was a sad end to someone who was trying to make something of her life.
The undoing of Sunanda was followed by that of another woman from society’s highest stratum, Indrani Mukerjea. Unlike Sunanda, I did not know Indrani at all. Born Pori Bora to a middle-class family in Guwahati, she first made the headlines when she married media tycoon Peter Mukerjea. Indrani’s success was cut short by extreme notoriety. She was jailed for the murder of her daughter Sheena—one of two children she had virtually disowned in her quest for a different life—only to reintroduce her many years later to the world as her younger sister. Before her fall—as dramatic and abrupt as her rise—she had been listed by the Wall Street Journal as one of ‘50 Women to Watch out For’—the power list, once again, being the ultimate aspiration of a society seeking to create a New Establishment. The crime Indrani was accused of was chilling. As more and more details emerged in the course of the investigation, in Indrani’s case that desire to find a place in high society appeared to have snuffed out all compassion. But what I would like to reiterate here is that the general comments that were made about her (in addition to those that pertained directly to the murder she was charged with) revealed the sexism and elitism in our society, just as they did when similar opinions were aired about Sunanda. Some things about the country have just not changed no matter how strong the churning within.
Two women. Two tragedies. Two cautionary tales. The bright lights of the new India sometimes cast the darkest shadows you could imagine.
VII
Between the controversies of Lalit Modi, Sunanda Pushkar and Indrani Mukerjea, there was little else on prime time news for months together, least of all the stories of India’s poor. India is home to more poor people than anywhere else in the world. One-third of the world’s poorest 1.2 billion people live in India where 1.4 million children die before their fifth birthday—making this the highest percentage in the world. Despite a reduction in the official poverty figures and an improvement in various human development indices, one in four children is still malnourished and 3,000 children die every day from poverty. This is the India that we would prefer not to see, the India that inconveniently comes in the way of slogans and news headlines of India Shining, India galloping forward, India being welcomed to exclusive clubs of the world’s rich and powerful nations.
In the summer of 2001, under the sun’s unrelenting heat, I travelled to the desert state of Rajasthan. I was headed to its southernmost corner, a wretchedly poor tribal area that almost never made it to the news. Travelling with me was a group of activists from an NGO who had petitioned In
dia’s Supreme Court for the Right to Food. They wanted the country’s enormous food stocks to be used to protect people from hunger and starvation. The strange paradox of plenty meant that millions of tonnes of grains would rot every year in railway yards and government warehouses. Yet millions would go to sleep hungry. India produced more than enough food to feed all her people but poor procurement, inefficient distribution, infrastructure constraints in supply chains and the lack of purchasing power in families that lived below the poverty line had resulted in a man-made catastrophe of mass malnourishment.
How to define ‘hunger’ and where to draw the poverty line had become the subject of ferocious political and academic debates. No state was ready to admit the inconvenient truth of ‘starvation deaths’ taking place on their watch. Mortalities were routinely blamed on diseases like diarrhoea, tuberculosis and pneumonia or a host of pandemics, conveniently sidestepping the truth of what more nutrients on the table may have done to save the lives of those grappling with innocuous viral infections.
Here in Rajasthan, in the village of Mewar ka Matt, ‘luxury’ was a word from an alien language. We were here because every day for the past few days one child had died from an undiagnosed fever— eleven children had already died. The NGO had forced a reluctant team of government doctors to come and help a people in distress. As the rickety jeep in which the doctors were travelling crunched to a halt at the last motorable point and the dry dust swirled up in clouds of muddy grey, two women peered curiously at us from behind their ghunghats. They weren’t used to visitors; no one from the city ever came here.