A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  A year later Sainath toured nine drought-stricken states in India, and recalls ruefully, “That’s when I learned that conventional journalism was above all about the service of power. You always give the last word to authority. I got a couple of prizes which I didn’t pick up because I was ashamed.”

  Ten years later Sainath’s moment came. “The economic ‘reforms’ began. That’s when the great intellectual shift took place.” Just as the US press romped ever deeper into celebrity journalism as the war on the poor unfurled through the 1980s and ’90s, so too the Indian press plunged into full-tilt coverage of India’s beautiful people. “I felt that if the Indian press was covering the top 5 percent, I should cover the bottom 5 percent.”

  He quit Blitz and in 1993 applied for a Times of India fellowship. At the interview he spoke of his plans to report from rural India—terra incognita to the national Indian press. An editor asked him, “Suppose I tell you my readers aren’t interested in this stuff.” Sainath, a feisty fellow, riposted, “When did you last meet your readers to make any such claims on their behalf?”

  He got the fellowship and took to the back roads in the ten poorest districts of five states. He walked hundreds of miles. The Times had said it would carry a few pieces. He had two good editors there who supported what he was doing. In the end the paper ran eighty-four reports by Sainath across eighteen months, many of them subsequently reprinted in his well-known collection, Everybody Loves a Good Drought. They made his journalistic name and earned him a bundle of prizes, both national and international. The prizes furnished him credibility and also money to go on freelancing.

  In those days, Sainath remembers, the legitimacy of the “neoliberal reforms” that plunged India’s peasantry into the inferno “was very great, like religious dogma. But I was getting 300 letters a month from people applauding and ratifying my reports as well as sending money for the people I was writing about. It was very moving. I learned that readers are far ahead of editors. I was saying that poverty is not natural, but a willed infliction. I asked, what are the survival tactics of the poor? I saw that the Indian woman eats last. She feeds her husband, her children, the parents, and then if there’s anything left she eats that. I learned how the poor lived off the forests. I did what they did. If they migrated and got up on top of a train, so did I.”

  For hundreds of millions of poor Indians, the brave new world of the ’90s meant globalization of prices, Indianization of incomes. “As we moved to fortify our welfare state for the wealthy, the state turned its back on the poor, investment in agriculture collapsed, and with it, countless millions of lives. As banks wound down rural credit while granting loans for buying Mercedes Benzes in the cities at the lowest imaginable interest rates, rural indebtedness soared. In the ’90s, for the first time in independent India the Supreme Court pulled up several state governments over increasing hunger deaths. Welcome to the world so loved by the Friedmans—Thomas and Milton.”

  From the mid-’90s on, thousands of Indian farmers committed suicide, including over 5,000 in the single southern state of Andhra Pradesh. As employment crashed in the countryside to its lowest ever, distress migrations from the villages—to just about anywhere—increased in tens of millions.

  Food grain available per Indian fell almost every year in the 1990s and by 2002–3 was less than it had been at the time of the great Bengal famine of 1942–3. Even as the world hailed the Indian Tiger Economy, the country slipped to rank 127 (from 124) in the United Nations Human Development Index of 2003. It is better to be a poor person in Botswana, or even the occupied territories of Palestine, than one in India.

  Few journalists write well about poor people, particularly the rural poor, who have mostly vanished from public description or discussion. Reporters tend to patronize them. The drama is really about the journalist visiting the poor (whose categories include several hundred million Indians, ranging from destitute itinerants to small farmers crucified by debt). Interviewing the poor as they reel off numbers from the balance sheet of their misfortunes takes concentration. The devil, in recent years often meaning suicides, is in details that have to be got right: inputs per acres, sources of irrigation, market price for crops.

  These numbers have to be jotted down in the fields, often in temperatures upward of 110F, and even 118F (47.7C) in the fields, at which point all electronic equipment gives up.

  It’s necessary to keep good records. When we visited the family of a dalit (i.e., an untouchable), Sainath gave me the standard form he has designed and fills out for the 300 or so families he’s personally visited after a suicide. Name: T. T. Johny, aged forty-three. Date of suicide: July 9, 2004. Debt: 60,000 rupees. (Exchange rates: in March and April of 2005: $1 US traded for about 42 rupees. In the Mumbai slums a bucket of water sells for 5 rupees, about 12 cents. One thousand rupees exchange for about $24. So T. T. Johny’s debt was c. $1,430.) Family members: one wife, one daughter. Land: one acre. Cattle: none. Crop seed changes …, Sources of credit …, Source of irrigation: no well. Input per acre …

  Sainath respects the people he writes about. On first encounter, he makes a point of drinking the glass of water they put in front of him, no matter how cloudy or suspect in origin. He cares about them, stays in touch with them, tries to get them money. He doesn’t see poverty as a “condition,” but as the consequence of decisions by people, businessmen, politicians, World Bank officials, economists ensconced in some distant Institute for Development Studies. He sees poor people as intelligent actors, well aware of the instigators of their misery, marshalling their tiny resources in the daily search for work and food.

  Nothing could be further from Oxfam portfolios than Sainath’s photographs of his subjects in the Indian countryside, which he recently took with him on a speaking tour in the US and which he is preparing for displays across India. These photographs don’t have the slightly stagy drama of, say, a portfolio from Salgado, but they have twenty times more insight and respect. Rural work is hard to photograph. Take California. Have you ever seen a good photograph of a celery cutter in the Pajaro Valley, or a limonero on his ladder picking lemons around Santa Paula near Oxnard, or a palmero, a date picker, near the Salton Sea?

  The American documentarists of the ’30s opted for cartoon stereotypes, preferring the easier and less seditious task of presenting migrants as inert victims. You can see from her contact sheet that Dorothea Lange chose the most beaten-down image of the famous migrant mother. It was Lange, so the contact sheets show, who herded children around the woman (actually 100 percent Cherokee), to make it look as though she was burdened with a vast brood, and who passed over more animated images of the same woman.

  Sainath’s subjects always look alive and even cheerful. They are still significant actors in the larger political drama being fought out in India today. In the US most of the Farm Security Administration’s photographers of the 1930s preferred despondency to defiance. Were there no Okie camps with laughing children? Of course there were, but Walker Evans didn’t circle those images on his contact sheets, though I’m told the Farm Security Administration has a bunch of color photos of migrants on file it would be worth inspecting.

  March 27

  Off to Agra (250km) and the early palaces and mausoleums of the Mughals. We hurtle along in a small Tata car, with Sainath’s friend JP, Jayaprakash, and a driver. Rural roadside Indian flashes by. The north Indian landscape here is flat, with wheat sheaves stacked. Everything looks half built and half ruined. Vespas and small motorbikes carry the male driver, with a woman and one child pillion. There’s often another child up front on the handlebars. The saris are like glorious butterflies everywhere one looks. On we go towards Fatehpur Sikri along the narrow road carrying buses and all bound for India’s premier tourist attraction.

  We get a flat and while we’re getting it fixed by a fellow with a compressor at the side of the road, there’s a crash as a 2000 Ambassador (India’s warhorse diesel sedan, looking a bit like a ’54 Pontiac) tries and fails to
squeeze through two tractors. We see it forty yards down the road with its side bashed in. It’s the only metal carcass I see, which is astounding because Indian driving is entirely terrifying, and I have strong nerves in this department. I have a photograph of our car overtaking a bus in the narrow main street of a small town, and ahead of us, rapidly approaching, another car, overtaking a truck. This is standard.

  Akbar’s Fatehpur palace is a marvel in sandstone, like a Utah landscape conjured into sixteenth-century Mughal architecture, robust, imperial, yet delicate. It’s certainly one of the most beautiful palace complexes I have seen, without the endless dreary frontages of Vienna or Versailles, with graceful little temples and pools and then vast colonnades, with parasol-like pavilion roofs lightening the rooflines.

  Off to Agra town for lunch before our visit to the Taj Mahal. We go to a vegetarian restaurant, thali-style. Sainath spots a publisher looking patriarchal with his family. He wrote a style book. I hope he defended the semi-colon and other cherished values of an age now gone.

  Over lunch we start talking about the whole acrid debate about the consequences of British rule. Sainath cites the Madras-based economist C. T. Kurien (in Global Capitalism and the Indian Economy, 1994) on one consequence of the American Civil War. Later I look it up in Sainath’s copy.

  The rapidly growing cotton textile industry of Britain had initially depended upon raw cotton from its colonies in America, but after these colonies declared themselves to be the United States of America, British industry lost the power to get cotton on its terms. Subsequently, the Civil War in the United States resulted in a sudden interruption in the supply of cotton to Britain and a frantic search started for an alternative and more dependable source. Demand for cotton from India suddenly shot up; the export of cotton from India to Britain increased from around 500,000 bales in 1859 to close to 1,400,000 bales in 1864.

  From then on the commercialization of agriculture continued to gain momentum: between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, when food production in India declined by 7 percent, production of commercial crops increased by 85 percent. There was, consequently, some increase in overall agricultural production, but a growing population could not use the commercial crops as food. Widespread and recurring famines became a regular feature during this period. However, those who had the land and other facilities to take advantage of the demand for commercial crops must have become much wealthier. Capitalism was performing its role of enriching some and impoverishing many.

  In other words, the Civil War helped install recurring starvation on the Indian calendar.

  March 28

  We head towards the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan for the dearest of his wives, Arjumand Banu Begum, whom he married in 1612 and who died bearing their fourteenth child in 1631. Shah Jahan took it hard, remaining in seclusion for two years and emerging with spectacles and gray hair. He spent twenty years supervising the construction of the Taj Mahal, joining her in the mausoleum thirty-five years later, having been imprisoned for a number of years by his son, Aurangzeb.

  There’s a split rate for Indians and foreigners, which seems sensible: 15 rupees for the former and 110 (about $2.60) for the latter. The crowds are large, but without the air of sullen resignation, amplified by the gross corpulence, conspicuous in American crowds in Disney World and other attractions. The children are mostly cheerful and the mothers animated. In all my journeys I saw neither a really fat Indian nor a skeletal one, of the sort enshrined in Oxfam posters, even though we later visited several homes with families so poor that the man of the house had killed himself from shame at the inability to pay off his debts to the banks and to moneylenders. As Sainath stresses, though you can see emaciation in the slums of Mumbai, most hunger is invisible and has been swelling since liberalization began in the early ’90s. Sixty-seven percent of Indian kids are malnourished.

  I’ve never cared for the Taj Mahal, depicted on the biscuit tins of my childhood. And after seeing Akbar’s first palace compound at Fatehpur Sikri, I feel this more strongly. Kitsch is emotional blackmail and the Taj Mahal, blaring Shah Jahan’s bereavement, seems to me the very essence of kitsch. Part of the problem is Shah Jahan’s snobbery about red sandstone. Both here and a mile up river at the Fort he ordered white marble, and in the case of the Taj Mahal the result is a sort of airless sterility. The manic symmetry amplifies this. Also, the Taj Mahal is just too big.

  On the way home Sainath starts reminiscing about Karanjia, the famous owner of Blitz. Karanjia was an owner-editor who plied his trade with élan. At the dawn of the Cuban revolution he traveled to Havana where the new government took him to be the new Indian ambassador and, gratified with such diplomatic recognition, gave Karanjia the red carpet, including an interview with Fidel. Finally, after three weeks, Karanjia disclosed that he was not the ambassador but a journalist and there was a momentary chill, soon dispelled.

  For Karanjia, said Sainath, impact was everything. Blitz’s stories had sizzle and the phones burned with powerful people howling libel threats down the lines. Death threats came too, in such profusion that reporters would solemnly request the callers to postpone their homicidal visits for a day or two owing to the length of the line of people preparing to exact retribution. The Hindu fundamentalists in Shiv Sena (Shiva’s Army) got mad enough one time at a slur in the humor column that they sent a mob from out of town to burn three of Blitz’s delivery vehicles and break office windows. Karanjia was away at the time and Sainath, who’d let the humor column through without reading it, quaked at news of his return.

  When he saw his burned trucks Karanjia trumpeted his dismay and Sainath, taking full responsibility, was under heavy fire until Karanjia noticed Blitz’s business manager, an elderly Parsee, looking undismayed. So, Karanjia asked him, were the trucks insured? No, said the manager, still calm. Then the glorious truth came out. The trucks had been rented from the local Shiv Sena outfit, whose capo soon appeared at Blitz’s office distraught at his dilemma. He could not, he told Karanjia, get compensation from the arsonists since they had been sent from out of town by Shiv Sena’s supreme commander. Karanjia told him he could offer no satisfaction.

  Sometime in the late ’60s a guru made the rounds of India, saying that his spiritual powers enabled him to walk on water. And so he could—with the assistance of a German engineer who had designed a tank with a span of fiberglass rope just under the surface, along which the guru would pace, to the amazement of the rubes.

  Karanjia announced that Blitz would sponsor a demonstration by the water-walking guru in a local auditorium. He ordered an extra big tank to be fabricated. Seeing trouble ahead, the German engineer made a prudent exit. In front of an excited crowd the guru faltered to Karanjia that the commotion was impinging on his powers and diluting the cosmic forces. “You’ll walk on water or I’ll break your legs,” Karanjia shouted. The trembling guru stepped off the edge of the tank and sank like a stone. When he’d dried off, Karanjia told him to try again. Once again the guru stepped and sank, and then fled into the night. Karanjia’s staff worried that the crowd would want its money back but Karanjia wouldn’t hear of it. “They have had their money’s worth,” he crowed. “They’re happy.”

  We bowled along, hooting at the antics and impostures of gurus and fakirs, from the Maharaji on. Only months ago, JP and Sainath told me, an up-and-coming swami, Sri-Sri Ravisander, had headed into southern Tamil Nadu, vowing to project his spiritual powers to those afflicted by the tsunami of December 26, 2004, and soothe the cosmic forces. The bigwigs of the local town assembled to greet the great mystic. But as his cavalcade of seventy cars rolled south along the highway down the coast of Coromandel, some subversive wag raised the cry that a second tsunami, even more immense in destructive potential than the first, was just over the horizon. The swami made a quick estimate of his powers versus those of the cosmic forces and ordered his car to turn round. The road was narrow, and the ensuing jam very terrible to behold as Sri-Sri Ravi
sanker tried to beat a retreat.

  March 28

  At 9.30 p.m. JP, Sainath, and I head for Jwaharlal Nehru University for my big talk. They drive round the campus reminiscing about the good old days when they hosted Iranian students protesting the Shah’s visit and JP managed to get onto the roof of the car behind the Shah’s. The next day JP brings a black and white photo and there he is, a blurry, bearded protester. I ask why the police didn’t beat him to death with their lathis—bamboo staves—and he said that they circled him and began to whack away, but the staves clashed above his body, as in a cartoon, and he was able to roll away and flee.

  The venue is the mess hall of one of the hostels. At ten Sainath gives me a generous intro and I’m off on my scheduled talk, “War on Iraq, War in America.” I go at it for about an hour, throwing everything into the pot, from Judith Miller to Abu Ghraib, to the failures of the American left. It goes down well, and questions are vigorous including from a fellow who asks about the neocons and their origins in a Trotskyite groupuscule headed by Shachtman. I confirm the story and the questioner, obviously a Maoist, grins with knowing approval. The Trotskyites furrow their brows.

  April 2

  After a few more days in Delhi and Mumbai we fly to the southwest, land in Tamil Nadu and drive over the state line into Kerala to visit a Coca-Cola plant blockaded by peasants since it has destroyed their water supplies. Then we head on down into Kerala, ending up in Khozikode, aka Calicut (a few miles from where Vasco da Gama made landfall in 1498), where I give a press conference under the aegis of Mathrubhumi, the million-plus circulation newspaper daily, published in Kerala’s language, Malayalam (spoken by seventy million).