Of late, though, Democracy’s timings have been changed. It’s strictly office hours now, nine to five. No overtime. No sleepovers. No matter from how far people have come, no matter if they have no shelter in the city, if they don’t leave by 6 p.m. they are forcibly dispersed, by the police if necessary, with batons and water canons if things get out of hand. The new timings were ostensibly instituted to make sure that the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi would go smoothly. But nobody’s expecting the old timings back any time soon. Maybe it’s in the fitness of things that what’s left of our democracy should be traded in for an event that was created to celebrate the British Empire. Perhaps it’s only right that nearly 400,000 people should have been driven out of the city and many seen their homes demolished.3 Or that hundreds of thousands of roadside vendors should have had their livelihoods snatched away by order of the Supreme Court so city malls could take over their share of business.4 And that tens of thousands of beggars should have been shipped out of the city while more than a hundred thousand galley slaves were shipped in to build the flyovers, metro tunnels, Olympic-size swimming pools, warm-up stadiums and luxury housing for athletes.5 The Old Empire may not exist. But obviously our tradition of servility has become too profitable an enterprise to dismantle.
I was at Jantar Mantar in spring 2010 because a thousand pavement dwellers from cities all over the country had come to demand a few fundamental rights: the right to shelter, to food (ration cards), to life (protection from police brutality and criminal extortion by municipal officers).
The sun was sharp that day, but still civilized. This is a terrible thing to have to say, but it’s true—you could smell the protest from a fair distance: it was the accumulated odour of a thousand human bodies that had been dehumanized, denied the basic necessities for human (or even animal) health and hygiene for years, if not a whole lifetime. Bodies that had been marinated in the refuse of our big cities, bodies that had no shelter from the harsh weather, no access to clean water, clean air, sanitation or medical care. No part of this great country, none of the supposedly progressive schemes, no single urban institution has been designed to accommodate them. Not the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, not any other slum development, employment guarantee or welfare scheme. Not even the sewage system—they shit on top of it. They are shadow people, who live in the cracks that run between schemes and institutions. They sleep on the streets, eat on the streets, make love on the streets, give birth on the streets, are raped on the streets, cut their vegetables, wash their clothes, raise their children, live and die on the streets.
If the motion picture were an art form that involved the olfactory senses—in other words, if cinema smelled—then films like Slumdog Millionaire would not win Oscars. The stench of that kind of poverty wouldn’t blend with the aroma of warm popcorn.
The people at the protest in Jantar Mantar that day were not even slum dogs, they were pavement dwellers. Who were they? Where had they come from? They were the refugees of India Shining, the people who are being sloshed around like toxic effluent in a manufacturing process that has gone berserk. The representatives of the estimated sixty million people who have been displaced by rural destitution, by slow starvation, by floods and drought (many of them man-made), by mines, steel factories and aluminium smelters, by highways and expressways, by the 3300 big dams built since Independence, and now by special economic zones (SEZs). They’re part of the 836 million people of India who live on less than twenty rupees a day, the ones who starve while millions of tonnes of food grain is either eaten by rats in government warehouses or burnt in bulk (because it’s cheaper to burn food than to distribute it to poor people).6 They’re the parents of the tens of millions of malnourished children in our country, of the 1.5 million who die every year before they reach their first birthday.7 They’re the millions who make up the chain gangs that are transported from city to city to build the New India. Is this what is known as ‘enjoying the fruits of modern development’?
What must they think, these people, about a government that sees fit to spend 240 billion rupees of public money (the initial estimate was 4 billion rupees) for a two-week-long sports extravaganza which, for fear of terrorism, malaria, dengue and New Delhi’s new superbug, many international athletes have refused to attend?8 Which the Queen of England, titular head of the Commonwealth, would not consider presiding over, not even in her most irresponsible dreams. What must they think of the fact that enormous sums of money has been stolen and salted away by politicians and Games officials? Not much, I guess. Because for people who live on less than twenty rupees a day, money on that scale must seem like science fiction. Maybe it doesn’t occur to them that it’s their money. That’s why corrupt politicians in India never have a problem sweeping back into power, using the money they stole to buy elections. (Then they feign outrage and ask, ‘Why don’t the Maoists stand for elections?’)
Standing at Jantar Mantar on that bright day, I thought of all the struggles that are being waged by people in this country—against big dams in the Narmada Valley, Polavaram, Arunachal Pradesh; against mines in Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand; against the police by the adivasis of Lalgarh; against the grabbing of their lands for industries and special economic zones all over the country. How many years and in how many ways have people fought to avoid just such a fate? I thought of Maase, Narmada, Roopi, Niti, Mangtu, Madhav, Saroja, Raju, Gudsa Usendi and Comrade Kamla with their guns slung over their shoulders. I thought of the great dignity of the forest I had so recently walked in and the rhythm of the adivasi drums at the Bhumkal celebration in Bastar, like the soundtrack of the quickening pulse of a furious nation.
HIGHWAY TO PARADIP, KEONJHAR, ORISSA 2005
Red dust fills your nostrils and lungs. The water is red, the air is red, the people are red, their lungs and hair are red. All day and all night trucks rumble through their villages, bumper to bumper, thousands and thousands of trucks, taking ore to Paradip port from where it will go to China. There it will turn into cars and smoke and sudden cities that spring up overnight.
PROTEST AGAINST BODHGHAT DAM, DANDAKARANYA, 2010
More than 60 million people have been displaced by rural destitution, by slow starvation, by floods and drought, by mines, steel factories and aluminium smelters, by highways and expressways, by the 3300 big dams built since Independence and now by special economic zones.
I thought of Padma with whom I travelled to Warangal. She’s only in her thirties, but she has to hold the banister and drag her body behind her when she walks up stairs. She was arrested just a week after she had had an appendix operation. She was beaten until she had an internal haemorrhage and severe organ damage. When they cracked her knees, the police explained helpfully that it was to make sure ‘she would never walk in the jungle again’. She was released after serving an eight-year sentence. Now she runs the Amarula Bandhu Mithrula Sangham, the Committee of Relatives and Friends of Martyrs. It retrieves the bodies of people killed in fake encounters. Padma spends her time crisscrossing northern Andhra Pradesh in whatever transport she can find, usually a tractor, transporting the corpses of people whose parents or spouses are too poor to make the journey to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones.
The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary. Whether people are fighting to overthrow the Indian State or fighting against Big Dams or only fighting a particular steel plant or mine or SEZ, the bottom line is that they are fighting for their dignity, for the right to live and smell like human beings. They’re fighting because, as far as they’re concerned, ‘the fruits of modern development’ stink like dead cattle on the highway.
~
On the sixty-third anniversary of India’s Independence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh climbed into his bullet-proof soap box in the Red Fort to deliver a passionless, bone-chillingly banal speech to the nation. Listeni
ng to him, who would have guessed that he was addressing a country that, despite having the second highest economic growth rate in the world, has more poor people in just eight of its states than in the twenty-six countries of sub-Saharan Africa put together?9 ‘All of you have contributed to India’s success,’ he said.
The hard work of our workers, our artisans, our farmers has brought our country to where it stands today … We are building a new India in which every citizen would have a stake, an India which would be prosperous and in which all citizens would be able to live a life of honour and dignity in an environment of peace and goodwill. An India in which all problems could be solved through democratic means. An India in which the basic rights of every citizen would be protected.10
Some would call this graveyard humour. He might as well have been speaking to people in Finland or Sweden.
If our prime minister’s reputation for ‘personal integrity’ extended to the text of his speeches, this is what he should have said:
Brothers and sisters, greetings to you on this day on which we remember our glorious past. Things are getting a little expensive, I know, and you keep complaining about food prices. But look at it this way—more than 650 million of you are engaged in and are living off agriculture as farmers and farm labour, but your combined efforts contribute less than 18 per cent of our GDP. So what’s the use of you? Look at our IT sector. It employs 0.2 per cent of the population and earns us 5 per cent of our national income.11 Can you match that? It is true that employment hasn’t kept pace with growth in our country, but fortunately more than 60 per cent of our workforce is self-employed.12 Ninety per cent of our labour force is employed by the unorganized sector.13 True, they manage to get work only for a few months in the year, but since we don’t have a category called ‘underemployed’ we just keep that part a little vague. It would not be right to enter them in our books as unemployed. Coming to the statistics that say we have among the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world, we should unite as a nation and ignore bad news for the time being. We can address these problems later, after our Trickledown Revolution, when the health sector has been completely privatized. Meanwhile, I hope you are all buying medical insurance. As for the fact that the per capita food grain availability actually decreased during the period of some of our most rapid economic growth—believe me, that’s just a coincidence.14
My fellow citizens, we are building a new India in which our 100 richest people hold assets worth one fourth of our GDP.15 Wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands is always more efficient. You have all heard the saying that too many cooks spoil the broth. We want our beloved billionaires, our few hundred millionaires, their near and dear ones and their political and business associates, to be prosperous and to live a life of honour and dignity in an environment of peace and goodwill in which their basic rights are protected.16
I am aware that my dreams cannot come true by solely using democratic means. In fact, I have come to believe that real democracy flows through the barrel of a gun. This is why we have deployed the army, the police, the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Pradeshik Armed Constabulary, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, the Eastern Frontier Rifles—as well as the Scorpions, Greyhounds and Cobras––to crush the misguided insurrections that are erupting in our mineral-rich areas.
Our experiments with democracy began in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. Kashmir, I need not reiterate, is an integral part of India. We have deployed more than half a million soldiers to bring democracy to the people there. The Kashmiri youth who have been risking their lives by defying curfew and throwing stones at the police for the last two months are Lashkar-e-Taiba militants who actually want employment, not azadi. Tragically, sixty of them lost their lives before we could study their job applications. I have instructed the police from now on to shoot to maim rather than kill these misguided youths.
In his seven years in office, Manmohan Singh has allowed himself to be cast as Sonia Gandhi’s tentative, mild-mannered underling. It’s an excellent disguise for a man who, for the last twenty years, first as finance minister and then as prime minister, has powered through a regime of new economic policies that has brought India into the situation in which it finds itself now. This is not to suggest that Manmohan Singh is not an underling. Only that all his orders don’t come from Sonia Gandhi. In his autobiography, A Prattler’s Tale, Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, tells his story of how Manmohan Singh rose to power.17 In 1991, when India’s foreign exchange reserves were dangerously low, the P.V. Narasimha Rao government approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for an emergency loan. The IMF agreed on two conditions. The first was structural adjustment and economic reform. The second was the appointment of a finance minister of its choice. That man, says Mitra, was Manmohan Singh.
Over the years, Singh has stacked his cabinet and the bureaucracy with people who are evangelically committed to the corporate takeover of everything—water, electricity, minerals, agriculture, land, telecommunications, education, health—no matter what the consequences.
Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma—and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The most recent example of this is the rally that was organized for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was a ‘soldier’ for the tribal people.18 He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite giri—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this ‘soldier’ for the tribal people looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the ‘Two Indias’—the ‘Rich India’ and the ‘Poor India’—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with this fact, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.)
The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base, and win elections to keep the charade of democracy going, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats, politicians. They in turn are run like prize racehorses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.
A senior member of the coven is P. Chidambaram, who some say is so popular with the Opposition that he may continue to be home minister even if the Congress were to lose the next election. That’s probably just as well. He may need a few extra years in office to complete the task he has been assigned. But it doesn’t matter if he stays or goes. The die has been rolled.
In a lecture at Harvard, his old university, in October 2007, Chidambaram outlined that task. The lecture was called ‘Poor Rich Countries: The Challenges of Development’.19 He called the first three decades after Independence the ‘lost decades’ and exulted about the GDP growth rate which has grown an average of 6.9 per cent annually in the years 2000 to 2007. What he said is important enough for me to inflict a chunk of his charmless prose on you:
TOXIC EFFLUENTS IN THE EARTH, DAMANJODI, ORISSA
The financial value of the bauxite deposits
of Orissa alone is 4 trillion dollars (much more than twice India’s gross domestic product) ... Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7 per cent.
TOXIC AIR, DAMANJODI, ORISSA
There is no environmentally sustainable way of mining bauxite and processing it into aluminium. It’s a highly toxic process that most Western countries have exported out of their own environments.
One would have thought that the challenge of development—in a democracy—will become less formidable as the economy cruises on a high growth path. The reality is the opposite. Democracy—rather, the institutions of democracy—and the legacy of the socialist era have actually added to the challenge of development.
Let me explain with some examples.India’s mineral resources include coal—the fourth largest reserves in the world—iron ore, manganese, mica, bauxite, titanium ore, chromite, diamonds, natural gas, petroleum, and limestone. Commonsense tells us that we should mine these resources quickly and efficiently. That requires huge capital, efficient organizations and a policy enviroment that will allow market forces to operate. None of these factors is present today in the mining sector. The laws in this behalf are outdated and Parliament has been able to only tinker at the margins. Our efforts to attract private investment in prospecting and mining have, by and large, failed. Meanwhile, the sector remains virtually captive in the hands of the State governments. Opposing any change in the status quo are groups that espouse—quite legitimately—the cause of the forests or the environment or the tribal population. There are also political parties that regard mining as a natural monopoly of the State and have ideological objections to the entry of the private sector. They garner support from the established trade unions. Behind the unions—either known or unknown to them—stand the trading mafia. The result: actual investment is low, the mining sector grows at a tardy pace and it acts as a drag on the economy.
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