Recasting India

by Hindol Sengupta

  In 2008, Chouhan, 52, who is the son of a poor farmer and who won a gold medal in philosophy for his master’s degree, made one of his greatest moves in agriculture by giving a Rs 100 bonus per quintal of wheat procured above and apart from the central government–determined minimum support price. This was raised in 2013 to Rs 150.

  Chouhan’s agriculture production commissioner Madan Mohan Upadhyay explains it best.

  “He is a hardcore farmer,” says Upadhyay. “He came in with a pure focus—most people work in agriculture in this state, so growth has to be agriculture driven first and then expand to industry.”

  Even in farmer suicides, although Madhya Pradesh is among the top five states according to the National Crime Record Bureau, statistics show that the number of such cases has been steadily falling in the state. The bureau records that farmer suicides fell by 8 percent between 2009 and 2010 due to the sharp fall in two states—Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

  In 2012–2013, Madhya Pradesh beat Bihar to become the fastest-growing major Indian state according to data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The state grew 14.28 percent in agriculture (at a time when overall agricultural growth in India has been growing at the level of barely 3 percent a year for the last three decades), and its state gross domestic product (GSDP) grew by 10.02 percent. In 2011–2012, Bihar topped the charts with 13.26 percent GSDP growth, and Madhya Pradesh came second at 11.81 percent, but in 2012–2013, Bihar’s GSDP growth fell to 9.48 percent. Per capita income in Madhya Pradesh rose by 8.69 percent in 2012–2013.

  In fact, surrounded by deeply indebted states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, Madhya Pradesh’s net debt as a percentage of GSDP has fallen to 21.7 percent from 33 percent in the last six years, while percentage of interest payment as a percentage of revenue receipts has reduced from 15 percent to 9 percent in the last six years.

  This performance is no fluke. In 2010–2011, agriculture in Madhya Pradesh grew by 9 percent. In 2009–2010, when the state got 35 percent less rainfall than usual, agrarian growth was still 7.2 percent. In the same period, industrial growth was one of the highest in India at 10.1 percent, though from a smaller base since 80 percent of the people still work in agriculture.

  The chief minister says he had a long-term strategy when he started by focusing on agriculture. “If you look at history, the development has always happened first and most expansively at coastal areas, with ports like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bengal, but we are a landlocked state. So what do we do?

  “So focus on agriculture first. Our aim is to become the wheat bowl of the country, why should it only be Punjab? As I keep telling people, take wheat from us, we are centrally located and therefore it is easier to transport to any area in India. We are a natural road transport hub. And if we produce a lot of food, it is a win-win for the whole country because food can be transported to any part quickly from the center.”

  Madan Mohan Upadhyay, who was also the former health secretary of the state, says he understood the chief minister’s mindset when, in one of the first meetings, Chouhan, the father of two sons, described how in his childhood village he saw women struggling and even dying in childbirth. From that gruesome experience was born his innovative policy decision to start a Janani Express—a helpline in every district of Madhya Pradesh, where any woman about to give birth could call for a government ambulance to fetch her to the nearest hospital.

  Chief Secretary R. Parasuram says the chief minister draws his policies deeply from his personal experiences. “This is why you will never see him in denial about female infanticide in MP (and why one of the biggest schemes of the government is on female infanticide).”

  Madhya Pradesh is one of the worst offenders in declining sex ratio. This happens in India because some girl children are killed by parents in the womb or shortly after birth. One of the parents’ main fears is the dowry that would have to be paid to a groom’s family during the marriage of a daughter. That’s why Chouhan has also started a scheme where he plays father of the bride in mass weddings organized by the state for poor girls, who are given Rs 15,000 when they get married. The chief minister himself gives them away, often at a scale of thousands in one go. This is one of the reasons why he has earned the nickname “Mamu” or maternal uncle in the state since giving away the bride is often a role played by maternal uncles in the absence of the father.

  The chief minister says that for him policy starts at home. “Most people don’t know that I have nine adopted daughters.”

  Some of the biggest beneficiaries of these schemes are farmers since villages have the highest rates of female infanticide and lack of hospital facilities—and so once again agriculture gets empowered in the state.

  His efforts have won Madhya Pradesh the national agriculture prize, the Krishi Karman Samman, twice in a row. In 2012–2013, Madhya Pradesh produced 27.7 million metric tons (30.5 million short tons) of grain, including 16.1 million metric tons (17.75 million short tons) of wheat. Madhya Pradesh now contributes 11.2 percent of India’s total food grain production, 17.5 percent of India’s total wheat production and 28.65 percent of its total pulses production. Madhya Pradesh surpassed other prominent agricultural states in India including Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Bihar in the category of states producing over 10 million metric tons (11.02 million short tons) of food grain in every aspect from production of grains to increase in yield.

  “We wanted to prove that agriculture—which everyone seems to have given up on in India—can be reinvented. There can be a business model in agriculture too,” Chouhan told me. “To do this, I began to rethink farming as a sustainable and growing, very profitable business which has maximum community impact and every farmer as a single business unit, as a successful social entrepreneur.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE NOT UNTOUCHABLES

  Kalpana Saroj was 15 years old, or perhaps 16—she does not accurately remember—when she drank three bottles of pesticide. It would, she hoped, do exactly what she wanted: kill her.

  For 24 hours Saroj, who now owns a Rs 250 crore ($42 million) empire that stretches from sugar to real estate to industrial pipes to movies, seemed to have slipped into a coma even as doctors at the local hospital near her native Roperkheda village in Vidarbha, the drought-ridden heart of the western state of Maharashtra, struggled to wash the poison out of her stomach. Then, just as suddenly and beating tremendous odds, she began to awaken.

  She was only 15, but by that time she had been married, abused and tortured. She had spent nearly two years waking up every morning at 4:00 a.m. and working nearly nonstop apart from short breaks for meals and a bath (sometimes not even that) till midnight. She did not mind the cooking or the cleaning. Nor the hours of washing clothes.

  But her husband’s family kept chickens. Those cages would be full of chicken shit. “I had never seen such filth. The smell was horrible. I would vomit several times while trying to clean them,” remembers Saroj.

  Her police constable father had sent her to school until Class 10; he had hoped she would, even after marriage, be able to go to college. “He never wanted me to get married so early,” says Saroj, now 53, who speaks fast, and starts answering before questions are completed. It is as if, decades after it all happened, the torture is embedded and alive, and sometimes even kicking.

  She speaks casually, with only the slightly unnatural speed perhaps giving away the old pain, and every now and again there is a small pause as she stops to force herself to remember. During those months, she was given food only once or twice a day; often the smell of the chicken pens so nauseated her that she could not eat for days.

  One day, about two years after her marriage, Saroj’s father came to see her. “He was shocked. He had never seen me so shattered. He told my in-laws, ‘I married off my daughter, I did not sell her into slavery,’ ” says Saroj. That day she returned to her father’s house.

  A new ordeal began. “I was a Dalit
girl who had already broken her marriage. It was the biggest curse,” says Saroj. Dalit literally means “oppressed” in Hindi. In the Hindu system of caste, the origins of which are disputed but whose poisonous effects have continued for centuries, for many Indians, Dalits are literally untouchables. They make up around 16 percent of the Indian population but have traditionally remained the lowest rung of society (the highest were the Brahmins). The Brahmins and other upper castes would not accept either food or water from the hand of a Dalit. They would not visit the homes of Dalits and would not invite a Dalit to their home. My grandmother had a phrase for the impossible situation that Dalits faced in the old days—Bamnar aage hathleo dosh, pore hathleo dosh. It means there is a problem if you walk before the Brahmin and there is a problem if you walk behind the Brahmin. It was meant to suggest the absolute farcical hopelessness of a situation. The Dalit could not walk in front of the Brahmin because an untouchable did not dare to be in front of the priestly caste—nor could the Dalit walk behind the Brahmin because he risked stepping on the shadow of the Brahmin, which was utterly unthinkable.

  Even today in parts of India, the punishment meted out to an “errant” Dalit woman is to be paraded naked through the village—and often gang-raped by upper-caste men. In 2012, 33,655 crimes were committed against “scheduled castes,” a government term for lower castes; the brunt of the violence is always directed toward Dalits.

  All of this is in spite of the fact that the legal ban against caste discrimination was first introduced by the British in 1850 under the Caste Disabilities Removal Act (or Act XXI); special protection was then given to lower castes under the Government of India Act of 1935, and 17 separate laws were passed by various Indian states to end caste discrimination between 1943 and 1950. The first national legislation against caste discrimination in independent India (after 1947) was created with the Untouchability (Offenses) Act of 1955, which was strengthened in 1976 and made the Protection of Civil Rights Act. In 1990, a special law called the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act came into being. But the violence continues—and rates of violence doubled from around 14,000 in 1981 to 33,000 in 2001 and have remained stubbornly at those levels since then.

  As India has modernized and urbanized, the most horrific of these crimes tend to take place in villages rather than in the big city where anonymity and modernity increasingly blur caste identity markers. Nearly all the women killed as “witches” each year in India (760 women have been killed since 2008 after being termed “witches” and 119 murdered in 2012 alone) were Dalits, and the majority of these hunts happened in the most rural states of India—Jharkhand and Odisha.

  It is as if modern India is bringing alive with a vengeance what Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar saw in the early twentieth century. Ambedkar, a Dalit scholar who was one of the finest intellectuals India has ever known, wrote the Indian constitution. A seminal figure in India’s struggle for freedom from British rule, Ambedkar embraced the modern early. A graduate in law, economics and political science of Columbia University and the London School of Economics, he was a prodigious student. In his three years at Columbia, he took eleven courses in history, five in philosophy, three in politics, four in anthropology, one each in basic German and French and twenty-nine in economics. Ambedkar advocated the total destruction of the caste system and promoted inter-caste marriage. Barely weeks before his death in 1956, faced with unrelenting orthodox Hindu resistance and after years of research, he embraced Buddhism and urged Dalits to do the same. This kind of renouncing was not new in Ambedkar’s politics and polemic. In November 1948, barely a year after independence, at a time when most Indians lived in villages and earned their living from farming, when Mahatma Gandhi made villages the cornerstone of his political philosophy and the prime unit of his idyllic Indian society, Ambedkar famously argued, “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism.”1

  This is what Saroj faced when she returned to her father’s village. Whispers started, asking why a Dalit girl had to leave her husband’s home. Fingers were pointed at her father—had he failed to reveal some illicit fact about his daughter that was later unearthed by the in-laws?

  “I could not take the insult of my father. I was convinced that the only way was to remove myself. I had to kill myself.” Three bottles of pesticide later, she was alive but with the additional burden of a girl who had tried to kill herself. The gossip in the village asked if she was mad, if that’s why she had been “sent back from her husband’s home.”

  She then decided to do what Ambedkar wanted of Dalits—to leave the village and seek their fortune in the city. “But my parents and relatives did not want a young girl to come to the city. A girl who had left her husband, a girl who had no male guardian—it was unbelievable,” remembers Saroj. “But I had crossed the final line—I was ready to die, so nothing could scare me anymore. I told them if they did not let me go, I would jump under a train and kill myself. And this time, there would be no time for doctors or hospitals to save me.”

  So it was that Saroj came to Bombay, the financial capital of India, to live with the family of a distant relative. Bombay, she says, seemed like America to her. It was dazzling and different from anything she had ever imagined. “I had never seen such tall buildings. In fact I didn’t believe that buildings could be that tall,” she says. “When I first saw the buildings of Mumbai [Bombay], I felt very scared but I also felt free. I had broken away from the shackles of the village. And even though I had failed to become a nurse or join the police like my father—or even join the military as I had hoped after my suicide since I did not fear death anymore—I felt that this was a place where I could make something of my life.”

  Her first job was at a small stitching center with a salary of Rs 200 a month. The first day she went there, Saroj froze. “I had never seen men and women working side by side in my life. And I never thought someone would offer me a Rs 100 note in my life. Here someone was offering me Rs 200! It was unbelievable,” she says. She rented a room for herself in one of Bombay’s slums—for Rs 40 a month.

  After a couple of years working at that center, Saroj started a not-for-profit to help women from impoverished backgrounds access government funds in order to start small-scale enterprises. Soon she spotted a loan she could take (of Rs 50,000) and started a furniture shop. As business grew, Saroj became more entrenched in local politics. As she says, “Many people began to see me as someone who could get things done.”

  It was at this time, around 1996, that she was offered a plot of land of about two acres on a road that links the cities of Bombay and Pune. The asking price was Rs 2.5 lakhs and the owner wanted to sell only to Saroj. The land was filled with illegal encroachments of the local land mafia. “The owner told me—‘Kalpana, I have two choices: either sell it to you and get Rs 2.5 lakhs, which is less than market value or give it up to the goons and get nothing,’ ” says Saroj.

  This was the first deal that kick-started Saroj’s career. But it was also the first time she was told that she might be killed—and when she decided to get her revolver license. The mafia put a price of Rs 10 lakh on her head. Saroj went to the home of the police commissioner and told him that she might be murdered. After months of legal battle, the land was cleared. On this she built her first commercial complex. She called it Kohinoor, after the famous Indian diamond.

  Around this period, Saroj says she began to read Ambedkar’s work very seriously. It made her question her concept of economics, and indeed her own life. Dalit economics in India has been the tale of the quota system, in essence a system of affirmative action where positions are reserved for the community in state-run schools and colleges and in government jobs. There has been endless debate, heartache and violence in India over these quotas. There is evidence that these quotas have been useful in some places to bring access to communities, but in many cases the reservation system has been overrun with rampant corruption and the worst kind of
bureaucratic sloth. The quota system and the inclusion of various communities under the quota regime has also become a source of votes with political parties carving out “vote banks” by forcing the inclusion of different communities on the reservation benefit list.

  There is also a raging debate over whether Ambedkar was a free-market proponent or a Fabian socialist, but it’s undoubtedly clear that Ambedkar was far less anxious about private capital, enterprise and business than the men who came to govern independent India, including its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, an avowed socialist. In fact, Ambedkar opposed the inclusion of the word “socialist” in the constitution he wrote. On November 15, 1948, Ambedkar said in a constitutional debate,

  The constitution … is merely a mechanism for the purpose of regulating the work of the various organs of the state. It is not a mechanism whereby particular members or particular parties are installed in office. What should be the policy of the state, how the society should be organised in its social and economic side are matters which must be decided by the people themselves according to time and circumstances. It cannot be laid down in the constitution itself, because that is destroying democracy altogether. If you state in the constitution that the social organisation of the state shall take a particular form, you are, in my judgment, taking away the liberty of the people to decide what should be the social organisation in which they wish to live. It is perfectly possible today, for the majority of people to hold that the socialist organisation of society is better than the capitalist organisation of society. But it would be perfectly possible for thinking people to devise some other form of social organisation which might be better than the socialist organisation of today or of tomorrow. I do not see therefore why the constitution should tie down the people to live in a particular form and not leave it to the people themselves to decide it for themselves. This is one reason why the amendment should be opposed.