Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  The correspondents’ offices had the feel and musty smell of miniature museums, for over the years they had accumulated relics and artefacts from trips around the country that nobody had the courage to throw out. To do so not only felt like vandalising a heritage site but also ran the risk, in this most superstitious of countries, of being recklessly inauspicious. On arrival, then, I inherited a scale model of a steam locomotive mounted in a Perspex display case, an assortment of craft items from Nagaland, a leather-bound collection of budget estimates that appeared to stretch back to the days of Nehru, and, the collection’s pièce de résistance, a metre-high chrome and plastic trophy that looked like it belonged in the hands of the Punjabi police department’s weightlifting champion or, if not, his close runner-up.

  What made our bureau feel even more antiquated was that the offices downstairs housed an Indian outpost of General Electric. Inside its boardroom, American executives had negotiated one of India’s first major outsourcing deals, unleashing a white-hot technological revolution that had transformed vast tracts of the country. But it had not yet percolated through to the floor above. As a result, our stories on ‘Before and After’ India were compiled in an office that fitted neither description. It came from an entirely different epoch.

  Still, modern India was all around us. Along with an Old Delhi and a New Delhi, a futuristic Delhi had risen up on the fringes of the capital in the newly developed suburbs of Gurgaon and Noida. It was there that we headed to cover the most modish story of the day: the headset-clad young Indians who manned the phones at outsourcing centres, all of whom received crash-courses in British culture in order to sustain the subterfuge that they were situated in, say, Stevenage or Hull.

  Covering the full gamut, from Posh and Becks to Robbie Williams, from Eastenders to Emmerdale, I fear these master-classes said more about the decline of Britain than the rise of India, but they also illustrated how business-processing outsourcing, or BPO, was revolutionising the subcontinent. With British and American times and temperatures displayed permanently on their computer screens, young Indians were forced to show greater interest in the rest of the world. And the rest of the world had been forced to show a greater interest in India.

  As well as being partisans of progress, most of these young Indians were fierce patriots, determined that India should regain its rightful place. The widespread presumption was that, by mid-century, the country would have become a global superpower rivalling America and China. The downside was that they had to work through the night in sync with their American and British clients, feign Western accents and even Anglicise their names in order to achieve it.

  If the kids manning the call centres were the infantry in India’s march towards greatness, the field marshals were the corporate tycoons, or the modern-day maharajas, as everyone had taken to calling them. Many had the showmanship and panache of their aristocratic forbears, and rarely needed much persuasion to show off their fabulous wealth.

  For a profile on one of India’s most swashbuckling businessmen, Subrata Roy, the head of the entertainment, real-estate and financial-services conglomerate Sahara, which sponsored the Indian cricket team, our producers thought it would be a terrific idea to film him playing cricket on the oval of his 100-acre Lucknow estate. What they had in mind was a gentle knockabout that, after editing, would probably make up at most about 30 seconds of the feature.

  Roy, though, had a much grander production in mind. He put on a full-scale match under floodlights, for which he flew in a planeload of Bollywood lovelies and former Indian cricket stars, including the World Cup-winning captain, Kapil Dev. And I have a feeling that the finale of the game was stage-managed so that he would hit the winning run.

  As if to prove that even the super-rich were impossible to stereotype, however, other Indian tycoons were much more frugal in their tastes and far more unassuming. Perhaps the greatest extravagance of the bespectacled N. R. Narayana Murthy, the founder and chairman of Infosys, the info-tech giant, was a classical-music collection that included the entire works of Mozart on 176 CDs. As for the country’s richest man, Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro Technologies and ‘the Bill Gates of India’, for years he had been driven around Bangalore in a Ford Escort, which he eventually replaced with a Toyota Corolla. Premji was also a Muslim, another sign of how the business world was disregarding time-honoured prejudices and hierarchies. The caste system finally faced a serious challenger: the flourishing meritocracy of India Inc.

  New hierarchies were fast emerging, which were usually determined by spending power and commonly linked to one’s means of transportation. What Indians drove, or were driven in, had become a telling social pointer. At the lower end, the Honda Hero motorbike had long been a sign of upward mobility. Now, though, the Maruti hatchback had become the gateway car for the middle classes.

  For the rich, there were subtler gradations. A vehicle shipped from Europe trumped a Japanese import, but such were the advances in Indian automotive engineering that both could be overtaken by the top-of-the-range Tata Safari, with walnut panelling, smoke-tinted windows, a back-seat snack tray and an ‘Aroma Ganesh Frame’, a fragrant neck cushion fashioned in the shape of the elephantine Hindu god that ensured the vehicle was both ‘fresh and blessed’. At the flash-cash end of the market, the super-rich could afford Lamborghinis and Maseratis, though it is hard to imagine cars more unsuitable for roads strewn with people, rickshaws and cows. The ridiculously super-rich could go one better. Whenever venturing out onto the roads, a millionaire in Pune ordered his chauffeur to drive behind him in one of his lesser European models, say his Porsche or BMW, so that no one would run into the back of his Ferrari.

  Being able to afford air travel was another social indicator, and, naturally, whether you turned left or right on boarding the plane. Often, as I nibbled my way through the samosas, oblong pizza slices and stale cheese-and-tomato sandwiches in a departure lounge lined with glass-fronted fridges, I would wonder whether the upper tiers of the caste system would ultimately be replaced by two broad categories: business and economy.

  Your destination was also germane. Having the economic wherewithal to leave the country was a sure sign that you had truly arrived in India. New money brought new bundles of contradictions and paradoxes. Consumerism had become so rampant, for instance, that in many quarters it actually came to be expressed with less ostentation. Fridges had become so commonplace that status-conscious families no longer felt the need to show them off in their lounge rooms and relegated them to their rightful place in the kitchen.

  Always, there was the temptation to report that the love of money was making India less sacred, but we did not succumb. Long before US television evangelists started preaching the gospel of prosperity, Indian holy men emphasised the compatibility of spirituality and commercialism. A BBC colleague offered a deft summation. ‘Contrary to the belief of many Westerners, India is not a profoundly spiritual country but a proudly materialistic one,’ he wrote. ‘The object of most religious practice is to ensure material success.’ A strong piece of analysis, and penned, it is worth pointing out, in the 1950s. Then, as now, religiosity was often regarded as transactional, an insurance policy against failure and a down payment on success.

  In any case, modernity usually came with traditional religious trappings. On the opening day of the new financial year, the first investment made by a stockbroking house in Bombay’s financial quarter was to pay a few hundred rupees to a Hindu priest, who brought work to a halt by performing pujas on the floor in the middle of the office. Similar rituals played out on the forecourts of car showrooms across the country, as families had their new Marutis consecrated with marigold chains and the engine daubed with the Hindu swastika.

  Now, it was possible to download the Nokia mobile-phone jingle in a holy ringtone, although places of worship still tried to prohibit their use. ‘Please switch off Mobile Phone’ read a newly minted sign at the entrance of the gold-domed Sikh temple, or gurdwara, in Old Delhi. Yet few p
ilgrims took any notice. Modern-day Indians were still prepared to put up with countless indignities, from water shortages to regular power outages, but they baulked at being denied the use of their mobile phones.

  Much of our time was spent chronicling the changes that were overtaking India, and occasionally we witnessed them unfold dramatically before our eyes. Back in the shanties that flanked the runway at Mumbai Airport, we had heard it was demolition day – part of a slum-clearance program that provided a useful illustration of how far India was prepared to go in its unswerving march towards the future. Mumbai was determined to become Shanghai, and for an image-conscious city the slums surrounding the airport were not only an ugly eyesore but also a sorry advertisement. As a result, they were the next on the list in a slum-clearance program that had already razed some 70,000 shanties to the ground.

  With the yellow bulldozers already rumbling through the nearby streets, the Jadhav family had been given ten minutes to gather up their lifelong possessions and leave. Bharati Jadhav, the matriarch of the family, was dressed immaculately in a copper-coloured sari with a ruby-coloured tikka on her forehead, while her bespectacled husband wore pressed slacks and an ironed shirt. By Indian standards, they could hardly be described as impoverished, but, like hundreds of thousands of upwardly mobile working families in Mumbai, the only place they could afford to live was a tiny shanty, which they shared with their three children.

  Eavesdropping as ever on misery, we filmed as Bharati hurriedly fastened a bag containing some pots and pans, the bare essentials, and listened as she spoke in a voice of rising panic: ‘If they demolish now, where do we go? They are going to smash down our shelter, and we will have nowhere to live.’ Minutes away from being made homeless, they had no idea where they would sleep that evening, since the government had not offered them any alternative accommodation.

  On the scrubland outside, as the planes continued to land over her shoulder, one of Bharati’s more feisty neighbours tried to raise a mob. ‘We’ll stop the bulldozers,’ she cried, with her sinewy arm thrust into the sky and her head contorting from side to side, ‘even if we have to die.’ Given her fervour, it was tempting to describe her as a sari-clad revolutionary. But all she was trying to do was preserve the status quo.

  When the bulldozers rolled around the corner, she stood in the way of the demolition crew for a few futile moments, while men from the shanties hurled bricks and rocks at the advancing machines. Yet a squad of policemen wielding lathis, the thin antiquated bamboo batons that for generations had kept agitators in their place, quickly brushed them aside. Within minutes of arriving, the bulldozers’ mechanical arms reached into the corrugated iron huts and wrenched them savagely apart.

  Now, without even tilting or readjusting the frame, the camera captured the new destroying the old: the shot showed a bulldozer entering from the side of the screen, while Bharati watched helpless and mute as its iron claws ransacked her long-time home. Here was the flipside of India’s grand new boast that nothing could stand in the way of progress.

  Successive Indian governments had an appalling record of managing change in a way that balanced the needs of corporations and foreign investors with the interests of the poor. There was no greater monument to their failure than the skeletal remains of the Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, where a poisonous gas leak in 1984 killed at least 3000 people at the time, claimed 8000 more lives in the years afterwards and left over 500,000 people nursing injuries. Returning there to mark the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst ever industrial disaster, we saw for ourselves the broken sacks of pesticide still littering the site and the piles of toxic waste that had not yet been cleared away.

  In the shanty opposite the factory were the victims themselves, many of whom still awaited proper compensation. Cows continued to amble around the site, from which the nearby slum-dwellers drew their milk. The wells that locals relied upon for their water remained poisoned. A helpful security guard, who patrolled the site with a double-barrelled shotgun slung over his shoulder, told us of his failed attempts to prevent local children from playing among the ruins. Then, as the fumes seeped into his nostrils, his knees buckled beneath him, and he started to faint. No wonder Bhopal had become a byword for corporate and official negligence.

  In covering the anniversary, we listened to the testimony of survivors, highlighted the ongoing litigation aimed at bringing justice for the victims of the disaster and visited the local hospital to film the room where foetuses cut from the bellies of pregnant women killed by the gas cloud were stored in over-sized glass jars – a real chamber of horrors.

  To our lasting regret, however, the BBC unwittingly added to Bhopal’s misery. We did so by falling prey to the most terrible hoax, which for a time that day made us the focus of the story. It started the week before when a producer in London was duped by a fake website purporting to be the corporate home of The Dow Chemical Company, which now owned the plant. She rang the telephone number that appeared on the phoney website and arranged for a company spokesman to come to our Paris bureau on the morning of the anniversary. Live on air, in an interview with a presenter in London, the spokesman made the most startling announcement: that Dow would not only clean up the factory site but also hand out vast sums in compensation. It would be financed, he said, out of the liquidation of Union Carbide. As if to prove how fast a lie can travel, the news reached Bhopal in an instant, where it was met with near riotous joy from the hardened activists who had fought Dow Chemical for years. The markets also delivered their verdict, wiping over four per cent of the value of Dow Chemical’s share price in the space of 23 minutes.

  It is still shocking, and enraging, to recall how easily London was duped. Alarm bells should have started ringing even before the ‘Dow Chemical Company spokesman’ was allowed on air, for he turned up at our Paris bureau in an ill-fitting suit, accompanied by his own camera crew, which was not the normal corporate look. His unusual name, Jude Finisterra, might have raised suspicions. Subsequent Google searches revealed that Finisterra means the end of the world, while Jude, of course, is the patron saint of lost causes. Then there was his startling announcement: the liquidation of a multi-billion-dollar company, Union Carbide.

  By now, the alarm bells should have been deafening. Here was an American corporate titan announcing the liquidation of a giant subsidiary live on BBC World News from a remote studio in Paris, with a boggle-eyed spokesman with a weird name wearing a ragged suit that looked like it had been borrowed from a mime artist on the Champs Élysées. Please.

  Soon, a real Dow Chemical Company spokesperson, desperate to halt the slide in its share price, was interviewed from London and given the easiest of rides by a presenter who now had to apologise for our mistake rather than tackling her on theirs. Then, the hoaxer himself was allowed back onto our airwaves to revel in his mischief. Later, a group calling itself the Yes Men made a film claiming that the people of Bhopal were deeply appreciative of their brilliant trickery, because it had highlighted the Dow Chemical Company’s hard-heartedness. But I witnessed the elation of these people when they learnt of their windfall and saw their despair when it was cruelly snatched away. Other than to marvel at their own cleverness, the main thing the Yes Men did that day was to further victimise the victims.

  Back in Delhi – a city where argumentative debate was often the highest form of entertainment – much of the dinner-party discussion at the time centred on whether India’s rapid advance was a wholly good thing. Perhaps the memory of Bhopal, an early American encroachment into the Indian market, offered something of a cautionary tale, given the new-found reliance on foreign investment. Not only was the gap widening between rich and poor, bringing about even more ghastly disparities, but also there was a danger that India was losing itself in the rush for globalisation.

  Old South Asian hands bemoaned the intrusion into their favourite local markets of fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Subway and Pizza Hut. (Are not pizza-delivery boys always the storm
troopers of globalisation?) High-end jewellers and opticians selling titanium frames and sunglasses by Chanel and Dior were crowding out booksellers. Edge-of-town supermarkets – a new innovation in India – threatened to kill off the trusted corner shop, while air-conditioned malls endangered bustling, traditional markets.

  Preferring denim and tight-fitting T-shirts, women now wore saris less commonly. Young men sported the latest Nike, Adidas or Reebok leisurewear. Much of India’s rapid new-millennial growth had been propelled by Western paranoia over the Y2K bug and the skill of Indian outsourcing firms to deliver cheap fixes. Now, it was India itself that was at risk of contamination from the twenty-first century.

  Whenever the debate was limited to the narrower question of whether economic growth was benefiting Indian society as a whole, I found it hard to side with the naysayers. The statistics, even without being tortured, spoke for themselves. In the early 1980s, before the evisceration of the Licence Raj and the opening up of the economy to outside investment, 60 per cent of Indians lived below the international poverty line. In 2005, the figure had dropped to 41 per cent, with the sharpest falls in poverty coinciding with the fastest spurts of growth.

  For all that, I was glad to have experienced so much of the old India before it was totally eclipsed by the new. One morning in Delhi, I found myself discussing this question with a high-ranking public servant who moonlighted as a public intellectual, who had written a series of quite brilliant books on the rise and character of the Indian middle class. Clearly, he was a strong believer in a more egalitarian society, and confidently predicted that a rising tide would eventually lift all the boats, to use the voguish economic analogy of the times.

  He spoke with eloquent conviction, and it was moving to hear him talk so hopefully of a less iniquitous country. Yet the moment we finished the interview, he nonchalantly pushed a buzzer concealed in the arm of his chair, at which point a waiter came scurrying in from the pantry next door to serve us tea. It was hilariously incongruous, but he performed this ritual with a complete lack of embarrassment or self-consciousness. Like many Indians, I suspect, he was a well-intentioned macro-economist, but more self-serving as a micro-economist. Much as he believed that the poor should get a far better deal, he rather enjoyed the luxuries that the inequality of Indian society brought to his daily life. I recognised this train of thought, not least because, like most foreign correspondents stationed in Delhi, I had fallen prey to it myself.