by Mark Tully
PENGUIN BOOKS
NO FULL STOPS IN INDIA
Mark Tully was born in Calcutta and educated in England. He worked for the BBC in South Asia for twenty-five years and now works as a journalist in New Delhi. Among the many major stories he has covered are the Bangladeshi war, Mrs Gandhi's State of Emergency, the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and Operation Blue Star – when the Indian army launched an attack on the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. This operation and the Punjab problem was the subjects of his first book, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle, which he wrote with his colleague Satish Jacob. In 1987 he made the much-applauded radio series From Raj to Rajiv, which traced the story of India's forty years of independence and formed the basis of his second book. Of his books Penguin publish No Full Stops in India, The Heart of India and India in Slow Motion, which was co-written with his colleague and partner Gillian Wright.
In 1992 Mark Tully was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India, a rare honour for a foreigner. This puts him in the unusual position of being decorated by the Queen of Britain and the President of India.
MARK TULLY
NO FULL STOPS IN INDIA
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking 1991
Published in Penguin Books 1992
26
Copyright © Mark Tully, 1991
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192775-6
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Ram Chander's Story
2. The New Colonialism
3. The Kumbh Mela
4. The Rewriting of the Ramayan
5. Operation Black Thunder
6. Communism in Calcutta
7. The Deorala Sati
8. Typhoon in Ahmedabad
9. The Return of the Artist
10. The Defeat of a Congressman
Epilogue: 21 May 1991
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Ram Chander's daughter, Rani
Ram Chander
Paul Paneereselvan of the Dalit Educational Trust in Arasankuppam
Pilgrims at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna at Allahabad
A naked sadhu leading his akhara's procession to the sacred confluence
Sadhus bathing at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna
Operation Black Thunder. Sikh militants taking aim from the Golden Temple at the police
Sikh militants surrendering in the Golden Temple
K. P. S. Gill, director general of the Punjab police
Ramanand Sagar's Ram and Sita
The communist chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu
Roop Kanwar's in-laws leading local people in a ceremony following her death
Mark Tully with Jangarh Singh Shyam
Mark Tully with Digvijay Narain Singh
Indian States States in bold have important mentions in the book
Towns, villages and rivers with important mentions in the book
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The greatest temptation journalists face is to regard the stories they write as their own. They are not: they are the stories of those who are involved in the events reported. It's not the journalist who is the hero, it's those who suffer the famines or floods, those who fight cruelty or oppression, those who govern and those who oppose them. Never do I feel this more strongly than when I walk away from natural disasters with the material recorded for what I know will be ‘a good story’, leaving the victims to their suffering.
Let me say from the start, then, that this book is not mine – it belongs to all the people whose stories I have told, and of course to India. It also belongs to those who helped in the telling. It belongs to Gillian Wright, on whom I relied from the time when we planned the book together to the final corrections. She travelled with me, shared the insights she has gained from her deep reading and long experience of India, did much of the research and took responsibility for much of the drudgery which inevitably goes with the final stages of producing a book. The book also belongs to many patient people at Penguin who put up with my procrastination and, when the stories rambled, brought me back to the straight and narrow. It belongs to my agent, Gill Coleridge, who arranged for Penguin to publish me and persuaded them that I would eventually deliver as the delays grew longer and longer. It belongs to the BBC, and particularly to Alan Hart, for arranging six months’ leave for me. It belongs to my colleagues in the Delhi office of the BBC, Satish Jacob and Avrille Turner, who have given me invaluable advice and help. And belongs to my wife, Margaret, and my family, who encouraged me to keep going.
The portrait of Ram Chander for Chapter 1 and photographs for Chapter 3 are reproduced by permission of Rajesh Bedi, those for Chapter 5 by permission of Pramod Pushkarna and India Today, that for Chapter 6 by permission of Saibal Das and India Today, and that in Chapter 7 by permission of Raghu Rai. My thanks to them all.
Mark Tully, June 1991
INTRODUCTION
‘How do you cope with the poverty?’ That must be the question I have been asked most frequently by visitors to India. I often reply, ‘I don't have to. The poor do.’ It's certainly true. I live a very comfortable life in Delhi, while the taxi-drivers who have lived opposite me for fourteen years have to sleep in their cars in the cold winter and on a charpai or light bedstead in the open during the hot weather. I have a three-bedroomed flat. The taxi rank is their home. My foreign guests expect the taxi-drivers to take them back to their hotels whatever hour of the night it may be. Before leaving, they will check the fare with me to make sure the taxi-drivers don't get a few more rupees than they are due. That's the way my guests usually ‘cope with the poverty’.
The crocodile tears that have been shed over India's poor would flood the Ganges, so there's no need for me to add my drop to them. No matter how much it may upset my guests, it's better to be honest and admit that I've learnt to live with India's poverty. The only excuse I can give is that I'm not alone in this: most prosperous Indians – and indeed the prosperous in all parts of the world – have learnt to live with the fact that millions of Indians live below what economists have defined as the poverty line. Millions more don't have adequate housing and sanitation. The fact that we, the fortunate of the world, still live with India's poverty is a scandal. India – which barely rates as a trading nation, which has no oil to export, which has no monopoly of any o
ther essential commodity, which has not adopted a hostile ideology, which can threaten only its smaller neighbours – does not count in the capitals of the West. It ought to count if we really cared about coping with poverty.
The successful capitalist countries of the world are rejoicing in the downfall of communism, and in the West we are talking of the final triumph of our civilization as though it was now proved that there was no other way ahead but ours. But our civilization has still to show that it can provide for the poor of the world. A great deal of evidence indicates the opposite – that the West has harmed the poor and continues to harm them. After all, it was our civilization which left India a poor and backward country. A. Vaidyanathan writes in the Cambridge Economic History of India of the ‘impoverished economy’ which was the raj's legacy to India. He says, ‘Altogether the pre-independence period was a period of near stagnation for the Indian economy…. There was hardly any change in the structure of production or in productivity levels. The growth of modern manufacturing was probably neutralized by the displacement of traditional crafts, and in any case was too small to make a difference to the overall picture.’ It is also our civilization that India has tried to follow since independence, with results which certainly could not be described as a triumph.
There are many reasons why India in particular should make us in the West aware of how much remains to be done in the developing countries and of how many difficulties have still to be overcome before anyone speaks of triumph. One is obviously the size of the problem India faces. There are countries which are poorer than India, there are countries which have made far less economic progress, there are countries which don't have even the rudiments of a modern state, but there is none which has so many poor people. India's nearest rival in this respect is China, but the World Bank's World Development Report (1990) shows that there are more than twice as many poor people in India than in China, and more than four times as many extremely poor people.
China is a communist country but India is a parliamentary democracy – surely that's another reason why we should take the plight of India very seriously. China's achievements could mean that it is communism which will triumph in the war against poverty and democracy which will be defeated. I think that that is unlikely, but those who are now talking of the victory of freedom should perhaps ponder the strange fact that one of the freest countries in the world, which has made an all-out effort since independence to eradicate its legacy of poverty, has been much less successful in this than its communist neighbour. Of course India's achievements in some fields are more impressive than China's, but the fact remains that communism has provided better education, better health services and more food and clothes for its poor than democracy has.
In the Indian Express of 17 June 1990, the eminent Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote, ‘It is important to understand the élite nature of India to make sense of India's policies.’ He has, for example, compared India's success in providing higher education with what he has called ‘the shocking neglect of elementary education’. Why has giving every man a vote not meant the transfer of power from the élite to the majority who in India are undoubtedly the poor? I believe one of the main reasons is that India's élite have never recovered from their colonial hangover, and so they have not developed the ideology, the attitudes and the institutions which would change the poor from subjects to partners in the government of India. Democracy has failed because the people the poor have elected have ruled – not represented – them. The ballot-box is only the first stage in democracy.
If all that were wrong with India were a particularly bad hangover from the raj, there might well be room for optimism. After all, even the worst hangover evaporates eventually, and in the twenty-five years I have known the country I have seen many of the more obvious relics of colonial rule disappear. India is no longer a land dominated by brown sahibs imitating the ways of the white sahibs who used to rule them. But India is still a land dominated by foreign thinking, and I would suggest that that thinking is just as alien as the brown sahibs’. Colonialism teaches the native élite it creates to admire – all too often to ape – the ways of their foreign rulers. That habit of mind has survived in independent India.
India's most successful students no longer knock at the doors of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge: they now prefer Harvard or Yale. But what do they learn there which is relevant to their country? The scientists are versed in technologies aimed at reducing the role of human beings in production, although labour is India's greatest asset. The doctors want to practise medicine which provides the latest and most expensive techniques of healing individuals, whereas India's need is for public health, preventive medicine and simple cures which can be administered by paramedical staff trained inexpensively. The business-school graduates know how to administer complicated corporations with billion-dollar assets – the sort of corporations which will put out of business the small, labour-intensive and unsophisticated industries that India is officially committed to encouraging. All this is not surprising, because America is concerned about educating students to propagate the American way of life and keep its economy expanding.
What makes matters worse is the cultural imperialism of the West, an imperialism now strengthened by our success in the battle with communism. We don't need armies to hold down our modern colonies, we don't need viceroys to administer them on our behalf: our economic might holds them in captivity, and our apparent success ensures that they accept, if not enjoy, their slavery. Today most Indians see no alternative to our culture at the end of this century, just as their grandparents and great-grandparents saw no alternative to direct colonial rule at the start of the century.
The best way to destroy a people's culture and identity is to undermine its religion and its language. We, the British, did that as India's rulers and we continue to do that as part of the dominant culture of the world now. It is true that the British rulers of India were very cautious about Hinduism, especially after the Mutiny. Unlike some colonial powers, we did not attempt to convert India to Christianity. But we did create the impression that our religion was superior to Hinduism. As a child in Calcutta, I remember being told that Muslims were superior to Hindus because at least they did not worship idols.
At independence, India adopted the contemporary Western view that common sense dictates that religion be confined entirely to the personal domain and kept out of all public life – to put it at its kindest. What in fact the majority of people in the West have done is to consign religion to the rubbish bin. ‘Modern’ Indians inevitably follow our example, and anyone who does not believe in keeping religion out of all forms of public life is regarded as ‘communal’ – that is to say, totally biased in favour of his own religious community. The élite's so-called secularism inevitably degenerates into disrespect for religion. But the vast majority of Indians, who do not enjoy the benefits of modernity, still believe that religion is one of the most – if not the most – important factors in their lives. I have to admit to believing that the West is paying a very heavy price for its lack of religion, but it has made the economic progress to achieve other goals in life – ephemeral though they may be. What I think is manifestly wrong is to disturb the religious beliefs of those who have no hope of any other comfort, which is exactly what we have taught and are still teaching the Indian élite to do. Not surprisingly, this is producing a backlash in India – Hindu fundamentalism. The greatest Indian leader of the century, Mahatma Gandhi, was a deeply religious man, but he campaigned tirelessly against the excesses of his own religion, Hinduism – particularly the humiliation of Harijans or untouchables. At the same time, he knew the danger of ridiculing rather than reforming religion. He believed that, in India at least, politics needed religion. In his autobiography he said, ‘I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.’
A central tenet of what passes for the post-religio
us ideal is the equality of all men. But, although all men may be equal in God's eyes, they can never be equal in the eyes of other men, and because of that basic flaw in the doctrine of egalitarianism we in the West now talk of ‘equality of opportunity’. The pursuit of equal opportunities for all has many achievements to its credit, but this ideal too is going to be realized only if there is another life after this one. Our differences of opportunity start the moment we are conceived. The gap widens as we live in different families, go to different schools, are inspired or bored by different teachers, discover or fail to discover our individual talents and are given or not given the resources to develop those talents. So it goes on throughout our lives. There will always be winners and losers. The alienation of many young people in the West and the loneliness of the old show the suffering that egalitarianism inflicts on those who do not win, the superficiality of an egalitarianism which in effect means equal opportunities for all to win and then ignores the inevitable losers. Imagine how many losers there must be in a country like India where many children have their physical and mental growth stunted by malnutrition, where many parents are forced to regard their families as economic assets to be exploited in the child-labour market as soon as possible and where education is often seen as a waste of time because it does not lead to jobs or a better life. Imagine also what would happen if egalitarianism and its companion individualism destroyed the communities which support those who start life with no opportunities.
For all that, the élite of India have become so spellbound by egalitarianism that they are unable to see any good in the one institution which does provide a sense of identity and dignity to those who are robbed from birth of the opportunity to compete on an equal footing – caste. Caste is obnoxious to the egalitarian West, so it is obnoxious to the Indian élite too. The Statesman, one of the daily papers of the English-speaking élite, recently published an article by Bernard Levin in which he told Indians what to think of the caste system. He said,
