No Full Stops in India

by Mark Tully

  Raoof Valiullah had been given the important job of keeping the Congress legislators happy. He was busy all day – buying samosas from one shop, special bread or roti from another, sweets from the best sweet-makers, chicken biryani for those who ate meat, and the finest vegetable preparations for those who did not. He himself was forced to eat so many rich meals that by the end of the election his stomach couldn't tolerate anything more aggressive than a glass of lassi or watery curd.

  The night before the election, all the Congressmen were confined in one house to keep them away from the seductive offers of the opposing power-brokers. Raoof provided ten videos to keep them happy. The sole woman member of the state assembly presented a bit of a problem. Obviously she couldn't stay with the men, so Raoof had to find another house for her. She then showed no inclination to go to sleep and insisted that Raoof stay up to keep her company. When she did eventually go to bed, Raoof had to stand guard outside the door. But all Raoof's efforts were in vain. His opponents got at one of the legislators he was protecting, who accepted a hefty bribe, and the Congress candidate was defeated by one vote.

  Raoof is in his early middle age. He's a small, intense man who would like his political work to be a serious contribution to the improvement of society and of the Muslim community in particular. He believes that, as chairman of the Gujarat Minorities Board, he has done much more for Muslim women than SEW A. He points out that the SEW A cooperatives are very small, and he can reel off figures to demonstrate that the number of women he has helped is much greater. Raoof is also very critical of the leaders of SEWA, who he believes have been seduced by international acclaim and spend far too much time at seminars and other jamborees. He has demonstrated his personal commitment to secularism by marrying a Hindu – the only member I have ever met of the Indian Postal Service, one of the less well-known of the élite government cadres.

  I went to see Raoof in the family home, situated in what is known as a ‘pole’ in the heart of the Old City. Much of old Ahmedabad is still divided into poles – small residential areas shut off from the main bazaars by gateways. There are two small mosques in Raoof's pole. Raoof and his five brothers all live in the house with his mother. Each brother's family has a separate room, but they all share a common kitchen. I sat on a wide wooden swing covered with cushions and suspended from the ceiling. Swinging gently creates a gentle breeze, and this is how Ahmedabadis used to keep cool before the invention of the electric fan. The room we sat in was built around a small open courtyard under which was a huge water-tank. There was an adjoining room to which the women generally retired when male visitors called. Raoof's sisters brought us tea and kachoris – savouries made of crisp, fried, unleavened bread stuffed with dal.

  I had first met Raoof while making a film on Gujarat eight years before. Since then we had often discussed politics. He would talk with great earnestness about his various disappointments and fears. ‘All my schemes and plans to benefit Muslims amount to nothing, because I can't provide protection for their lives and property,’ he said. ‘This is the most important thing. The problem is, the social fabric is tearing and politicians are losing their grip on society.’

  ‘But whose fault is that?’ I asked. ‘Surely it's yours, the politicians'?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘We have fallen victims to these sort of people. Politicians use men like Latif and then end up having to seek their support. That's why we are losing our grip. It's like a Frankenstein which has got out of control. We have created them and now we can't control them. During the riots in the eighties, the chief minister even negotiated with that criminal Latif you have been told about. Under those circumstances, what can the police do about bootlegging and other crimes? I once took the commissioner of police to see the illegal liquor on sale on every corner in my area. I said to him, “This is the public distribution system for illicit liquor. It's a lot more efficient than the government's distribution system for rations.” But I knew that the commissioner would not do anything about it because of the links between the bootleggers and the politicians, and I was right.’

  One of Raoof's sisters reminded him that he had to get his ticket to go to Bombay that night. She said that he would have to ring up the divisional manager because the booking-office had refused to give him a reservation on the quota for ex-M Ps. Raoof phoned the divisional manager, who was quite used to dealing with such apparently trivial matters – he ‘did the needful and obliged’, as they say in Indian bureaucratese. I then brought Raoof back to the subject of the bootleggers.

  ‘Do you believe that it's the bootleggers who are responsible for the riots?’ I asked.

  ‘They can be used to start them, certainly. It's very easy to start a riot – all you have to do is set fire to someone's hut and start rumours flying about the place. But communal strife comes because a communal riot is the only thing which can bring down a government. The riots of 1985 and 1986 all started from the anger of high-caste politicians who did not like Solanki, the chief minister, favouring the backward castes.’

  ‘You seem to be agreeing with the poor Muslims I have talked to. They say the politicians start the riots and the poor suffer.’

  ‘That's not entirely true,’ Raoof replied. ‘My family certainly suffered during the '85 and '86 riots. We took a beating from the public and the police. My family had to deal with a lot of abusive phone calls, and the police were very partial.’

  I remembered that the printing ladies said the police treated the poor Hindus as badly as the Muslims, and I told this to Raoof. He was surprised. ‘Well, that's the first time I've heard Muslims say that. I have always found the police biased, but what really surprised me was to find the army were the same. They also acted in violation of the law in a very communal fashion. When the army is put in charge of law and order, each section is given a local policeman to guide it. That may be part of the trouble, because the policeman will tell the army when to fire and he will be biased.’

  Raoof had good reason to be angry with the army. During fourteen days of uninterrupted curfew in 1985, soldiers patrolling the main streets were often stoned from the rooftops. One patrol climbed on to the roof of a house in Kalupur to arrest some stone-throwers. The stone-throwers ran for it, jumping from roof to roof. The soldiers gave chase, but their boots slipped when they jumped on to a sloping tin roof, and some lost their rifles. Luckily they slid on to the flat roof of a terrace, but they were trapped. Realizing that they were sitting targets for stones, bottles or even bullets, they ran to a staircase but the door was locked. They beat on the door and shouted, ‘Let us in, we are soldiers.’ There was no response, so they hammered at the door with their rifle butts until they broke it down, and charged into the house shouting, ‘Where have you hidden those salas throwing stones?’ When the members of the family protested that they knew nothing about any stoning, the soldiers started to break up their furniture and smashed the fridge. One soldier picked up a 28-day-old baby and said, ‘We'll kill her if you don't tell us.’ They searched the house but only found one toy gun. Eventually they gave up the search, arrested the male members of the family and moved to a house on the other side of the narrow alley whose door was open. There they repeated the same tactics, pushing around an elderly woman and arresting more men.

  Unfortunately for the soldiers, the first house belonged to Raoof's grandfather and the second house was his mother's. Raoof was in Bombay at the time, flagging off a ship of pilgrims to Mecca, but when he heard of the attack on his family he contacted senior members of the Congress Party. A brigadier was sent to apologize to Raoof's mother, and the government television carried an announcement that the ‘raid’ on his house had been a mistake.

  There were further humiliations for the army during those two weeks of curfew, as Raoof explained to me.

  ‘The army had orders to shoot at sight, and they did, so no one even thought of going out. I tell you, the whole area was stinking. Most of the people are daily-wage-earners living in one room, and they
have to go out to do their motions. They couldn't because of the curfew. Eventually people started getting sick from hunger. Then about 500 women came out in a procession near Kalupur tower and gheraoed [surrounded] a platoon. One woman slapped a major and said, “I have hit you. Now show how brave you are. Kill all of us.” The press heard of this and went to the place. By the evening, 5,000 women were on the streets. The army was then withdrawn from the area.’

  I also asked Raoof about the arrest of the Congress lawyer Mohamed Husen Barejia.

  ‘I am still not entirely sure what the motive was,’ replied Raoof. ‘I rang the chief minister and he said he had to take some Muslim leaders into custody as a balancing act, but I couldn't understand what he meant because no Hindu leaders were arrested. I wrote to Rajiv Gandhi about this and was summoned to Delhi to meet one of his close aides. When I met him, he accused me of harbouring “communal elements”. I really lost my temper and let him have it. Eventually the Congressmen were released and the local people gave them a rousing reception. There will never be lasting peace here so long as the authorities come down on the side of the Hindus.’

  ‘You have talked about the political reasons for communal violence. What about the economic causes?’ I asked.

  ‘The economy of Ahmedabad is almost worse than its politics,’ Raoof said. ‘Ahmedabad is a dying city, because of the crisis in the textile mills. Thirty-five thousand families have lost their earning members, and most of them are Muslims or Harijans because they are the traditional weavers. They are also, of course, the poorest too. Large numbers of the Muslims aren't even from Ahmedabad – they came here to work in the mills from Uttar Pradesh, in the north, and now they have no roots there or here. Obviously, economic despair makes people turn anywhere to earn some money, so these unemployed mill-workers and their sons make very good recruits for the bootleggers and anti-socials.’

  I drove from the bazaar outside Raoof's pole to one of the mill areas of the city. The tall chimneys and red-brick buildings reminded me of Lancashire as I used to know it. Blake could never have described arid Gujarat as a green and pleasant land, but he could well have described Ahmedabad's mills as dark and satanic. I asked a group of men sitting outside a tea stall which mills were closed. They replied sullenly, ‘All of them.’ So I drove on until I came to the premises of the Commercial Ahmedabad Mills Company, just by the railway line.

  Behind the mill's high walls you can still sometimes hear the rush of steam from leaky valves as a metre-gauge engine pulls a slow passenger train out of Ahmedabad Junction, north towards Delhi or west towards the Saurashtra peninsula and the Arabian Sea. But there is no more steam inside the mill – there's no power of any sort. The Gujarat State Electricity Board has disconnected its line to the mill and now stands in the queue of creditors waiting for the mill's liquidators to complete their dismal task.

  When I arrived at the mill gate, I found a small and forlorn group sitting outside the office where once 2,200 people had clocked on and off. One of the men had an ancient rifle across his knees: he was in charge of the guards protecting the mill for the liquidators. A bald man with a large gap in his front teeth said he had retired from the mill as a clerk some years ago but somehow couldn't keep away, even though the mill was now closed. He wasn't sure what had gone wrong but thought it was something to do with the malik, or owner, who lived in Bombay and didn't take much interest. At one stage the workers might have hoped that the Gujarat government would help them: it had a scheme for reviving what are described in bureaucratic jargon as ‘sick mills’. But civil servants had proved incompetent company doctors. They had already paid more than £100 million to keep 6,000 textile workers in jobs and there was no sign of the mills recovering. I supposed the only hope for the workers of the Commercial Ahmedabad Mills Company was recruitment by Latif or another of his ilk. But then I thought that perhaps I was being too pessimistic. After all, with Ahmedabad's record for recovering from slumps, there must, I felt, be grounds for hope that its fortunes would revive.

  I knew of one mill where the revival had already started, but getting there proved difficult as Sanjay Lalbhai, the managing director, was surprisingly publicity-shy for a modern Indian businessman. Eventually he agreed to see me in his plush, modern office in the mill. He explained that the Lalbhais were a large family, owning assets which probably made them one of the top twenty Indian industrial groups. They had never bothered to club all their assets together, because the only value of doing that was publicity and they had always believed that publicity created jealousies as some members of the family would have to be ‘up front’. Sanjay himself was the third generation in Arvind Mills, and admitted that he had ‘inherited’ the managing directorship, but he didn't think his son would necessarily inherit a top job. Whether he had earned or inherited his job, at thirty-five Sanjay was one of the most progressive Indian managers I had met for some time.

  There are similarities between the fate of Ahmedabad and that of the Lancashire textile industry. In both cases, family managements ploughed on in the same old way – ignoring new market trends and new technology. They had had it so good for so long that they came to believe they had a divine right to prosper. But in Ahmedabad it was local competition from power looms, not cheap foreign labour, that had undermined the prosperity of the old mill-owning families. Power looms are individual units and can be set up in anyone's back yard, or indeed front room. They have no unionized labour, or safety regulations, and so can easily undercut the traditional mills.

  Sanjay admitted that his family had ‘taken success for granted’ and had ‘stopped scanning the horizon’. But a few years ago they had decided to accept that the power looms had conquered most of the domestic market and to find new niches for their mills. The two they had found were denim and the most expensive cottons at the top of the market. Both, of course, meant exports. In three years, Arvind Mills' sales of denim had risen from £4 million to £32 million and they had plans to increase them fivefold in the next two years. Sanjay Lalbhai believed that he would become the biggest denim manufacturer in the world and that Ahmedabad could yet again recover from disaster and become a major international textile centre, if only the government would get off the industry's back. Almost 70 per cent of Sanjay's time was spent dealing with the bureaucracy.

  I asked the young industrialist what his plans would mean for the Muslim and Harijan weavers. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it will mean that a lot of them will save their jobs. Of course we will have to rationalize our labour force, and we have already started doing so. Every worker who leaves gets 100,000 rupees which, invested in a savings bank, gives him 60 per cent out of his salary. The rest he can easily earn. Some people walk straight out of here into jobs with power looms. But you mustn't get this wrong – we will always be labour-intensive compared to Europe, and that will be a disadvantage we will have to overcome in other ways. It's a sad fact of modern technology: you have to automate. You have to get the human beings out, because they make mistakes.’

  ‘You have to get the human beings out’ – not a very encouraging message for most of Ahmedabad, especially as the more efficient industry becomes the more of a threat it poses to the self-employed like the hand printers and the khol-sewers. The economists argue that the service industries will grow with the expansion in wealth created by the modernized mills. But then, suppose the service industries like retailing are modernized too: a Marks & Spencer of India would put millions of vegetable- and fruit-sellers out of business, not to mention the small shopkeepers who still dominate Indian retailing.

  There are those who believe that industrialists like Sanjay Lalbhai can never bring prosperity to India, who reject the worship of growth rate preached by the World Bank. They don't believe that wealth will ‘trickle down’ to the poor: they want the growth to start with the hand printers and khol-sewers, not with the mass-producers. They are not socialists, but neither are they capitalists. One of them is Ela Bhatt, who founded SEWA and the cooperatives that the
khol-sewers and printers belong to.

  Ela Bhatt founded SEWA in 1972. Its annual report for 1988 gave examples of the difficulties faced by the self-employed women it was helping. There was the case of a vegetable-seller in Ahmedabad who borrowed fifty rupees at the beginning of each day to buy her merchandise and had to return fifty-five to the moneylender every night. Her family's land had been made barren by industrial effluent. Then there was a kerosene-vendor who was going to be put out of business by a new order banning sales on the street. A woman who made pots and pans was facing increasing difficulties because of the high price of metal scrap. A basketmaker could no longer afford the price of bamboo, which had been inflated by the demand from paper-mills. The SEWA report classified three main groups of women as self-employed: vendors, manufacturers of home-made products and casual labourers (including agricultural workers). The report pointed out that only 6 per cent of Indian women had jobs in offices, factories, firms or shops which came within the purview of the labour laws of India.

  SEWA's answer to the problems of the remaining 94 per cent of Indian women has been to register itself as a trade union and to form cooperatives. The union fights for laws that recognize the rights of self-employed women and for improvements in the pay and conditions of casual labourers. The hand printers are a good example of a cooperative. Hand printers had been reduced to producing very cheap-quality products at the bottom end of the market. They were controlled by traders who provided the cloth and dye and paid them a pittance for their piecework. Those who have joined SEWA now run the cooperative themselves, buying all their own dyes and materials. They have upgraded their skills and employed a manager of their choice. The last problem they have to surmount is marketing.