Two decades since Naipaul came to India

Just through reading Naipaul’s ‘India – A Million Mutinies’ the last of the trilogy on Naipaul’s travelogue in India and I wonder, as yet another year draws to a close, if Naipaul would have seen India in a different light from the India he saw in 1990.  India then was standing at the threshold of an economic growth miracle to be fueled by the opening up of the economy and the easing away of the License-Permit raj. Naipaul would today have perhaps travelled more comfortably to the rural hinterlands of Punjab, been astounded presence of the ubiquitous Nokia handset in the hands of the boy who repairs tires by the roadside or by the spending power of the burgeoning middle-class in the glitzy malls but the million mutinies that he saw then would still be there.

Two decades later while the sense of ‘nation’ has grown (and we have the British to thank for this), the country remains as fractured as ever – factures that are both old and new. The political demography of the country has seen a sea change from the heady days of independence. The rise of regional parties and the pressures of running a coalition government – never an in-thing with the family driven Congress Party has thrown an entirely different set of challenges for the nation. The replacement of Brahmin power starting from the south and extending up to the north has brought forth a new breed of politicians and political ideology that has done nothing, just as Brahmin hegemony did nothing, for the economical transformation of the deprived classes – they remain in the same state if not worse even as the nation steps firmly into its next growth curve. The acute lack of governance (‘su-shasan’ as Nitish Kumar succulently puts it) at the federal and state levels (except perhaps states such as Bihar, Gujarat etc.) has widened old economic fractures and introduced more yawing gaps between the rich and the poor.  Endemic corruption coupled with poor policy measures, lack of transparency and controls has seen a galloping increase in prices of essential commodities leaving a significant part of the populace without access to very basic food let alone a minimum balanced diet. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) estimate ranks India at a low 66 out of the 88 developing countries - a score worse than many Sub-Saharan African countries! While I find the WPI (Wholesale Price Index) an inaccurate measure to gauge Food Inflation (the middlemen and hoarders are the devils in heady supply chain cocktail) the following table (Inflation in %) gives you a sense of how prices have been on a sprint.

Items	1993 – 94	2004 – 05	2010 - 11
Primary Articles	7.9 %	9.2 %	19.3 %
Fuel and Power	4.2 %	5.9 %	13.5 %

While spiraling fuel prices has been a major cause of inflation, but that in itself does not tell the whole story. With more families slipping below the poverty line (instead of the reverse) the oft heard lament of poor agricultural output is too a sloppy story that is put out as the graphic below illustrates.

Source: RBI Governor's Speech

On the socio-political front if Naipaul saw the waning away of the Naxalite and Khalisthan movements in 1990 he would be mighty surprised today by the emergence of Maoists as a powerful anti-state force and the abject mishandling of Kashmir turning the on-the-wane separatist movement into a terrible hydra headed monster. The pulls and pressures on the Indian nation state is an ever present fracture that keeps changing shape and dimensions but refuses to ebb away, due to an acute lack of right governance and timely political interventions. The culture of corruption introduced, to a large measure, by Indira Gandhi has taken such deep seated roots that the politician-bureaucrat nexus has now become an institution with its own kinetic energy to replicate itself at all levels – starting from central/federal ministers to the clerk that passes the file around. With the growth in communication & information technology, it is only a matter of will to bring absolute transparency into the system by removing unnecessary human intervention and making information accessible to all – cut the bureaucracy, their power over information and the horrendous red tape surrounding the smallest of transactions to see policy effectiveness at the grassroot levels. 

The alienation that Muslims feel – largely their own doing by not adopting modern education and remaining cloistered – remains perhaps the only thing that hasn’t changed over the two decades that have passed since Naipaul was here. It must also be added in the same breath that the actions of extreme fundamentalist groups and the bad press that the community has received over the decades have taken a toll on the psychology of the community and the general feeling of discontent still remains as strong as ever.   

If the 90’s saw the last vestiges of the erstwhile royalty, India in 2010 has given rise to a new class of royalty – the rulers of a billion souls have made politics a family run business. Fathered (Mothered?) by the Congress Party, with a Crown Prince in waiting in Rahul Gandhi, the regional parties too have taken cue from the great dame and politicians are passing on the party reins to their wards fast and furiously. So if the DMK in down south has the patriarch Karunanidhi passing the baton to his son and daughter, the tiger of Shiva Sena – Balasaheb in Mumbai has passed on the baton to his son. Then in Kashmir we have Farooq Abdullah handing in the reins to Omar while we have Jyotiraditya Scindia parading his school going son in an open jeep as his next visible successor and the list just keeps growing. Viva-la-India!

As a country that fights a million mutinies and contradictions each and every day of its existence, India has done surprisingly well. In spite of a zillion fractures straddled by a dismal political class and a corrupt bureaucracy, the country prods along at an amazingly healthy clip rate and has managed to capture the attention of the world. What the coming decade has in store is difficult to predict but one thing is for sure…unless we grow our agrarian economy and start moving on the path of good governance the poor in the country shall remain on the margins of society without guarantee of the minimum dignity of life – a cause enough for all of us to hang our heads in shame