Mother India

As a nation, we are an easy target for the arrows of statistics. They pierce us accurately, drawing blood, and we cannot ignore the wounds. They are there for the whole world to see although we make every effort to camouflage them with rhetoric. How can we refute the latest marksman, John Pilger, a well know British investigative journalist, without being defensive? I have long admired his ‘Pilger Reports’ (in print and on television) from around the world in which he unearths the sorry plight of humanity. The New Statesman recently published his report on India and it does make sorry reading. 

But we are eternally trapped in what I call the ‘Mother India’ syndrome.  This was a book by an American journalist, Katherine Mayo, published in the 1920s and Gandhi dismissed it as ‘the drain inspector’s report’, rightly or wrongly.  In the Mother India syndrome, writers look for, and find, a failed India. V.S. Naipaul in his ‘Area of Darkness’ was delighted to describe men and women defecating by the railway tracks, among other of our appalling social habits, including the caste system.  These failures are of great comfort to those who read them as it grants them a sense of superiority, of proof in the written word that India continues to fail on many fronts.

Pilger has compared us to China and we have failed while China is a grand success. We’re often compared to China and the comparison leaves us lagging behind in economic miracles. They have the advantage of a socialist dictatorship while we have the disadvantages of a flawed democracy. Recently the Chinese authorities executed 36 people (criminals and corrupt bureaucrats) before the start of their annual festive season, and it barely made the news. While we anguished over executing one person for rape and murder. Yet beneath the glitter of the Shanghais, there is too the darker underbelly of poverty, rural and urban, which isn’t often revealed.  It could be censorship but also the foreigners reluctance to peer beneath the China Shining syndrome. Chinese poverty is somehow not as dramatic as an Indian one, although poverty’s face is terrible to behold wherever it exists and there can be no differentiation in its misery.

According to our government’s statistics, those living in abject poverty in India had fallen by 10 per cent. Unfortunately, Pilger contradicts that with our own experts. Abijit Sen, in his study, ‘Poverty and Inequality: getting closer to the truth’, says that the Indian poor actually increased and that, for them, the 1990s were a “lost decade”. In 2002, those in absolute poverty made up more than a third of the population, or 364 million people. “Inadequate nutrition is actually far more widespread than either hunger or income poverty,” he wrote. “Half of Indian children are clinically undernourished and almost 40 per cent of all Indian adults suffer chronic energy deficiency.” I cannot argue with that or with any other of the statistics.

            The UN reports that India today spends less than one per cent of its gross domestic product on health and, in the health services available to most people, ranks 171st out of 175 countries, just ahead of Sudan and Burma. Yet spending on private health, which only the well-off can afford, is one of the highest in the world. Pilger does dig deep into our failings. ‘More than 70 per cent of the population lives off agriculture. Not only is malnutrition and discrimination rife among the minorities, the 70 million tribal people and 150 million Dalits small farmers from all ethnic groups have suffered during the “lost decade”. Suicides among share croppers “now run into many thousands”, the environmentalist and writer Vandana Shiva told him. “Governments dare not admit the true figure.” Debt, often owed to money lenders at interest rates of up to 120 per cent, is aggravated by an open market in the patenting of seeds, plants life and natural fertilizers by foreign bioscience companies: “the piracy of our life source”, as Shiva calls it.’

            Behind these appalling numbers are human suffering and despair that cannot be denied.  If we try to contradict the writer, that we’re now the call centre of the world, Pilger is quick to dismiss this achievement. He states only 100,000 young people (0.01 per cent of our population) work in these centres. But I take the different slant – 100,000 people are employed performing a skill that those in the UK and US do not want, apart from the fact that neither country has created 100,000 new jobs in any year.  Pilger doesn’t see that the earnings of those 100,000 are the tip of the visible iceberg. Those 100,000 support probably 10 or 20 times that number of other people, not only from their immediate family members, but also, like the stone in the pond, ripple out to a host of other employments in restaurants, shops, two wheeler manufactures and wherever else they spend their earnings. Our economy isn’t entirely dependent on call centres either. He makes no mention about the economic achievements in the IT industry, motor cars, pharmaceuticals, back office jobs, textiles, banking, telecommunications, and entertainment.  He also ignores our strong economy and our growth into an economic power.   Even our modest achievement of around 15 percent (his figure) of our population becoming consumers is dismissed as those who cannot afford cars, two wheelers, refrigerators, television sets and are mere survivors, clinging to the life raft of the ‘India Shining’ slogan that sank the NDA government. Yet even if 150 million people, thrice the size of Britain’s population, have economically advanced, it is a major achievement over 57 years since independence.

            India’s economic development since independence, our benchmark as for two centuries before under British rule we were exploited ruthlessly and driven into poverty, hasn’t been evenly distributed.  If, over the years, we could equally have lifted every Indian to prosperity that would have been a miraculous economic achievement. Sadly, our ‘Abolish Poverty’ slogan and our CMP (why minimum and not maximum I wonder?) are the rhetoric of our failure to do so. However, even the US cannot abolish its poverty, where 24 million live below poverty level and 14 million children suffer from malnutrition. Not everyone lives the American Dream. Urban and rural poverty in America are the nightmares of despair and desperation in such a wealthy society.  The contrasts are far starker there where the richest man is worth 50 billion dollars, the poorest without food and shelter.

Yet there are many in India who have achieved the Indian Dream, and it’s just the parlour trick of looking at whether the glass is half-full or half empty. I see our glass half full.  I spent many of my summers as a child on a farm near a village called Hosur and nearer still to a sleepy hamlet called Mathyagiri.   In all the years I visited, little changed in either place and I doubted anything had for over a century. When I passed through a year back, they were both unrecognizable. Hosur had exploded into a bustling town, surrounded by industries, and Mathyagiri from a sleepy hamlet into a sprawling village.  Surely, they had prospered economically. But the Pilgers who swoop down on us for snapshots of our failures may look at Hosur as an aberration, closely noticing the fraying edges of poverty, and not the success of those who live there and built it up. Admittedly, the prosperity of the Hosurs has not been evenly distributed throughout rural India. Some districts, depending on their administrations, have prospered; others have suffered and still mired in poverty.  For a Punjab, we have a Bihar.  And how does one explain the individual success without being defensive and isolating examples.  In the urban areas, the carpenter who first traveled on bus, then cycle now shows up on his motorbike with a mobile phone in his pocket, and this in a short ten years. And his son is a computer engineer working for a multinational company. While I attended the wedding of a young man, the manager in a foreign bank, who’s grandfather was employed by my grandfather in the house. This took just a generation of hard work and talent but also the opportunities were there for his rise. They’re both personal statistics that could be, for a Pilger, a too narrow one but I know there are so many million other success stories. The greatest change is that today our youth don’t have to beg for someone’s influence to get a job but do get into companies on their own merit.

On the larger map of India, there are the achievements of men and women who have built companies from scratch – whether in the IT or pharmaceuticals- to compete in the world markets. And they have not depended on inherited wealth. We have countless small entrepreneurs who have contributed to the strong economy. And I won’t mention our doctors, scientists, engineers, artists who are also a part of the Indian success.  If our railways are packed with travellers so are the airlines, which is why the ailing foreign airline companies fight for the Indian rupee spenders.  Foreign universities are targeting our talented youth and, of course, our money.  Others may look on these successful individuals and blame India for not having 800 million more of them. Those reporters afflicted by the Mother India syndrome seldom give India the credit for what has been achieved.

Our failures have been more political than economic. Pilger quotes Rajiv Gandhi’s comment that for every 100 rupees spent by the government, only one rupee reaches the people the money’s meant for. We have an abundance of resources and talent but our politicians need the poor, they’re the vote banks that elevate them to power.  They can make empty promises at each election.  It’s the politicians and administrators who have failed us; we haven’t failed ourselves.

            India is an imperfect society, but no more than any of the others.  If we could only have a perfect world, and truly abolish poverty, Mother Earth would be a paradise. It was originally meant to be an Eden but we all have made a total mess of it.